Since J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972 — after 48 years of leading the FBI — the seven men chosen to lead the premier law enforcement agency had previous experience as senior lawmen, senior federal prosecutors and federal judges.
If President-elect Donald Trump has his way, the agency will instead be headed by a political loyalist who has pledged to use his powers to target the president’s political opponents.
Kash Patel, 44, is a former junior-level federal prosecutor who was a White House aide in Trump’s first administration.
That’s drawing scrutiny not just from Democrats, but from at least one Senate Republican.
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South Dakota Republican Mike Rounds expressed support for current FBI Director Chris Wray — who Trump appointed after firing predecessor James Comey in 2017.
“The president has the right to make nominations, but normally these are for a 10-year term. We'll see what his process is and whether he actually makes that nomination,” Rounds said Sunday during an interview on ABC News’ “This Week.”
It would also be the second time Trump removed an FBI director before the end of the congressionally mandated 10-year term, which is designed to allow FBI directors to outlast the presidential administration.
Since the end of the first Trump Administration, Patel has been actively engaged with the Make America Great Again movement supporting Trump.
He was also one of the select group of supporters who accompanied Trump during the trial earlier this year in Manhattan that led to Trump being convicted of 34 felony counts related to falsifying corporate documents.
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He has also said that a charity he operates provides financial help to families of people charged in connection with the January 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
In an interview with conservative strategist Steve Bannon, Patel said he and others “will go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media.”
”We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said, referring to the 2020 presidential election in which Biden, the Democratic challenger, defeated Trump. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
In an interview earlier this year on the “Shawn Ryan Show,” Patel vowed to sever the FBI’s intelligence-gathering activities from the rest of its mission and said he would “shut down” the bureau’s headquarters building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., and “reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state.’”
Rounds, meanwhile, praised Wray and said he saw no reason he should be removed.
“Chris Wray, who the president nominated the first time around — I think the president picked a very good man to be the director of the FBI when he did that in his first term,” Rounds said. “When we meet with him behind closed doors, I've had no objections to the way that he's handled himself, and so I don't have any complaints about the way that he's done his job right now.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
