WASHINGTON – Republican President-elect Donald Trump announced on Saturday his intention to nominate former National Security official and loyalist Kash Patel as FBI director.
Patel, 44, previously worked as a federal public defender and a federal prosecutor, has advocated for removing the FBI’s intelligence-gathering responsibilities and purging its ranks of any employees unwilling to support Trump’s agenda.
“The biggest problem the FBI has had, has come out of its intel shops. I’d break that component out of it. I’d shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state,” Patel said in a September interview on the conservative Shawn Ryan Show.
“And I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops. Go be cops.”
In selecting Patel over more conventional contenders, Trump is once again testing his influence over the Senate, seeking to secure confirmation for some of his more controversial nominees.
With the nomination of Patel, Trump is signalling that he is preparing to carry out his threat to oust the bureau’s current director, Christopher Wray, a Republican first appointed by him, and whose 10-year term at the FBI does not expire until 2027.
That length of the term is designed to allow directors of the U.S.’s most prominent federal law enforcement agency to operate without political influence or pressure. Nevertheless, it is also the case that all FBI directors serve at the pleasure of the president.
The announcement means that Wray can either resign from the job, consistent with Trump’s apparent wishes, or wait to be fired once Trump takes office in January.
Meanwhile, Wray expressed no intention of stepping down early and was busy planning events well into his 2025 calendar, according to a person familiar with the matter.
During Wray’s tenure, the FBI carried out a court-approved search at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate to look for classified documents.
Special Counsel Jack Smith, who led the two federal prosecutions against Trump for his involvement in attempting to subvert the 2020 election and retaining classified documents, requested on Nov. 25 that the judges overseeing these cases dismiss them before Trump takes office on Jan. 20, citing a Justice Department policy of not prosecuting a sitting president.
