The corrupt cannot be expected to challenge corruption, only to bend corruption into forms more useful to them. An abundance of evidence strongly suggests that Patel is as corrupt as Trump, et al., and not a reformer in the standard and useful sense. Ultimately, the people (complexly through the pressures of oligarchs) have given up their responsibilities of governance; the people do not govern themselves and have abandoned the responsibility to be informed and act with resolve, leaving the vacuum of power to be filled by people with clearly identifiable pathologies. It seems that this is a pretty standard progression in societal changes! (…this comment is n9t to be seen as defense of any other person or party.)

Thank you for the update.

But the point remains the same to ignore and or replace constitutional intent with a hegemonic substitute.

The thing is, it MUST be stripped down from the top if is indeed at all possible. The self-righteous smugness of the FBI’s upper echelons whenever appearing before Congress tells us that, and their impunity during crucial testimony is an expression of just how far gone is our Republic.
And that expressed disdain for Congress by them is likely enough to have a foundation in having dirt on enough Congresspersons to assure their own protection during committee votes advancing prosecutions.

Yes, it will be one tough row to hoe, but do it we must, while hoping it does not collapse back into the sordid institutional clown show the Directors previous (Wray included and especially) have made and maintained it.
Among those rows to hoe are the impediments written in invisible ink across the agency’s history, the dirt in so many Beltway little black books on supposedly august establishment figures, a likely who’s-who of reputational self-protection writ in ‘omerta,’ the Sicilian Mafia’s code of silence. It is there in that stone wall that resistance will be most profound.

Speaking of Mafia, they had the goods on Hoover going back to the 1920s, having held pictures of his sexual proclivities for many decades. Coupled with the OSS/CIA’s partnerships with the underworld throughout the 20th century, this thing has all the makings of a very frustrating if not murderous maze to wander through.
Are there enough and big enough chain saws to cut through all of this trans-generational miasma? Who knows at this point. But try we must. To not do so is to concede our nation completely. To treasonous criminals.

Unfortunately, Smith-Mundt was repealed and modified under Obama in 2015, thanks to the bi-partisan efforts of Sen Rob Portman (R-Indiana) and then-Representative Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut.) Replaced with the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act.”
hxxps://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/3274

Yep,

Gabbard and RFK were both beloved by the Democrat establishment until they started to break with party orthodoxy, then they were excommunicated and became pariahs. Musk was also a much ballyhooed ally/donor of the Democrats until he started to commit heresy, then he became a target for retaliation which pushed him to the right. Who can forget Biden’s electric vehicle summit to promote EV market expansion that didn’t even bother to include the guy who held 75% of the domestic EV market share at the time? And that was back in 2021, long before Elon bought Twitter and began his flirtation with the right.

There are quite a few members of Trump’s inner circle who are anything but ‘far right’. Trump himself is not ‘far right’. He’s flipped back and forth between Republican and Democrat throughout his life. The original complaint the neocon Never Trumpers had against him was that he wasn’t a proper doctrinal conservative who prayed at the alter of William F Buckley and Milton Friedman. His politics have always been an incoherent mish-mash of conservative and liberal.

I dunno.

I kind of like Patel’s idea of firing the entire 7th floor of the Hoover building (the executive floor), then shuttering the building and moving the rest of the employees to field offices around America. Most of the problems with the FBI stem from the political animals who rise to power in DC. As John said, ripping the Hoover building down to it’s studs would be a great start to fixing the organization. My preference would be razing it and then salting the earth, but that’s probably asking for too much.

I would disagree Trump’s people are a mixed bag some are right wing fanatics and some are true patriots such as Tulsi Gabbard. I don’t know if Patel is the best choice but I do like the idea of ending the power of the FBI to conduct political witch hunts against any citizen who opposes government policies and mainstream media narratives regardless if they are from the right or the left.

Source:
“Prologue,” from John F. Kelly and Phillip K. Wearne, “Tainting Evidence: Inside the Scandals at the FBI Crime Lab” (New York: The Free Press, 1998), available on The New York Times website (archive.ph/hn5fJ)

…and here we are some twenty-six years later, the situation thus far unremedied (almost certainly much worse, actually), and this book that recounted the problem as it already existed in the pre-GWOT days at the “Turn of the Millenium” sadly out of print.