After all the bureau’s crimes, Americans need somebody who is willing to tear this organization down to its bare studs.
Kash Patel at the 2022 AmericaFest n Phoenix. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News
On the surface of things, Kash Patel is the kind of person most of us would want to keep out of government.
A MAGA true believer, and Donald Trump’s choice to head the F.B.I., he’s the tip of the spear of Trump’s apparent effort to use the courts to go after his perceived enemies in the media and on Capitol Hill.
The mainstream Democratic-oriented press is apoplectic about the appointment. The Christian Science Monitor said it most clearly when it wrote that,
“Democrats invoke (the notorious late F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover) as they warn about Mr. Patel, suggesting he will target political enemies. Republicans, though, compare Hoover’s tenure to what they say is a modern ‘deep state” resisting and harassing Mr. Trump.”
That’s the bottom line. Democrats compare him to Hoover while Republicans argue that he’s the anti-Hoover.
I’m here to argue that Kash Patel is exactly what Americans need right now at the F.B.I. We need somebody with the guts and the political authority to burn the F.B.I. down, at least figuratively.
First, I’m under no illusions that Kash Patel is a good guy. According to former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, Patel is “salivating” at the opportunity to investigate and, apparently, charge former Rep. Liz Cheney with some sort of crime because of her work on the Jan. 6 Committee.
This is not only wrong, it also ignores the fact that Cheney had congressional immunity for her work because she was serving in an official capacity for the committee. Nothing will come of any investigation.
The press also has opined that Patel will target police officers who arrested protestors at the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol for investigation. Again, the police have qualified immunity, and nothing will come of the idea.
Police reinforcements guard the Capitol after rioters were pushed out of the building on Jan. 6, 2021. (Tyler Merbler, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
He has also called for the prosecution of a wide range of political figures, including President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and outgoing F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray. Again, they have immunity, and nothing will come of Patel’s rhetoric.
With that said, my view is that it’s the F.B.I. that’s the “bad guy” here. Here’s just a sampling of F.B.I. crimes over the years;
- The F.B.I. over the years has spied on thousands of Americans simply because they have held progressive political views. Some of these Americans included music star Elvis Presley (a well-known Republican, actually), crooner Frank Sinatra, comedian Groucho Marx, entertainer and former Republican Congressman Sonny Bono, musician Bob Dylan, “King of Pop” Michael Jackson, and even baseball star Mickey Mantle. Why? Nobody knows.
- A 1985 congressional report found that the F.B.I. had conducted electronic surveillance against more than 7,000 Americans without any legal authority to do so.
- COINTELPRO, the F.B.I.’s illegal Counterintelligence Program, targeted groups and individuals that the bureau had deemed to be “subversive,” including such “dangerous radicals” as Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a myriad of anti-Vietnam War groups, black political groups and women’s rights groups.
Chicago police on Dec. 4, 1969, removing the body of Fred Hampton, national spokesman for the Black Panther Party, from a building on the city’s west side where he was assassinated during a COINTELPRO operation. (Associated Press – Chicago Sun-Times, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
- In 1964, the F.B.I. wrote an anonymous letter to Martin Luther King, Jr., meant to blackmail him for alleged sexual dalliances and urged him to commit suicide.
- In 1965, a white civil rights worker, Viola Liuzzo, was murdered by a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Gary Thomas Rowe. Rowe also happened to be an F.B.I. informant at the time. So the F.B.I. spread a rumor that Liuzzo was a Communist and heroin addict and that she had abandoned her children to run off with a black man. F.B.I. documents show that J. Edgar Hoover personally briefed this lie to President Lyndon Johnson.
- In a 1992 siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, F.B.I. agents seeking to serve a warrant on Randy Weaver shot and killed Weaver’s wife, son and dog. Weaver in turn shot and killed a U.S. Marshal in what a court later deemed to be self-defense. The F.B.I. was forced to pay Weaver a settlement of $3.38 million.
After the Ruby Ridge siege, F.B.I. agents escort Randy Weaver down the mountain on Aug. 31, 1992. (Jim Botting, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
- In 2007, a Caltech grad student found that the F.B.I. was changing Wikipedia entries related to the bureau so that they contained only pro-F.B.I. information.
All of this is to say nothing of the F.B.I.’s involvement in the 2016 election with its investigation of Hillary Clinton, in allegedly using electronic surveillance against the 2016 Trump campaign and in infiltrating and disrupting such groups as Occupy Wall Street, racial justice and environmental groups, and pro-Palestine peace groups.
The bureau also investigated candidate Trump and participated in the Russiagate fiasco in Operation Hurricane Crossfire.
I’ve had my own negative experience with the F.B.I. In 2009, the bureau secretly opened a criminal case against me in response to my having blown the whistle on the C.I.A.’s torture program.
In the end, I was charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage. I hadn’t committed espionage, of course, and those charges were dropped, but not until I had declared bankruptcy.
To make the case go away, I pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and served 23 months in a federal prison. I had been facing 45 years. In the intervening years, three F.B.I. agents have reached out to me to apologize for their role in the case, saying that it was political in nature and that they were ordered to target me.
That’s the F.B.I. That’s what it does.
And that is why we need Kash Patel at the helm of the F.B.I. right now.
We need somebody who is willing to tear this organization down to its bare studs. The F.B.I. is a criminal organization. It should be dealt with like a criminal organization. There should be a price to pay for its crimes against the American people.
John Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act — a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Please Support CN’s
Winter Fund Drive!
Make a tax-deductible donation securely by credit card or check by clicking the red button:
Notwithstanding the rightfully negative comments prior to this one and peoples’ reasons a’plenty to doubt the ability of Patel or anyone else to clean the sordid mess that is the FBI, we at least have to express some actions toward doing so. We owe it to our own mythos of this country (ourselves and posterity) actually existing toward elevating the human condition. It’s our turn to actually struggle and battle forward and through.
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.
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 John
kash patel might dismantle the current FBI.
but he might put structures even more deeply
hateful of true freedom and TRUE democracy
[which has yet to be set up somewhere on earth]
in its place.
“As [FBI whistleblower] Fred Whitehurst, a mustached Vietnam veteran sat, arms crossed, at the back of the room, Senator [Charles] Grassley went on to recount that it was ‘the FBI’s say-one-thing-do-another habit’ that made him hesitant to simply accept assurances that everything was now in order at the FBI lab. ‘The subcommittee’s investigation has revealed that systemic problems remain at the lab….The problems exist and flourish because of a cultural disease within the FBI,’ Grassley continued. ‘The question is, how will these changes ensure the integrity of the scientific process within the lab, which seeks to discover the truth, when a culture exists within the FBI to apparently cut corners and slant lab reports in favor of the prosecution, which seeks to convict. The IG report did not reconcile this dilemma. The FBI will not admit the problem exists. That is why we are here today.'”
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.
“Patel will target police officers who arrested protestors at the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol for investigation. Again, the police have qualified immunity”
We currently ignore the Right to privacy, Freedom of speech, Smith-Mundt Act (Obligations to not propagandize the American public), Etc…
I am sure we can add qualified immunity to this list of things to ignore.
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
Thank you for the update.
But the point remains the same to ignore and or replace constitutional intent with a hegemonic substitute.
…to say nothing about Scott Ritter who was also abused by the FBI. Cheered when I heard Kash Patel was appointed and hope he carries out getting rid of the FBI, unless they do their job properly, which I doubt they will. Now, will someone get rid of the CIA which is worse.
P.S. The Clintons should be in jail for life for all the harm they’ve caused. Plus all the other war criminals beginning with Biden.
Ridiculous! Patel will only take what’s bad about the FBI and make it more coercive, dishonest and destructive. The structures for despotic action have, as Kiriakou describes, long and deep foundations in the agency; these will not be ‘corrected’ in the next administration, but will be amplified.
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.
The FBI is always political police. This goes all the way back to its founding, when its key mission was to get the commies. And, this won’t change. Trump and Pastel will find that they love having a political police as much as all of their predecessors did. The FBI will change targets, but there will be no real change in the FBI and how it operates.
A couple of bits of wisdom that used to go around the old, lefty anti-war movement:
1) The undercover FBI agent in your group will always be the person who is trying to get you to do something illegal. The only change to modern times is that now it would be a paid informer and not an undercover employee.
2) Never talk to an FBI agent without your lawyer. If an FBI agents shows credentials and says they’d like to talk, the only response is to arrange an appointment time when you can bring your lawyer to the interview. An old tactic used against activists was to ask a very simple question but use it as a trap. I remember a tale of anti-war activists organizing protests at one of the national warparty conventions. Two FBI agents rang the doorbell and asked if she knew where her roommate was? She naturally said no. Of course, in modern America, the FBI agents had bugged her phone and had waited until the roommate had sent a text saying they were at the store and should they get anything needed? Thus, the antiwar activist who had foolishly talked to the FBI without a lawyer faced a 5 year prison sentence for ‘lying to an FBI agent’ when she denied knowing where her roommate was. This is how the FBI recruits informants.
Do not hold your breath waiting for these Republicans wanting to ‘de-fund’ the FBI in the same way they always want to de-fund the IRS police.
Good point. Trump and his followers want a dictatorship of the far right. The rest of us will be targeted as always for not following fascist orders. The left has always been the target of the police state. Nothing will change in that department per order of the rapacious oligarchy.
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.
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.
Yup! same tactics, different targets ….