The New Yorker:

If Trump’s pick to lead the F.B.I. gets confirmed, the Bureau could be politicized in ways that even its notorious first director would have rejected.

By Beverly Gage

Since President-elect Donald Trump announced his intention of appointing his political loyalist Kash Patel as the director of the F.B.I., critics have warned that we’re heading back to the bad old days of J. Edgar Hoover. The F.B.I. should be so lucky.

Hoover, for all his many faults and abuses of power, was nevertheless an institution builder; he believed in the F.B.I.’s nonpartisan independence. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., he grew up imbued with the idea that career-long government service was one of life’s noblest aspirations. As a D.C. resident, Hoover could not vote, and though he was a staunch conservative, he never joined a political party. Patel’s chief goal, by contrast, is to weaponize the F.B.I. as a partisan force to protect Trump and wreak vengeance on his Administration’s enemies. If such naked politicization happens to undermine public faith in the F.B.I., so much the better. In Patel’s book “Government Gangsters,” published last year, he describes the Bureau’s top officials—along with other “Deep State” executives—as a group of “spiteful mandarins” hell-bent on destroying the country in service of their “uniformly left wing” desires. He warns, “Democrats and the Deep State are on the same team.”

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