A national security expert warned on Tuesday that Donald Trump is likely to appoint a loyalist to “a position where he could do a lot of damage and wield a lot of power.”
Several news sources say that Kash Patel will likely be given a high-profile job at either the FBI or the Justice Department by the new president.
And because his nomination would cause a lot of trouble, Trump is thinking about putting him in a job that does not need Senate approval.
“Patel would be an extremely controversial selection for any leadership role, including director of the FBI,” noted MSNBC’s Willie Geist. “Patel was a top adviser to Trump during his first term.”
He has said many times since leaving the White House that he wants to use the Justice Department to go after Trump’s political opponents and the media.
“Reports say that the president-elect is thinking about making Patel deputy director or giving him an appointed investigative role in the DOJ to avoid a fight in the Senate over his confirmation.” Trump is likely to fire Christopher Wray, who was appointed FBI director by Trump in 2017 for a 10-year term.
It looks like the transition team knows that Patel will not be confirmed, even if the Senate is run by Republicans. They do not want to fight a losing battle like the one Matt Gaetz had before he dropped his nomination as attorney general.
As a result of the Gaetz mess, it looks like they have decided that Kash Patel cannot be confirmed, according to NBC News’ Ken Dilanian.
“That might not have been what he meant when he talked about going after the “deep state.” They want to do that. Things about his past that have been made public, like how he seemed to lie about his role in the Benghazi case, are examples of this.
He said he was one of the lead prosecutors at one point, but that is not true. Other things have come up in his background over the years, so it looks like the plan is to put him in a position where he can do a lot of damage and have a lot of power.
“Let us make no mistake — deputy FBI director, for example, is essentially the chief operating officer,” Dilanian said.
“It is a very important job, and Jack Smith and his team will be looked at in some way, even if they let him go and investigate the investigators.
That is how he could get into a lot of trouble. Patel is the personification of how angry Trump is with the FBI and the Justice Department.
Patel has said many times in interviews that the FBI is corrupt and that Democrats are to blame for the Trump prosecutions that never went anywhere.
“I have covered these investigations for two years – there is not a shred of evidence that happened,” he said. This is not true at all.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, who you talked about earlier, did everything he could to stay out of this, appoint a special counsel, and make sure that politics had no say in these decisions.
Some might say that was too much, but Patel has been saying that the deep state hacked the FBI to go after Trump, and he is going to get his revenge.
It looks like he will be able to do the same thing at the CIA, where he is also declared war on the intelligence community.
