Transcript: Trump’s Awful FBI Pick Is Already Revealing What’s Coming

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 2 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump just announced that his FBI director will be Kash Patel, who’s being widely described as a Trump loyalist. But the truth is considerably worse than that. Trump clearly chose Patel in order to carry out his threat to turn law enforcement loose on his enemies. How do we know this? Because Patel has basically said so himself. This along with a strange new threat from Trump to impose 100 percent tariffs on countries that don’t do his bidding underscore that he still feels zero constraints of any kind as he prepares to assume the presidency again. All of this raises a question: Are the guardrails gone or not? Today, we’re chatting about this with Michael Sozan, a senior fellow for the Center for American Progress who wrote a useful report recently that grapples with these very questions. Good to have you back on, Michael.

Michael Sozan: Good to be back, Greg. Thanks for having me.

Sargent: Kash Patel has some national security experience, but he’s plainly unqualified to run the FBI. The Times reports that he’s grotesquely embellished his prosecutorial experience in the past. He worked hard, of course, to undermine the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Trump saw him as a key loyalist during his impeachment for extorting Ukraine. Michael, it seems as if that loyalty is the only real qualification that Trump looks for in staffing such crucial roles. What’s your reaction to all this?

Sozan: That’s absolutely right. My reaction really is one of alarm. I shouldn’t have been too surprised to see Kash Patel being chosen to head the FBI—a lot of us were waiting to see which position Trump was going to slot this loyalist into. Kash Patel has been one of Trump’s henchmen from the very beginning, one of the most loyal of all of the loyalists in the small circle. He is somebody who has worked time and again, as you alluded to, to help making sure that Trump evades legal and constitutional accountability, that he escapes the rule of law. None of this is about helping the American people or upholding the Constitution. This is about appointing an extreme loyalist.

Sargent: Again, the through line here is he picks people who have shown a willingness to put Trump above the law and the constitution. This is a particularly glaring example of that.

Sozan: He has a history of going to the far extremes and perhaps even beyond what Donald Trump may have thought was possible. Kash Patel was one of these behind-the-scenes power operators for many years before he was really exposed, and he really actually rubbed a lot of people within Trump’s orbit the wrong way.

You may remember that Donald Trump’s second Attorney General Bill Barr absolutely refused to work with Kash Patel. There was a time when Trump was considering appointing Kash Patel to a high position in the FBI, and Barr said, No way. Trump also tried to appoint Kash Patel to a high position at the CIA, and the CIA Director Gina Haspel said, No way. These were Trump appointees, loyal Trump foot soldiers saying Kash Patel was even too far for them.

Sargent: And Patel has explicitly said the next Trump administration should carry out prosecutions of Trump’s enemies. Listen to this 2023 quote on Steve Bannon’s podcast, which comes after Bannon asked Patel about the prospects for such prosecutions of those enemies.

Kash Patel (audio voiceover): The one thing we learned in the Trump administration, the first go round, is we got to put in all American patriots top to bottom. And we got them for law enforcement; we got them for Intel collection; we got them for offensive operations; we got them for DOD, CIA, everywhere. We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you—whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.

Sargent: Michael, in that same quote, Patel claims he’ll follow the law, but in reality, Trump is picking him to be willing to break the law on his behalf to go after his foes. It’s going to be an expanding circle of enemies as well. Can you talk specifically about how far that can get? What can Patel actually do here with the FBI and what are the obstacles he’ll face?

Sozan: Well, it’s a sad fact that the FBI director can do a lot. We know from history: J. Edgar Hoover was an FBI director who abused his powers horribly. There’s been attempts since then to rein in the FBI directors, but they still have tremendous power. One thing we should note, of course, is that for Kash Patel to become the FBI director, Trump is going to have to fire the current director, Christopher Wray, who Trump appointed to begin with.

But Trump has no problems firing FBI directors if they don’t go far enough in doing his bidding. He did that with James Comey. Apparently, he’s going to do that now with Christopher Wray, and he’s going to set Kash Patel up to really obliterate the guardrails, to go after political enemies in a way that we haven’t seen since the J. Edgar Hoover days.

Some Americans say, Well, that’s okay, we voted for Trump to come in and bust open the system. But there are really worrisome things that the FBI director can do with his very broad powers. The power of the FBI, again, is very vast. They have, for example, vast surveillance powers. They can tap into people’s phones. They can tap into our computer networks. They have all sorts of covert and undercover ways of doing things.

That is the nature of the FBI, but imagine it being turned on average Americans where nothing is private anymore, where if we dare to speak against the president or we work for an organization that might be just at political odds with a President Trump, we could have a complete loss of our own privacy. The FBI could be going through our records in conjunction with the Department of Justice, which could become politicized under a President Trump. We could be subject to prosecution. That’s a really dangerous slippery slope to go down.

Sargent: Let me ask you though, Michael. It is subject to various due process and rule of law constraints. Can you talk a little bit about that? He can’t just order the phones of George Conway tapped. He’ll have to have probable cause and get a judge to authorize that stuff. Or am I being too optimistic? What are the obstacles, and how far can he get in the face of them?

Sozan: There do normally need to be various court procedures, court permissions from judges, etc., in order for warrants to be issued or for investigations to be started or tapping of phones to be done. That’s how things should work in normal course, and we would hope that the guardrails would hold up.

But wow, we are in a very new worrisome period, as you’ve been talking about for a while on your podcast and your writings; I’ve written about this for the Center for American Progress. We don’t know whether these guardrails are going to hold, and we already know that we have a U.S. Supreme Court where the extremist judges are very, very allied with President Trump. They just recently issued a decision, as we know earlier this year, that turns presidents into kings, making them immune from almost everything they do in the course of their job.

That immunity should not extend to people who work at the FBI or the FBI director, but guess what? Trump also has his pardon power. That’s also been deemed to be fairly unlimited under this new decision as well. He could end up pardoning the Kash Patels of the world after asking them to go after political enemies and try to skirt the law. I try to be somewhat optimistic that the normal court and judiciary procedures could be a backstop here, but we really don’t know.

Sargent: Let’s talk about what this would look like. Imagine President Trump says to Kash Patel, Man, X really pissed me off when he went on cable TV and said x, y, and z. So theoretically, he can and would try to open an investigation via the FBI into that person. Maybe that runs into some of these frontline obstacles like the inability to get a warrant. Do you think that there’s an actual prospect that he would essentially command Kash Patel, or that Patel would do this of his own accord—he would just break the law and proceed with wiretaps, investigations, etc.? What does that look like?

Sozan: I would like to think that that would not happen, Greg, but I am sufficiently worried as a lot of national security experts and others are. As we know, there’s really no guesswork in terms of the fact that Trump would like to break the law. He would like to be able to bend the media, bend his political opponents to his will; he’s already called them enemies of the state. He’s also said he’s going to be people’s retribution, so we know he’s going on a retribution tour. And he is willing to really bend the guardrails to test them as far as he can go.

That one way he would do it is quietly, or not so quietly, meet with his FBI director and his inner circle, and, as you indicated, bring up a couple of names of people he’s particularly angry at. It would be well understood, even if it were not directly said, that the FBI would be expected to start some probe of a person. That could start with electronic surveillance of them. It could start by making their life a little bit difficult in terms of requests for documents, in terms of having them followed. These things send a message to political enemies that the government’s watching you, Donald Trump is watching you.

That’s what a lot of this goes back: just putting the fear out there amongst political enemies. Maybe making an example of just one or two, but the main purpose is putting the fear out there to start to get people to bend to the will of Trump.

Sargent: It’s definitely plausible. I want to point out that in Trump’s tweet announcing the Patel pick, Trump says Patel played a key role in exposing the “Russia hoax.” And Trump says, again, Russia, Russia, Russia in the tweet, still clearly seething with rage over the Russia investigation. Now, to clarify, Russian interference in the 2016 election wasn’t a hoax. It was extensively documented by the Mueller probe and a GOP-led Senate committee.

But that aside, this Trump tweet is a threat. It’s an angry threat. In it, he also says he picked Patel to bring back integrity to the FBI. Translation, they’re going to go after the people who investigated and prosecuted Trump based on facts and the law, both in the Russia probe and in his prosecutions for stealing state secrets and trying to overthrow the 2020 election. What about that threat in particular? Where do you see it going? Can he go after Trump’s prosecutors and investigators inside law enforcement? Can Patel do that?

Sozan: He could certainly make their life really difficult. He’s going to be at the FBI, which is within the DOJ. He’s going to be working closely with the head of the DOJ. Trump has nominated Pam Bondi to be the attorney general after Matt Gaetz’s nomination crashed and burned. They’re going to have a wide latitude, and they’re going to be able to use all the prosecutorial tools, investigative tools at their disposal. We would hope that they would go through normal court processes, as we were just saying. But again, being able to just raise the fear in people is a huge thing. Again, we’re talking about using the tools of the Department of Justice and the FBI in ways that are going to be the exact opposite of what’s been going on over the past four years.

In one example, we know that the FBI and DOJ have been successfully prosecuting the insurrectionists who undertook the riot on January 6 at the U.S. Capitol. Many of them have been convicted. Kash Patel has been talking about how the 2020 election was rigged and how those prosecutions were deeply unfair. I don’t know if you remember, Greg, but he even was a producer on the alternative Star-Spangled Banner song that’s sung by the January 6 defendant. He can now use the FBI and the DOJ tools to try to get those people pardoned or freed, and then investigate the investigators who are doing the job on the behalf of the American people to put those insurrectionists behind bars where they belong.

Sargent: I want to clarify for people that you don’t even need to launch a prosecution by DOJ in order to really essentially terrorize or bully or cow people into silence and submission. An investigation would suffice.

If the Department of Justice were to just start investigating a particular critic who Trump is really in a rage about ... Maybe Trump says to his attorney general, Man, this guy really pissed me off. Hey, by the way, I heard that he’s up to some weird shady stuff, then the word filters down to an ambitious U.S. attorney or prosecutor who gets the memo that basically Trump wants this looked into. You don’t even need an indictment to do that part. That alone is going to put people through hell and drain them of immense legal resources, financial resources, right?

Sozan: We’ve seen that actually in part through Jim Jordan and the way that he has investigated and used his committee to do that within the House. Just the course of his investigations that didn’t yield anything caused people who he was questioning to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. Some of them had to basically close down their operations or severely limit them. Nothing ever came of those investigations. There were no charges issued or there was nothing further that Jim Jordan did, but it really had the ripple effect, the instilling of fear into people.

The DOJ and the FBI have infinitely more resources than the congressional committee does. So they can follow that exact line. Let’s remember at the same time, part of Trump’s plans is to clean out a lot of the civil servants out of places like Department of Justice and FBI. These are the career people who swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president, to work on behalf of the American people. If they’re cleared out of there and instead replaced by Trump loyalists, those are the foot soldiers of the type you just mentioned. Those are the ones who will be much more willing to carry out these sort of orders, even if they’re not always explicit orders. They know what Donald Trump and Kash Patel want them to do and how they can use the levers of their power to do it.

Sargent: In fact, the whole Schedule F purge that’s coming interlocks with the appointment of people like Kash Patel in the following way as well. Not only do the new foot soldiers provide the manpower to do the prosecution or persecution of Trump’s enemies that he and Kash Patel want, that type of purge also makes it a whole lot less likely that people blow the whistle when they see wrongdoing internally. We should remember that whistleblowers were key in the Trump first term, exposing some of his worst wrongdoing. That, too, is another guardrail that goes.

Sozan: This all comes back to loyalty. This is what we talked about right at the beginning of this podcast. This permeates everything here. This is all about who can be the most loyal to Donald Trump, who can be subservient to his world vision and his vision of retribution.

Donald Trump is shooting for the stars here with Kash Patel. A lot of Republicans were saying there’s no way Donald Trump would go quite that far. This is much worse than even the Matt Gaetz nomination. This is all about loyalty, and this is all about another word that many of us will start using more and more: kakistocracy. That means government by the absolute least competent to run government, the most ill-qualified. That is Kash Patel. Then you add onto it the corruption angle, and there you really have a corrupt kakistocracy.

Again, American people might be saying, Well, how’s that going to affect me? It affects them in a lot of ways. This is completely un-American, and this is why many of us are a little bit worried about the chapter that we’re about to go into.

Sargent: As a quick aside, Trump also issued this bizarre threat over the weekend to impose 100 percent tariffs on developing countries if they try to develop their own currency, which he said would undermine the dollar. Paul Krugman had a threat on how dumb this all is, illustrating that there’s no serious threat to the dollar. Putting that aside, what’s striking here is Trump feels zero obligation to consult with anyone— experts, members of his own party, never mind leaders of the opposition, anyone at all—before issuing wildly unhinged threats like this one. What do you think that portends with regard to how we’ll govern particularly as an aspiring autocrat?

Sozan: He is going to do a lot of unhinged autocratic things. The fact that he would issue this threat in the middle of the night, seemingly not having consulted with anybody—I think Trump feels very untethered more than ever.

Look, he was just reelected after a campaign where he was pretty darn clear about what he wanted to do. He said a lot of completely untethered-to-reality things along the way. He sees that he got reelected saying all that stuff, and he says he has his mandate. So the guardrails are going to be tested like never before. It’s a matter of how the nation can respond to that going forward.

Of course, everyone’s weighing to what degree there should be pushback against it. But in the meantime, Donald Trump, like a petulant kid, is going to just be trying to push the boundaries wherever he can. We know, Greg, that he really enjoys that, even if occasionally he has to take a loss. He loves dominating the new cycle and seeing how far he can push the system. We’re going to be in for a long four years of that.

Sargent: It sure seems that way. I want to read a line from The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols about the Kash Patel pick. Nichols says, “If you want to assemble the infrastructure of an authoritarian government, this is how you do it.” Do you see other evidence of this infrastructure being built?

Sozan: Absolutely, Greg. It’s being built in a number of ways. Reportedly they are preparing for day one for a slew of executive orders that are going to build the chapter one of their authoritarian regime. Some of it is the schedule F—the clearing out of the civil service, making sure that Trump has much more ability to sway what all of the agencies are doing. As we said, he’s weaponizing the Department of Justice and the FBI—very clearly, that’s going to happen. He is making sure that he’s already threatening the media and threatening their licenses, and nominating now somebody to head the Federal Communications Commission, who is already dropping lots of breadcrumbs about the threats to media licenses.

All of this is unfolding right now, and the icing on top is his nominees. Again, it’s a kakistocracy in the making; it’s extreme loyalists. On top of it, we’ll add in one other level, which is Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy being given this huge platform to try to cut government waste, fraud, and abuse. I understand there is a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse in our government. People do want it cut. But the amount of power that these extreme millionaires and billionaires are being given at a time that there’s a huge conflict of interest with their own companies and their own desire to get richer—this is all what authoritarians have done around the world. We can just see it in recent regimes where that’s happened. There’s not much guesswork about what’s going on here.

Sargent: Right, they’re going to essentially empower right-wing elites to loot the place from top to bottom.

Sozan: That’s right. Sadly, that’s what we’ve seen before in some of these other backsliding democracies. That’s what we’re seeing here. We’re seeing this across his cabinet nominees, the ones he’s already put forward for nomination that are multimillionaires, billionaires in some cases.

Who knows whether they’re even going to follow the ethical requirements? Trump has not yet filed the ethical requirements for conflict of interest and disclosures. He doesn’t care about that anymore. I don’t think he cares about that for his billionaire nominees. His attitude is like, What are you going to do about it, system? I’m here to smash the system. I’m here with my oligarchs. We’re saying we’re going to work on behalf of the American people, but we’re really going to be in it for our own self-enrichment.

Sargent: Certainly looks bleak, Michael Sozan. Thanks for coming on and laying that all out for us.

Sozan: Thanks, Greg. Appreciate being on.

Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.