President-elect Donald Trump's choice of Kash Patel to lead the FBI has led some commentators to warn that he could weaponize the agency against political opponents the way that J. Edgar Hoover once did.
However, a scholar who won the Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Hoover believes this comparison is unfair to the longtime FBI director.
In an interview with the Christian Science Monitor, Yale University Professor Beverly Gage said there are troubling signs that Patel could be an even more dangerous choice to lead the agency than Hoover.
"Hoover was a big institutionalist," argues Gage. "He spent his whole career in government. He believed in the power and independence of the FBI. He loved the FBI. He probably loved the FBI too much; and came to see it as sort of the great protector of the American way of life. Kash Patel, on the other hand, is kind of coming in with a wrecking ball. He has said that he wants to kind of reduce the independence of the FBI, make it much more responsive to the political needs and desires of the White House. And he really wants to, in a lot of ways, dismantle the bureaucracy that Hoover built."
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Gage acknowledges that Hoover "abused the civil liberties of thousands and thousands of Americans," but said he wasn't a staunch loyalist to a single president in the same way that Patel would likely be.
"I do think that Hoover had a real understanding that for the FBI to maintain any kind of real legitimacy -- in terms of its investigations, in terms of people believing what it said -- it had to be outside of partisan politics, or its credibility was going to collapse," she contends. "So in this moment, I do see this hyperpartisan, highly politicized version that Patel is promoting as probably the greater danger."
She then said that any senator thinking of confirming Patel should look past his claims about wanting to make the FBI a more transparent and accountable institution.
"His deepest agenda is to take this incredibly powerful, secretive institution and turn it against the enemies of the Trump administration," she warns. "He’s openly said he wants to go after members of the press. He wants to go after politicians. He wants to build cases against people who criticize the president. And that seems to me to be both pretty dangerous and pretty hostile to traditions of free speech and democracy."
