Kash As King: A Hatchet Man Comes To Town

Jeff Robbins on Dec 17, 2024

It's in vogue since Donald Trump's election last month to suggest that using words like "autocrat" or "strongman," let alone "fascist," to describe the once and future president is bad form at best and terribly out of line at worst. The problem with this suggestion is what the president says and what he does; other than that, there's no particular cause for alarm.

"I am your retribution," Trump has vowed to audiences cheering for anyone to be locked up other than Trump, whose conviction on 34 state felony counts stands even as indictments on a series of federal felony charges have evaporated. These vows are unsubtle threats to use governmental power to punish critics and political opponents. And Trump hasn't been obscure about what he wants to do, what he thinks he is entitled to do and to whom he thinks he is entitled to do it. On the subject of exacting revenge against those who have challenged him, Trump recently told NBC "I have the absolute right. I'm the chief law enforcement officer, you do know that." Speaking of those in Congress who exercised their duly conferred power to investigate the veritable mountain range of evidence that he had attempted to block the counting of electoral votes, he said with characteristic regard for the Constitution, "Honestly, they should go to jail."

It's no surprise, therefore, that he has nominated to serve as the new director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, termed by John F. Kennedy "the premier law enforcement agency in all of human history," one Kashyap (Kash) Patel, a poster boy for conceiving of law enforcement as an instrument for political revenge if ever Americans have had one. It was Patel who told fellow loon Steve Bannon on the latter's podcast last year, "We're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out."

It was Patel who in his 2023 book "Government Gangsters" named 60 people as "members of the executive branch deep state," a "cabal of unelected tyrants" posing as "the most dangerous threat to our democracy," who would be pursued either by criminal prosecutions or civil lawsuits. Who are these evildoers on Patel's enemies list? Why, the usual suspects: President Joe Biden, Vice President Harris and former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, of course. But there are so many other nefarious actors who need to be rooted out and punished for ... something: Republicans like former Attorney General William Barr, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper and former National Security Adviser John Bolton, all of whom were appointed to high office by Trump himself but who proved themselves insufficiently reliable at ring-kissing, even though they all did quite a lot of it. These individuals, claimed Patel in one of the examples of rhetorical sobriety for which he is now famous, are among those who are "as treacherous and evil as the villains portrayed in books and movies."

America: Meet your new FBI director. And were any icing on the cake required, Patel would appear to have his own insights into potential criminality, though not necessarily the kind one would prefer. It was Patel who claimed without apparent basis that when Trump spirited classified documents to Florida, retained them and concealed them, this was A-Okay because Trump had "declassified whole sets of materials in anticipation of leaving government that he thought the American public should have the right to read themselves."

Called before the federal grand jury that ultimately indicted Trump for this little misunderstanding, the director-in-waiting of our FBI wasn't exactly eager to tell what he knew about Trump's conduct, or his own. He invoked his right not to testify on the basis that to do so might tend to incriminate him. Ultimately, he only agreed to answer questions about Trump's little "I-can-take-whatever-classified-documents-I-want" caper with a grant of immunity from the prosecution.

Making America great again with each passing appointment -- that is what we are living through. Is Kash Patel a terrible pick for a position with enormous power? Of course he is. But then again, that's why Donald Trump picked him.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.