Kashyap “Kash” Patel, President-elect Donald Trump‘s pick to lead the FBI, has been a Trump loyalist for years.
The two have shared the same distrust of the FBI, but Patel has made his thoughts of overhauling the FBI known through interviews and his book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy.
Here are some things Patel has said about the nation’s top federal law enforcement agency.
Shutting down the FBI’s DC headquarters
The J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue has been home to the FBI since 1974. Patel has been outspoken about his desire to close down the building and rid the FBI of its Washington, D.C., base.
During a September interview on the Shawn Ryan Show, Patel said, “I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on Day One and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state.’”
“Then, I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops — go be cops,” he said.
The building happens to be in a state of flux as the General Services Administration chose Greenbelt, Maryland, as the location for a new FBI base. However, FBI Director Christopher Wray has expressed concerns about conflicts of interest in selecting the new headquarters site.
In Patel’s book, he encouraged the idea of moving the FBI’s headquarters out of Washington, saying it would “prevent institutional capture and curb FBI leadership from engaging in political gamesmanship.”
Surveillance reform
During his appearance on the Shawn Ryan Show, Patel also called for “major, major reform” of the FBI’s surveillance capabilities.
Patel has always criticized how the FBI enacted surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The stance is popular among Trump supporters and liberals alike, who recognized surveillance mistakes in the FBI’s investigation of Russia‘s possible ties to Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Nonetheless, the FBI’s leadership does not agree and feels the need to continue surveillance on terrorists and possible spies.
There is a debate within the FBI regarding a provision of FISA known as Section 702. The provision allows the United States to bypass a warrant and collect communications of non-Americans outside the country with the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence. Some members of Congress are worried the FBI will use the provision to search through Americans’ data.
President Joe Biden signed a two-year extension for the provision in April, and Patel has not been shy about showing his disapproval.
“Because the budget of FISA was up this cycle, we demanded Congress fix it. And do you know what the majority in the House, where the Republicans did? They bent the knee. They (reauthorized) it,” Patel said.
In his book, Patel also discusses another belief that departs from the status quo: A federal defender should be with the accused, arguing for their rights in all FISA court proceedings.
Finding conspirators within the government and media
Patel has expressed interest in giving the government leeway to crack down on officials who anonymously disclose sensitive information and the reporters who write about it. The stance goes against the current Justice Department policy, which prevents prosecutors from seizing the records of journalists in leak investigations.
He backed up the opinion during a 2023 interview with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon when he said, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
Decreasing the size of the intelligence community
Patel has advocated cutting the CIA and the National Security Agency but wants the FBI to break away from its “intel shops.”
The FBI places an extensive amount of its budget toward gathering intelligence, making the intelligence outfits a core part of the bureau.
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Frank Montoya Jr., a retired senior FBI official who served as the U.S. government’s national counterintelligence executive, told the Associated Press he viewed breaking out the FBI’s “intel shops” as a way to defang the bureau.
Doing so, he said, “makes the bureau less effective at what it does, and quite frankly, it will make the intelligence community less effective at what it does.”
