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When wordFBIFBI FBI FBI.FBI FBIFBI K$HFBI FBI .FBI FBIFBIYour browser does not support the element. reached the president that the , without informing him, had warned members of Congress that a foreign nation was meddling in American politics, he blew his stack. He had already lost trust in the director of the bureau, who he now also concluded had kept him in the dark in hope of catching him accepting illegal foreign help. “That bastard was trying to sting us!” he exclaimed.The country was China, the president was Bill Clinton and the director was Louis Freeh. But you could substitute Russia, Donald Trump and James Comey and arrive at a similar episode in the century-old saga, by turns tragic and comic, of manipulation, suspicion and outright enmity between America’s presidents and its national law-enforcement agency. The bureau was created in an act of deception, when President Teddy Roosevelt’s Justice Department circumvented bipartisan opposition in Congress, and it has never shaken the habit.Of course, to suggest Mr Trump’s skirmishes with the fit a familiar storyline is to challenge the essence of Mr Trump’s overwrought politics: that he is history’s singular actor, its greatest victim and greatest hero. Fortunately for Mr Trump, he has found someone who shares that grandiose vision. He now wants this person, Kash Patel, to run the In “The Plot Against the King,” a picture book by Mr Patel, apparently meant for children who do not overhear enough Fox News at home, Kash the Distinguished Discoverer is a wizard “known far and wide as the one person who could discover anything about anything”. Hillary Queenton has lost on Choosing Day to the merchant Donald, but a shifty knight claims to have a paper in a steel box showing the Russionians helped him cheat after drinking cherry ginger ale with him in the Swirly Tower Tavern in Russionia. Lexington is not making this up—for that you can thank Mr Patel and the Steele dossier, the gossip-packed bit of Democratic opposition research that fanned suspicions of collusion between Mr Trump and Russia in the 2016 campaign.Mr Patel’s book for grown-ups, “Government Gangsters”, is as vainglorious. As an investigator for House Republicans, Mr Patel did expose corner-cutting in the investigation into Russian interference. But his findings did not discredit the investigation, as he claims, or blow open “the biggest political conspiracy in American history”. From the staff of the House Intelligence Committee, Mr Patel moved to the national security staff at the White House, he reports, after Mr Trump was told “I had saved his presidency”.Mr Patel’s zeal for Mr Trump is profound (one senses a childlike joy as he uses “one of President Trump’s famous Sharpies that he gave me personally”), but, wherever he served, he picked up critics. “Over my dead body” was the reaction of Bill Barr, then attorney-general, when he discovered in 2020 that Mr Trump wanted to appoint Mr Patel as deputy director of the .To Mr Patel such critics are among the “incestuous, power-hungry, unelected oligarchs in Washington who hate us”. He includes Mr Barr among dozens of other “members of the executive branch Deep State” in an appendix to “Gangsters”. Mr Patel also lists the director, Christopher Wray. Mr Trump appointed him, but now wants him gone before his ten-year term ends in 2027 because his agents, the former president feels, spent too much time investigating him rather than his opponents. Mr Patel sees the Deep State as a conspiracy reaching far beyond those he names, beyond even the state itself, to implicate “the Democrat Party, the media, Big Tech, and all the major power centres of America”. In a speech to a conservative conference in February, wearing a green scarf emblazoned “Fight with Kash” that is among the merchandise he sells under the logo , he called the mainstream media “the most powerful enemy that the United States has ever seen”.Mr Patel sees a one-to-one correspondence between critics of Mr Trump and members of the Deep State. The desire he has expressed to investigate them is sure to be a topic of the Senate hearings to confirm him as America’s next Distinguished Discoverer. So are some episodes of his government service, including one in which, according to Mark Esper, Mr Trump’s former secretary of defence, Mr Patel appears to have supplied false information that almost upended a hostage-rescue operation in West Africa. Mr Patel blames Mr Esper, and he appears in the appendix.Mr Patel, who is 44, lacks experience in running a giant organisation. But his background in government, including as a federal prosecutor, is conventional for an director. He also spent years as a public defender, which seems to have sensitised him to the rights of the accused, a welcome attribute in an chiefMr Patel’s views of reform should also occupy the Senate confirmation hearings. He may be right that the headquarters building, the ugliest in Washington, is overstaffed, though his proposal to empty it and turn it into a museum of the Deep State would probably undercut the ’s effectiveness. He is surely correct in arguing that Congress should more actively oversee the bureau.For all the Democratic piety now about the ’s independence, a tension has always existed between that and its degree of democratic accountability, between its powers to protect Americans’ safety and the scope that provides to abuse their freedom. As John Harris concludes in “The Survivor”, his biography of Mr Clinton, the president probably should have fired Mr Freeh despite the political storm that would have ensued. Their mutual contempt contributed to the breakdown in intelligence-sharing that the 9/11 commission later found to have enabled al-Qaeda’s attacks. It is just too bad, as usual, that Mr Trump should be the first president, in a long time, to take the need for change so seriously.
