After successful the 2024 election, President Donald Trump mentioned on Nov. 30 that his new FBI director could be Kash Patel, a controversial lawyer and former Trump aide identified for backing right-wing conspiracies.
Patel formally changed FBI Director Christopher Wray, a 2017 Trump appointee, on Feb. 20, 2025.
By regulation, FBI administrators serve a 10-year time period to keep away from White Home political interference. Wray was in his eighth yr. Patel stands exterior the norm of FBI administrators over the previous century. They’ve usually been apolitical and impartial investigators, upholding the rule of regulation. Patel’s personal phrases, nonetheless, seem to contradict this.
Patel has supported Trump’s 2024 marketing campaign vow to make use of federal energy to “root out” political opponents.
“We’re going to come back after you whether or not it’s criminally or civilly,” Patel said in December 2023. Patel’s 2023 guide, “Government Gangsters,” features a record of top-ranking authorities officers, which Democrats say is an enemies list.
As an FBI historian, I’ve researched political affect on the FBI. Whereas it’s nonetheless early days, Patel’s affirmation has one clear, if century-old, comparability in FBI historical past.
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The FBI of the previous
Some observers have in contrast Patel to J. Edgar Hoover, the domineering FBI director between 1924 and 1972 who was famend for FBI abuses. In 1956, Hoover created COINTELPRO, an unlawful counterintelligence program that focused communists, battle protesters and even civil rights activists.
Whereas Hoover additionally generally catered to White Home political pursuits – akin to monitoring overseas coverage critics and offering data on political opponents – he did so solely when it suited his explicit pursuits. Hoover, who served below eight presidents, was an autonomous bureaucrat. He prioritized concentrating on communists and containing American tradition from nontraditional forces, whereas vigorously selling the FBI’s independence.
The extra apt comparability to Patel in FBI historical past lies with Hoover’s immediate predecessor, William J. Burns, who served as director from 1921 by means of 1924.
Burns was a well-known author and proprietor of the Burns Worldwide Detective Company, a non-public investigative company. The general public knew him because the American Sherlock Holmes.
But Burns by no means hesitated to make use of his energy to guard the political pursuits of his superior, the politically related lawyer normal, Harry Daugherty. The FBI is an company throughout the Division of Justice.
Daugherty and Burns had been on the coronary heart of the so-called Ohio Gang, a corrupt cabal within the administrations of Republican Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge throughout the Teapot Dome scandal within the early Nineteen Twenties. This scandal emerged after two oil tycoons bribed then-Interior Secretary Albert Fall, a good friend of theirs, to safe contracts to drill on federal land at Teapot Dome, Wyoming.
Daugherty, though conscious of this improper exercise, refused to have the Division of Justice examine. He additionally confronted his personal scandals involving graft, corruption and political intrigue.
Legislators of each events finally pushed again on Daugherty’s refusal. Nonetheless, it might take one other two and a half years earlier than the Division of Justice noticed reforms.
The unfolding Teapot Dome scandal
Newspapers first raised questions on corruption within the Harding administration early in spring 1922 after FBI officers ordered an agent to drop a fraud probe to focus as an alternative on the excessive value of bread. This FBI agent resigned in protest in Might 1922 and handed his data to Congressman Roy O. Woodruff, a Republican from Michigan.
Varied other senators and representatives of both parties following Woodruff’s lead cried foul and referred to as for an investigation into the Justice Division.
Seeing no outcomes, Congressman Oscar Keller tried to question Daugherty by the autumn of 1922. Republican Get together stalwarts, nonetheless, blocked the hassle.
As retribution, Daugherty ordered Burns to analyze all of the legislators attempting to face of their approach.
FBI brokers shadowed these legislators, learn their mail and listened to their cellphone calls all to search out one thing towards them. Others had their places of work searched.
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‘No quitter’
By October 1923, some six months after information of the Teapot Dome scandal first broke, Sen. Thomas Walsh, a Democrat from Montana, lastly started to analyze Teapot Dome as a member of the general public lands committee.
A number of months later, Democratic Sen. Burton Wheeler, by way of a choose committee, additionally started investigating Daugherty’s makes an attempt to halt any investigation into Teapot Dome. Different senators, together with Republicans, met with President Calvin Coolidge – generally remembered as “Silent Cal” – and urged him to strain Daugherty to resign.
The president sat quietly and stared. Daugherty didn’t.
Daugherty boasted in February 2024, as reported by the Lincoln, Nebraska, newspaper Journal Star, that he was “no quitter.”
Quietly, Burns tasked his FBI brokers, some undercover, with creating a bogus influence-peddling case towards Sen. Wheeler. Allies additionally sought details about Sen. Walsh “to smear him.”
The FBI’s spurious probes resulted in a federal indictment in Montana towards Wheeler on April 8, 1924, for affect peddling. Wheeler was simply exonerated in a delayed 1925 trial.
Earlier than the case was tried, Coolidge in March 1924 lastly relented and compelled an uncooperative Daugherty to resign. The president appointed a brand new reformist lawyer normal, Harlan Fiske Stone, to wash up a corrupted Justice Division, together with the FBI. Stone pressured Burns out from the FBI two months later. He was changed by Hoover.
In his first strikes as the brand new lawyer normal, Stone ordered Hoover to rid the FBI of “incompetent or unreliable brokers” and to rent solely these “of known good character” with authorized coaching. Stone banned political investigations, unethical techniques – together with wiretapping and entrapment – and concentrating on political enemies. Stone instructed reporters after appointing Hoover: “There may be to be no extra rifling of the desks of senators and representatives.”
The FBI at present
For the subsequent practically 50 years, Hoover led a politically impartial FBI. The Watergate scandal of the early 1970s revived problems with a politicized Justice Division. Ever since, for half a century, the Justice Division and FBI have purposefully and pointedly created a tradition of investigative independence outside of politics.
Attorneys normal from the Carter by means of Obama administrations limited contact between the FBI and White House to keep away from political affect. FBI Director Louis Freeh independently investigated each purported scandal of the Invoice Clinton administration throughout the Nineties. Director James Comey protected FBI investigative independence and refused to declare loyalty to Trump throughout his first time period.
Trump’s and Patel’s personal phrases, nonetheless, portend the FBI returning to the open political concentrating on of the Teapot Dome period.
Historical past whispers a warning.
