A New York Times opinion piece’s ludicrous explanation for why Kash Patel is ‘unqualified’

The New York Times published a guest essay by Garrett M. Graff boldly stating that “It goes almost without saying that Kash Patel…is supremely unqualified to direct the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency.” After that beginning, you’d expect to read that Patel heads a crime syndicate, took money from foreign governments, or has a bizarre cereal fetish. However, in an essay that is hysterical in tone and amusing in content, Graff’s complaint is that Patel is not a card-carrying member of the Deep State—the same Deep State that the voters elected Trump to clean up.

Before getting to Graff’s essay, it’s important to note that, at least when I speak of the Deep State, I’m not speaking only about Democrats. It’s true that they’re the majority in the Deep State, but Trump’s first term showed that the Deep State also includes myriad establishment Republicans. Past presidential candidates and fanatic Trump haters John McCain and Mitt Romney were and are Deep Staters.

<img alt captext="Public domain” src=”https://conspiracyresource.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/a-new-york-times-opinion-pieces-ludicrous-explanation-for-why-kash-patel-is-unqualified.jpg” width=”500″>

Image: Kash Patel, reformer. Public domain.

These Deep State Republicans like the status quo but simply wish it were a bit more affordable. Republican Deep Staters don’t have an allegiance to America or Americans. Their allegiance is to the government itself, along with strong support for corporations.

Notably, these corporations aren’t the mom-and-pop stores of Main Street America, the ones who are still the backbone of the American economy. Instead, they support multinational conglomerates that want to send America’s manufacturing sector overseas to benefit from slave labor in China or, failing that, to oust American workers at home in favor of cheap illegal labor.

These Republican Deep Staters strongly sided with the Democrats when Trump entered office in 2016. Trump was an outsider who promised to change the status quo, removing the government from its Washington, D.C., anchor and operating it for the benefit of all Americans, not just the insiders and their paymasters.

It was these Deep State Republicans, not the Democrats, who blocked Trump at every turn. I say that because, without the Republican Deep Staters’ help, the Democrat anti-Trump initiatives, everything from the Russia Hoax to refusing to fund the border wall to the two impeachments, would have died a’bornin’.

With that background, let’s go back to Graff’s screed. In Graff’s second paragraph, he “explains” why Patel is so unqualified: He’s unqualified because D.C. insiders say so, especially Bill Barr (a Republican) and Gina Haspel, two of the people who worked hardest to undermine Trump’s agenda.

But the worst thing, according to Graff, about Patel’s nomination is that it breaks with FBI tradition! Graff says that the current FBI Director, Christopher Wray (a Republican), is supposed to hold the job for two more years. This is because Congress passed a law in 1976 saying that FBI directors have ten-year terms.

However, as is usually the case when Democrats insist there are limits on Trump’s power to run the administrative state, there’s that little thing called the Constitution. The FBI is an administrative agency that is run as a subset of the Department of Justice. Both those organizations fall under the executive’s purview in accordance with Article II of the Constitution. Congress cannot interfere with the president’s ability to manage his administration. If Trump wants Wray gone, Wray goes.

The other tradition “in modern times,” says Graff, is that prior FBI directors, all of whom were Republicans, were “vetted and confirmed (often repeatedly) by the Senate to another position first.” So what? One vetting and confirmation should be all that we need to make sure that Patel isn’t doing weird things with Quaker Oats in the privacy of his own office.

The fact that the Republican James Comey had been twice confirmed didn’t stop him from engaging in questionable acts when he headed the FBI. These included unilaterally announcing that Hillary Clinton was off the hook for national security violations, sending to the FISA court unfounded requests to spy on the Trump team, working with the Obama administration to destroy Trump’s presidency, and forcing the Steele dossier into the public eye to justify investigating Trump. Double vetting did nothing to make Comey a decent public servant.

Graff also rails against the fact that Patel is a Trump loyalist. The first problem with this is that Patel is loyal not to Trump but to Trump’s plans to clean up the government. Every person in the FBI should be loyal to this agenda.

The second problem with Graff’s “how dare he appoint a loyalist” argument is that Graff seems to have had a brain fart that led him to forget former AG Eric Holder’s proud boast that he was Obama’s “wing-man,” who was “there with my boy.”

Democrats are okay when a Democrat president has DOJ and FBI heads who support him. They just don’t like it when Republicans do.  

Lastly, of course, Graff risibly contends that the FBI is a rigorously honest organization that’s shaken off the partisanship that characterized its decades under J. Edgar Hoover’s aegis. Again, his selective memory has led him to forget the fact that the FBI knew immediately or, at least, should have known that the Steele dossier was a fake, that the Hunter Biden hard drive was real, that Catholics are not a threat to the nation, and that parents speaking out at school board meetings about teachers foisting sexual deviance on their children are not terrorists.

There’s also strong evidence that many of the FBI’s “terrorism” busts occurred because they entrapped foolish and desperate people, Muslims and conservatives alike. This is not a rigorously honest institution. It’s one that needs to have a new broom sweep through.

I doubt that Graff will gain wisdom over the next four years. However, if he ever finds himself out of work, he can always take up comedy writing because I’m still laughing at the nonsense he spouted.