An ex-FBI official on Sunday flagged several reasons why Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s controversial pick to be FBI director, could spell major trouble for his former agency.
Frank Figliuzzi — who served as a former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI — told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki that Patel, a fierce loyalist to the president-elect, wants to grind Trump’s ax should he have the opportunity to lead the agency.
“If he now somehow interferes with FBI field office operations and management, you’re looking at a total hijacking of the federal law enforcement system,” Figliuzzi said.
“That could concern everybody and as they’re pursuing Trump’s enemies, what are they not doing? Are they not working that violent gang? Are they not working the corrupt Republican mayor, congressman and governor in your city, state, county? That’s a problem.”
Figliuzzi’s reaction arrives after former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe slammed Trump’s choice of Patel and called him “profoundly unqualified” for the job.
Patel — who previously served as chief of staff to acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — is a “deep state” conspiracy theorist who has vowed to close the FBI’s D.C. headquarters to replace it with a “deep state” museum.
Psaki, at the start of her program, noted that Patel hasn’t been shy over his desire to use tools in federal law enforcement “to settle political scores for his boss.”
She then turned to a clip of Patel on the “Shawn Ryan Show” podcast naming a number of former high-ranking government officials — some whom were Trump picks — and claiming they did “a lot of rule and law-breaking.”
“What you have is a build-up of so many actions by the deep state that it becomes borderline treasonous to allow those people and their activities in a collective fashion ever to be applied to the United States,” Patel said.
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Figliuzzi, in his interview with Psaki, pointed to Patel’s vow to empty out the headquarters on “day one” and send thousands of employees in the office “across America to go chase down criminals.”
“Now that makes for a great soundbite but it’s ignorant of the role that headquarters analysts and supervisors play in the 30,000-foot level view of the world,” Figliuzzi said.
“You can’t just empty out headquarters, put everybody in the field and tell them to work homicides. … You lose your global intelligence capacity to see what’s going on in transnational crime, espionage, cyber crime across the world and on and on and on.”