US politics
fromThe New Yorker
1 day agoKash Patel's Bureau of Vengeance
Kash Patel, lacking qualifications, was appointed to lead the FBI based on loyalty and is reshaping it to serve Trump's political and personal agenda.
On June 5th, Kash Patel, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was in Austin, Texas, to record a podcast interview with Joe Rogan. Patel had recently declared that the F.B.I. had moved on from its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's sex crimes, but his agents were still looking into other "coverups," including the Covid-19 lab leak and the role that the Bureau's own operatives supposedly played in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The first problem with this argument is that the Biden administration did not politicize law enforcement-in fact, it went out of its way to avoid doing so. Biden put the Justice Department in the hands of Merrick Garland, a widely respected figure who had bipartisan support and who pledged to operate independently, and who followed through on that pledge by appointing a special counsel to insulate the federal Trump investigations from political influence.