Confirm Kash Patel as FBI chief

OPINION:

In recent years, the house that J. Edgar Hoover built has elevated the liberal agenda over the traditional mission of locking up violent crooks. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 38,000 employees spend less time combating crimes such as murder, kidnapping and terrorism as a result.

That will change if the Senate approves President Trump’s choice to run the bureau. “The only thing that will matter if I am confirmed as the director of the FBI is a de-weaponized, depoliticized system of law enforcement completely devoted to rigorous obedience to the Constitution and a singular standard of justice,” Kash Patel vowed in his nomination hearing.

As a former public defender and Justice Department prosecutor, Mr. Patel is controversial for one reason. While serving as an investigator on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, he revealed the FBI’s complicity in a plot to undermine the Republican presidential candidate who went on to become commander in chief.

“We followed the money and exposed the fraud that was the Steele dossier,” Mr. Patel said.

That doesn’t sit well with Sen. Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who read the farrago of lies into the Congressional Record and earned a censure from the House of Representatives.

Although the broad outlines of the dossier scandal are known, mysteries remain. For instance, court documents confirm that Hillary Clinton hired a firm that paid “journalists” to write stories libeling Mr. Trump with dodgy material, but the names of those taking the dirty money remain sealed. They do not deserve this courtesy.

There can be no faith in the FBI as an institution without a full accounting of its involvement. The same is true regarding the bureau’s records on the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Kennedy.

Transparency in these matters is not about reliving ancient history. We don’t even have the truth about the two attempts on Mr. Trump’s life a few months ago. Under President Biden’s administration, an FBI official falsely portrayed the would-be assassin in Butler, Pennsylvania, as a right-wing extremist by making vague assertions about his social media posts.

He never expected Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab, to release those messages and describe the shooter as “unequivocally, pro-Biden and in particular pro-Biden’s immigration policy.”

Mr. Biden’s FBI engineered narratives that aligned with the goals of George Soros, the billionaire leftist who poured his vast fortune into electing local district attorneys committed to emptying prisons and filling the streets with violent felons.

Instead of going after the growing number of swindlers and cutthroats, the FBI investigated traditional Catholics. It imprisoned pro-lifers. It arrested a jokester who did nothing more than post a funny meme on Twitter.

The FBI even ensured CNN’s cameras were rolling as a team of armed agents dressed up like soldiers to raid the home of 67-year-old Roger Stone. His purported crime was impeding a fake investigation predicated on the dossier’s lies.

Perhaps the low point was when the FBI descended on Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and rifled through the personal effects of first lady Melania and their teenage son, Barron.

The seventh floor of the FBI building set these disastrous priorities. Mr. Patel is uniquely qualified to understand what must be done to reverse them. On Tuesday, the full Senate is expected to vote on advancing the nomination, allowing a final confirmation vote a few days later.

Mr. Patel deserves the opportunity to restore the prestige of what was once the nation’s premier law enforcement agency.