Kash Patel’s vendetta against FBI headquarters

OPINION:

The FBI’s newly appointed director, Kash Patel, has said he would like to shut down the bureau’s headquarters and reopen it as a museum to the “deep state.” His rationale is that headquarters personnel overseeing counterintelligence investigations egregiously violated President Trump’s rights by targeting him based on nonexistent evidence.

Although that is true, the FBI officials who ordered those improper investigations under Director James B. Comey left the bureau more than six years ago. Whether valid or not, the more recent targeting of Mr. Trump was at the direction of the Justice Department under Merrick Garland, not the FBI.

Most disturbing is that Mr. Patel does not seem to understand what the FBI does.

“Let cops be cops,” he has said. Thus, Mr. Patel mischaracterizes the FBI’s mission. The FBI is not a local police department. It is the only U.S. law enforcement agency empowered to go after spies and foreign terrorist organizations. Instead of targeting these threats to our national security, Mr. Patel repeatedly emphasizes going after violent crime.

After he took over, the FBI issued a statement saying Mr. Patel “has made clear his promise to the American public that FBI agents will be in communities focused on combatting violent crime. He has directed FBI leadership to implement a plan to put this promise into action.”

In a recent video conference call with agents, Mr. Patel barely mentioned national security and confused the terms counterintelligence and counterterrorism, according to press reports.

Although the FBI may help local law enforcement target violent offenders, especially in gang-related investigations, its mission is far broader. Every few months, the FBI announces arrests of terrorists directed by foreign networks. As a result, we have not had a successful foreign terrorist attack since Sept. 11, 2021, a remarkable record.

By advocating dispersing agents from headquarters to field offices, Mr. Patel is inviting a return to the days when a figurative wall prevented FBI agents from sharing information gathered during counterintelligence investigations with agents pursuing criminal cases. Because of the wall, created by a low-level Justice Department official based on a misreading of the law, crucial information about the Sept. 11 hijackers that could have rolled up the attack was not shared.

“The greatest single cause for the Sept. 11 problem was the wall that segregated or separated criminal investigators and intelligence agents,” then-Attorney General John Ashcroft told the 9/11 Commission.

The Patriot Act of 2001 dismantled the wall, but it was too late. As a result of the wall, nearly 3,000 Americans died.

Except for hot dog stands, every organization of any size needs a headquarters. That is particularly true with the FBI, which must be able to seamlessly pass along intelligence and direct investigations in a coordinated effort that cannot take place if investigation supervision is dispersed to field offices all over the world.

Now, Mr. Patel wants to replicate the blunder that created the wall. Nothing compares with the importance of the FBI’s primary mission of rolling up terrorists and spies. By downplaying and impeding that mission and reassigning headquarters agents who are focused on threats to our national security to go after street crime, Mr. Patel risks a foreign terrorist attack that could wipe out the U.S. with weapons of mass destruction.

• Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, is the author of “The Secrets of the FBI” and “The FBI: Inside the World’s Most Powerful Law Enforcement Agency,” which led to the dismissal of William Sessions as FBI director over his abuses.