There’s a simple enough rule of politics: If you’re an insider and an outsider wants to come in and muck around your stuff, you don’t like it.
So, we can see why the Federal Bureau of Investigation Deep State is so hostile to Kash Patel, nominated on December 2 by President-elect Trump to head the venerable-but-controversial FBI. (On December 11, the incumbent director, Christopher Wray, announced his resignation; Trump, who had intended to fire Wray upon taking office next month, called it “a great day for America.”)
Patel has said that he intends to release some or all of the FBI’s files on everything from “Russia, Russia, Russia” to Jeffrey Epstein to the John F. Kennedy assassination. “The most important [goal],” Patel says, is “restoring trust in our agencies and departments . . . The way to do it is by giving the American people the truth.”
Hearing this, the Main Stream Media is thrilled, right? After all, reporters are always telling us that they must “speak truth to power” because, of course, “democracy dies in darkness.” Surely the MSM looks forward to a new period of lustration, bringing secrets to light. So, journos want to see Patel in the FBI gig ASAP, all the better for their own headlines, clicks, and prizes, correct?
Well, not quite. In fact, the MSM reaction to Patel has been absolutely venomous. A single MSM publication, The Atlantic, can speak for the whole. One scribe there called Patel “dangerous,” another called him “incredibly dangerous.” A third wordsmith opined, “We are headed toward a US constitutional crisis vastly bigger than Watergate.”
Yikes! The Watergate scandal engulfed the presidency of Richard Nixon in 1972, leading to his resignation from office two years later. It was an epic saga that transfixed the nation; two investigative journalists, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, became household names, as well as best-selling authors.
Indeed, so immense was Watergate’s impact that ambitious politicians began looking around for other scandals to unravel. One such was Sen. Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho. Taking note of all the allegations and revelations about U.S. intelligence agencies—including the CIA and the FBI—Church persuaded the Senate to form a special body, soon known as the Church Committee, to start digging.
In 1975-76, the committee issued subpoenas and grilled witnesses, all the while basking in the warm glow of publicity and national television.
The media did, for sure, play along. Newsweek hailed Church as “Frank Cathedral.” The Washington Star spun Church nicely, praising his “seriousness.” The newspaper added, “His committee has been the most leak proof in memory and he talks with furrowed brow and half-closed eyes about his determination to avoid jumping to judgment on a matter of gravity.”
The truth, of course, was that the Church Committee routinely leaked its scoops—about everything from CIA assassination schemes to FBI snooping on Martin Luther King, Jr.—to favored venues, notably CBS News and The New York Times. As for Church himself, he was fully mindful of his rising media profile, burnishing it with glib soundbites such as “rogue elephant” and “glorified godfather,” accusing the president and his men of anti-democratic “caesarism.”
The press loved it. Why? Because Church was attacking their mutual enemy—the Establishment. Back then, big institutions, including the national security apparatus, were at least somewhat conservative and almost always anti-communist. To be sure, there were plenty of Democrats in high places, but they were not the new crew from the hippie Sixties and radical Seventies.
In fact, key pieces of earlier Cold War legislation, such as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which aimed to screen out subversives and communists, were sponsored and shepherded by Democrats, specifically Sen. Pat McCarran of Nevada and Rep. Francis Walter of Pennsylvania.
But Church was the newer kind of Democrat, the George McGovern-type. He himself would later enjoy swimming and spearfishing with Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro. So, Church was delighted to sear the Establishment, seeking to melt it into something more malleable and liberal.
The Church Committee’s 989-page final report led to purges within the national security agencies, as well as structural changes, such as the creation in 1978 of new courts as part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Thanks to these and other pressures in the 1970s, the Establishment moved further and further to the left, first to McGovernism and then to full-on wokism. It’s no accident that those same agencies and FISA courts were in the middle of the Trump-targeting Russiagate.
Yet back in 1976, the media’s hero-treatment inspired Church to run for president. That proved to be a bridge too far. Jimmy Carter won the Democratic nomination that year. And Church himself was defeated for re-election in 1980, as Idahoans noticed that their man spent more time thinking about the Potomac than Pocatello. (Interestingly, the Gem State hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since Church).
Yet the Church Committee lives forever in the liberal pantheon. To progressives, it’s a gold standard for Capitol Hill diggers.
So, whenever Republicans in Congress wish to investigate something, the Democrat-aligned MSM tells them, don’t even think about comparing yourselves to Church and his work. In 2023, when House Republicans, led by Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, launched an investigation of Biden administration misdeeds (for starters, the FBI’s handling of Hunter Biden’s laptop), The Washington Post was quick to shut down any comparison. Headline: “The Church Committee was nothing like Republicans’ new investigation.” Got that? Nothing like.
By now, of course, the two sides, left and right, have traded places in their attitude toward the Establishment. Today, it’s liberals and Democrats who are in the inside, while conservatives and Republicans are on the outside. (Yes, Trump has won the White House twice now, but the Establishment is very established, just as the Deep State is very deep.)
So, of course, Democrats want to defend the FBI because it’s now their institution. J. Michael Waller’s 2024 book, Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains, provides a detailed account of how the FBI, particularly its headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, has been transformed and woked.
Okay, back to Kash Patel, who says he wants to shut down the FBI HQ and “reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state.”
Such tough talk guarantees plenty of opposition to Patel. Democrats in the Senate will all oppose his confirmation. And Never Trump Republicans, from the sidelines, have expressed their strong opposition. For instance, John Bolton compares Patel to Soviet-era secret police chief Lavrenty Beria. Bolton continued the fight in a December 11 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, headlined, “Kash Patel Doesn’t Belong at the FBI.”
For his part, Patel gives it right back. He has published a list of “government gangsters,” including, yes, the same John Bolton.
To be sure, Patel has plenty of allies. One such is top Trump aide Stephen Miller, who says crisply:
When the radical left says “our democracy” they mean “our unelected deep state.” When they say “FBI independence” they mean “unchecked law enforcement power immune from all democratic accountability.” In short, what they oppose is the restoration of democracy and self-government.
So, what’s going to happen next? In this polarized environment, nobody’s going cakewalk their way to a Senate confirmation. Still, Polymarket lays the odds in favor of Patel as more than 2:1.
At minimum, his Senate hearings will be circuses because for Establishment insiders, the key goal is to keep the outsiders out of their citadel.
We shouldn’t be surprised that Deep Statists and Democrats are so strongly opposed to Patel. Yet still, it’s jarring to see reporters and pundits lining up to help protect the muck and keep it from being raked.
