MSNBC Panel Frets That the FBI Could Abuse Surveillance Powers Under Kash Patel - It's Already Been Happening for Years
An MSNBC panelist raised the specter on Tuesday that Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI, could abuse the agency’s surveillance powers for political purposes if he is confirmed director.
Wouldn’t that be a terrible thing to happen? Who could even imagine such a thing? Anyone who’s been paying attention even marginally for the last 10 years to the FBI under the Biden and Obama administrations.
“Morning Joe” MSNBC panelist David Ignatius, a columnist with The Washington Post, described Patel as “the most loyal” among Trump’s first administration officials.
Patel’s past posts include chief of staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council and principal deputy to the acting director of national intelligence.
In those positions, Patel sought to “do the president’s bidding,” Ignatius argued.
Yes, that’s the point. The head of the executive branch, the president, wants to see his agenda and priorities implemented at the agency level.
“I think what’s of concern when you think about [Patel] as FBI director is the FBI director has extraordinary powers to conduct surveillance on American citizens,” Ignatius said.
“And those powers to listen in to phone calls, to read mail, so to speak, would be directed by somebody who has shown that he has a very political agenda,” he added.
“Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski agreed that Patel could be problematic in the role of FBI director.
Before Patel joined the first Trump administration, he was a federal prosecutor in the National Security Division of the Justice Department and later was senior counsel to the House Intelligence Committee then-chairman GOP Rep. Devin Nunes.
In that capacity, he helped unearth the origins of the infamous Steele dossier funded by the Democratic National Committee and the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.
The FBI used the document to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants to spy on Trump campaign associates in an effort to prove collusion with Russia.
So if Ignatius is concerned about the FBI abusing its spying powers, look no further than the end of Barack Obama’s time in office in 2016, when the bureau spied on the Trump campaign, i.e., the opposing political party’s nominee for president.
In fact, the bureau’s blatant disregard for revealing the source of the dossier and other exculpatory evidence brought a rare public rebuke from the presiding judge of the FISA court in December 2019.
“The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable,” Judge Rosemary M. Collyer wrote in her order.
So Patel was the source of truthful information about the FBI and the bureau was the source of false and misleading information.
And let’s not forget the Obama FBI spied on then-Fox News reporter James Rosen and the Department of Justice seized the phone records of dozens of Associated Press journalists during the Obama administration.
“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of the Associated Press and its reporters,” then-AP president and chief executive officer Gary Pruitt said at the time.
“These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know,” he asserted.
The Register reported last year that “The FBI misused controversial surveillance powers more than 278,000 times between 2020 and early 2021 to conduct warrantless searches on George Floyd protesters [and] January 6 rioters who stormed the Capitol.”
“The Feds were found to have abused the spy law in a ‘persistent and widespread’ manner, according to the [FISA] court,” the news outlet added.
All this is to say nothing of the FBI’s conduct toward Trump and his associates during the Biden administration, with the Mar-a-Lago raid and all the rest.
Who can possibly blame Trump for wanting a loyalist leading the FBI?
He’s experienced eight years of non-stop abuse of power and deception from the agency.
It’s time for it all to stop, and Patel’s the man to do it.
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