How Does Kash Patel Compare to J. Edgar Hoover?
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Prior to becoming FBI director, Kash Patel made no secret of his plans for the agency. I'd shut down the FBI Hoover building and I'd take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. We're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We're going to come after you. Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out. But yeah, we're putting you all on notice.

leading pundits and Democrats to warn of a return to darker days. I think he's told us exactly what he's going to do. It's the sort of things that we have not seen an FBI director do since J. Edgar Hoover. Trump wants to politicize the FBI, to turn it back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover, where the FBI has its

own really lawless agenda. We've got a recipe for severe abuse that could happen. The kind of abuse we haven't seen since J. Edgar Hoover illegally wiretapping and planting evidence against people he thought were a threat to him.

But according to Beverly Gage, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, some comparisons between these two offer more insights than others. For instance, the current FBI could be politicized in ways that even Hoover would have rejected.

Hoover built the FBI and Patel really wants to tear it down. I asked her to chart the rise of J. Edgar Hoover, who led the bureau for 48 years, and explain how he came to weaponize the agency under the pretense of defending a, quote, American way of life.

For Hoover, in many ways, it meant defending the status quo and racial hierarchy. He was a very committed anti-communist, especially. Communism in reality is not a political party. It is a way of life, an evil and malignant way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic. And like an epidemic, a quarantine is necessary to keep it from

from infecting this nation. He was a funny creature because he was a very powerful conservative ideologue on the one hand, and he was also a big believer in federal power, in the administrative state. And these are things that we don't actually see going hand in hand in our politics very often anymore. Hoover's power expanded significantly when President Franklin D. Roosevelt put him in charge of

of the Bureau's nascent domestic intelligence system, which allowed the FBI to both hunt for spies and also basically spy on American citizens. It was through this authority that Hoover demonstrated a new way that the agency could be weaponized.

You've pointed to the FBI's investigation into Martin Luther King Jr. as a sort of case study in how quickly these practices could spiral out of control today.

The investigation of Martin Luther King was one of the most labor-intensive and expensive investigations that the FBI undertook in the late 50s and early 60s. And it's a really interesting study in how something that's undertaken under, I

a national security logic, if you will, the fight against communism, became a powerful personal and political vendetta. So it began with an investigation into some members of the Communist Party who were in King's orbit. It then extended into wiretaps not only on those people, but on King himself. So the FBI began wiretapping his home and his office.

From there, it extended into bugs that were planted in his hotel rooms. The FBI was recording King's extramarital sex life. And then it went into a much more aggressive, disruptive operation that entailed trying to share these recordings with people in Congress and in the press and get King exposed as what Hoover called him publicly, the most notorious liar in all

of America. And then finally, it led to the FBI coming up with a threatening anonymous note that King took as a push for him to commit suicide, that the Bureau says was intended to push him out of public life.

The letter concludes by saying, "King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation." Nobody thought that King was breaking any laws.

He was not ever going to end up in a courtroom through this FBI investigation. This was all happening through these kind of secret techniques and was primarily because Hoover understood King as a threat to himself and to the Bureau and to the America that he wanted to see. The press has predicted that Patel might use the Bureau to go after his and Trump's enemies, but...

But you say that actually it's more likely that abuses of power will take the form of targeted surveillance operations.

Criminal law enforcement, you know, you have to have some kind of crime. And then you've got a lot of people participating in the process. Juries, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and the law itself. Certainly history is full of things like show trials, but...

But I think it's actually much easier to engage in intimidation and disruption aimed at your political enemies through a whole host of other techniques, many of them secret.

that are not going to be subject to that kind of scrutiny. Now, of course, it should be said, the Bureau is not supposed to do those things. But if you wanted to, and if you had control over the institution, that's probably the easier and less scrutinized way to go.

Hoover was often acting out of self-interest and would work with both Democratic and Republican presidents, whereas Patel and Bongino really seemed to be positioning themselves as loyalists to President Trump, acting to realize his vision for the bureau, which we'll get to in a second. But with Hoover...

Tell me how he was able to manipulate presidents across the aisle. One of the really fascinating parts of Hoover's career is simply that it went on for so long. He came into office in 1924 and...

And he died on the job in 1972. So Hoover worked under four Democratic presidents, four Republican presidents, and he always made a point of describing himself as standing, quote unquote, outside of politics, being political.

nonpartisan and I think in certain ways that was true. He was willing to work with just about anyone who he thought would serve his interests, serve the interests of the Bureau, or who happened to be in power at that moment.

He had very, very close relationship with both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. We think of these as being very different political characters, but Hoover did a great number of favors for each of them. You know, for Johnson, he was constantly supplying intelligence about the civil rights movement, other critics of the Johnson administration. For Nixon, he had had a

long, long anti-communist bond. They had been very close when Nixon was vice president. Many different kinds of politicians were afraid of him. I mean, why can't a president get rid of somebody running the FBI if he wanted to? Hoover had

Hoover had files on just about everyone who was anyone, not only in Washington, but in the United States more broadly. It's often said that he blackmailed people. Often it was a little more subtle than that, which is to say they might go to a senator, go to a congressman or a member of the press and say,

well, Mr. Senator, we have found this terrible information about the affair that you're having, and we just want you to know that your secret is safe with us. So the senator knew that this information was there. People knew that Hoover was a pretty skilled leaker of information, and sometimes it was more direct than that as well.

After his death in 1972, the Senate's Church Committee investigated the Bureau along with the NSA, CIA, and IRS, uncovering a lot of civil liberty abuses and other secret intelligence operations.

How did the government ultimately reckon with Hoover's legacy and how did we work towards preventing this kind of abuse of power from happening thereafter?

The analysis in that moment was that the problem with what had been happening at the FBI was that Hoover had been too powerful, he had been too autonomous, that the Bureau had been too insulated from democratic pressure, transparency, and that

That that was the problem. And so there were a number of reforms put in place that were intended to sort of split the difference between wanting the FBI to be this autonomous, independent, apolitical bureau, but at the same time wanting to make sure that it was more responsive, more transparent.

and that no one was going to get the kind of power that J. Edgar Hoover had. So we now have, at least in theory, a 10-year term for the FBI director. And that term was put in place to prevent someone from doing what Hoover did, which was to be there for 48 years, but

But it was also put in place to make sure that the FBI still had some insulation from politics. Ten years was longer than the term of any presidential administration, even if the president was reelected.

And now I think what we're seeing with the Trump administration is that lots of those norms and policies and rules are just being thrown out the window. Yeah. I mean, he appointed Christopher Wray to be director of the FBI and then did not allow him to serve the end of his tenure term, for one. Right.

Right. And he appointed Christopher Wray after he fired James Comey. So that was, if we all think back, a very big deal in 2017. That was really the first time that an FBI director had been fired in that way for what was clearly a concern about political loyalty and

So this is quite consistent with what Trump did in his first term. But of course, this time, as so often has happened, he's coming for his own appointee. Yes. And appointing Kash Patel and now Dan Bongino is kind of turning the whole thing up to 11%.

The narrative that we keep hearing is that, you know, the Bureau is this like toxically left-wing agency. It's rife with anti-Christian, anti-conservative bias. What do you make of that? Well, that seems like a very strange description of the FBI, which is a pretty conservative organization, right?

The big claim that the FBI is full of closet Marxists does not make a whole lot of sense to me and certainly would have shocked and appalled J. Edgar Hoover. Say a little bit more about Kash Patel's specific critique of the FBI.

There does seem to be a tension between I'm coming in with the chainsaw, I'm going to shut down FBI headquarters and turn it into a museum of the deep state. I love that. Which is something that Patel said and we'll see. You know, I have to say as a historian, I feel like, oh, I'd actually love to have a museum of the deep state, but maybe not in this way.

And then there's also a really powerful desire to make use of this very large and powerful bureaucracy. But in some ways, the breaking of the FBI is also about breaking the norms and processes and constraints and internal culture. I also have wondered...

in this process about the Republicans in Congress who were so enthusiastic about

confirming Patel as FBI director because I think one thing that we have learned about Donald Trump is that you might think that you're on the inside for a while, but at any moment, you too could be thrown out into the cold. And actually, if we have a politicized bureau that's going after Trump's enemies, then

I think the very people who have voted for this set of changes might themselves pretty easily and pretty rapidly become the victims of what they wrought. Yeah, that's interesting because it sends a message to even Trump's current allies that they're on thin ice.

I also found it interesting that when Elon Musk demanded that federal workers send in these emails with the five points about what they did during the week, Kash Patel was actually one of the people who said to his employees,

Actually, don't do that because, of course, we probably don't want it documented what every FBI agent in the country was doing in the last week. Oh, that's an interesting interpretation. What I took away from it was Elon Musk, get your grimy hands out of my bureau.

Well, there's that too, right? So we have Kash Patel in that case as allegedly the person who wants to tear down the Bureau, but also somehow being its protector or at least wanting his own fiefdom.

In some ways, we could look at J. Edgar Hoover's legacy as a kind of playbook for this new leadership. If they choose to wiretap political enemies, surveil them, bully the press, etc. Are there signs that you're seeing that Patel and Bongino could go even further than Hoover?

I think Hoover had lots and lots of abuses, but then there were also certain constraints in the sense that there were moments where presidents or other figures wanted him to use the Bureau in explicitly political ways that he resisted because he thought it wasn't in his interest, it wasn't in the FBI's interest.

And I don't see those sorts of constraints operating in this situation. I think what we are seeing potentially is a perfect storm in which you've got this powerful secretive bureaucracy. And Patel and others have been quite open about saying that they want to use the power of an institution like the Bureau to go after Trump's enemies, to go after his critics.

So that seems to me to be a very powerful and pretty dangerous combination.

Beverly, thank you very much. Thanks so much. Beverly Gage is the author of G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Making of the American Century. She wrote an article for The New Yorker titled, How Would Kash Patel Compare to J. Edgar Hoover? I wouldn't like to be an A-man or a B-man or a C-man or a D-man or an E-man or an F-man. Get it?

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