Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard Are Wasting Resources Trying To Root Out Gov’t Employees Who Just Aren’t MAGA Enough
In the Trump administration, every political appointee is now their own personal Richard Nixon. Simply being some of the most powerful people in the world is never enough for Trump and those in his inner circle. If you can't demand complete loyalty from everyone you oversee, than what is even the point of ascending to power?
Trump's first term as president involved the same ridiculous demands for abject loyalty, as well as the ridiculous assumption that subjecting dozens, if not hundreds, of federal employees to (objectively unreliable) polygraph tests would somehow shut down the steady flow of embarrassing leaks.
It didn't work last time. And since it didn't, the new Trump administration does what it always does when it has bad ideas: doubles down. The eminently under-qualified head of the FBI, Kash Patel, is using federal money and resources to seek out insider threats. But these threats" don't actually put the FBI in any danger. The only thing possibly being threatened is Patel's self-image.
Since Kash Patel took office as the director of the F.B.I., the bureau has significantly stepped up the use of the lie-detector test, at times subjecting personnel to a question as specific as whether they have cast aspersions on Mr. Patel himself.
In interviews and polygraph tests, the F.B.I. has asked senior employees whether they have said anything negative about Mr. Patel, according to two people with knowledge of the questions and others familiar with similar accounts. In one instance, officials were forced to take a polygraph as the agency sought to determine who disclosed to the news media that Mr. Patel had demanded a service weapon, an unusual request given that he is not an agent. The number of officials asked to take a polygraph is in the dozens, several people familiar with the matter said, though it is unclear how many have specifically been asked about Mr. Patel.
It's not just about Patel. Sources report being questioned about things they may have said about Patel's even-more-unqualified deputy director, Dan Bongino. None of this has anything to do with preventing employees from leaking information that might undermine ongoing investigations. All of this serves a single purpose: the expelling of agents and officials who raise legitimate concerns about FBI directives, as well as the man sitting on top of this whole paranoid mess, Donald Trump.
The FBI is now bleeding talent thanks to Patel's efforts and general lack of competent leadership.
Top agents in about 40 percent of the field offices have either retired, been ousted or moved into different jobs, according to people familiar with the matter and an estimate by The New York Times, which began tracking the turnover once the new administration arrived.
And, like Nixon himself, Patel has compiled an enemies" list. Fortunately for Patel, nearly none of the people on his list are still employed by the federal government, which means he can focus on people who say mean stuff about him or Dan Bongino or otherwise undermine his authority by raising questions about his actions or directives.
Patel isn't alone in his paranoiac behavior. Tulsi Gabbard, who's even more unqualified for her position than Patel, is in the process of aiming the Intelligence Community's surveillance tech at any IC employee who doesn't appear to be an unquestioning drone who spends their free time going MAGA on main.
Gabbard, according toThe Washington Post, has expressed a desire to gainaccessto emails and chat logs of the largest U.S. spy agencies with the aim of using artificial intelligence tools to ferret out what the administration deems as efforts to undermine its agenda." In other words, Gabbard is threatening to endanger the careers of loyal intelligence officers by asking an AI if any of them aren't fully on board with the MAGA cause. She hascreateda team within her office with the anodyne name of the Director's Initiatives Group," which will collect large amounts of data from across 18 different agencies and run them through AI tools to see whether anyone is engaging in weaponization" of intelligence. This is a flatly ridiculous, and extremely dangerous, idea.
Even before you get to the point that AI is going to be given the job of spy hunting, you have to wonder why someone who holds the title of Director of National Intelligence" would think tearing down silo walls and providing a cross-agency blend of internal communications for AI to trawl through would be a good idea. It's certainly a self-serving idea, which is the sort of thing MAGA officials constantly conflate with good."
While this effort may eventually find some people to fire for not being loyal enough (including the false positives who will be considered acceptable collateral damage), it will create an extremely tempting and useful target for malicious state-sponsored hackers. Those who target foreign government agencies to exfiltrate useful information are always thrilled when someone does some of the compilation work for them.
And while Gabbard (and to a lesser extent, Patel) are making America less secure with their efforts, the stuff they should be paying attention to (actual insider threats, terrorists, criminal cartels, state-sponsored hackers) will be ignored... or, at the very least, starved of resources just to ensure this squad of Nixons won't be kicked around by those in their employ.