‘Incredibly harmful’: why Trump’s FBI and DoJ picks scare civil liberties experts

By tapping two combative ultra-loyalists to run the FBI and the justice department, Donald Trump has sparked fears they will pursue the president-elect’s calls for “revenge” against his political foes and sack officials who Trump demonizes as “deep state” opponents, say ex-DoJ prosecutors.

Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, who Trump has nominated to run the FBI and DoJ, respectively, have been unswerving loyalists to Trump for years, promoting Trump’s false claims that his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden was due to fraud.

Patel was a top lawyer on the House intelligence panel under rightwing member Devin Nunes for part of Trump’s first term and then held a few posts in the Trump administration including at the national security council advising the president.

Bondi, a recent corporate lobbyist and an ex-Florida attorney general, defended Trump during his first impeachment and was active on the campaign trail during the late stages of his 2024 run.

Patel and Bondi have each mimicked Trump’s calls for taking revenge against key Democrats and officials, including ones who pursued criminal charges against Trump for his aggressive efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat and his role in inflaming the January 6 attack on the Capitol that led to five deaths.

Trump has lavished praise on both picks, calling Patel a “brilliant lawyer” and “advocate for truth”, while hailing Bondi as “loyal” and “qualified”. But critics say their rhetoric and threats are “incredibly harmful to public trust” in the two agencies undermining the integrity of the FBI and DoJ, and potentially spurring violence.

Patel promised last year on Steve Bannon’s show to “go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media … who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections”.

Patel, 44, who last year published a “deep state” enemies list as part of a book, added:“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.”

At the end of his first term as Trump scrambled aggressively to block Biden’s win, he briefly tried to install Patel as number two at the FBI or the CIA for support, but the idea died when then attorney general Bill Barr vowed “over my dead body”.

Meanwhile, Bondi, 59, told Fox News last year that when Trump wins “you know what’s going to happen: the Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated. Because the deep state … they were hiding in the shadows.”

Bondi added: “But now, they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated, and the House needs to be cleaned out. Because now we know who most of them are; there’s a record of it, and we can clean house next turn. And that’s what has to happen.”

Fears about the two nominees were compounded by Trump’s comments on Meet the Press on Sunday where he said he wouldn’t tell DoJ to prosecute his political enemies, but added threateningly that the House members on the panel that investigated the January 6 insurrection “should go to jail”.

Ex-DoJ prosecutors worry that Trump’s two picks will exact retribution against Trump foes, undermining the independence of both the justice department and the FBI and damaging the rule of law.

“The rhetoric of Bondi and Patel is incredibly harmful to public trust in our government institutions and the reputations of individual public servants,” said Barbara McQuade, a former top prosecutor in eastern Michigan who now teaches law at the University of Michigan. “There’s absolutely no public evidence of wrongdoing to ‘rig’ the 2020 election.

“Pledges to prosecute the prosecutors and investigate the investigators based on the complete absence of evidence is reckless because even if investigations do not materialize, unhinged members of the public will hear these bombastic accusations as a call to action.”

Similarly, ex-DoJ inspector general Michael Bromwich said: “Bondi and Patel are election deniers, in the face of the adjudication of more than 60 cases rejecting claims of election fraud in 2020. This is alarming.”

“Members of the Senate judiciary committee have a duty to explore the basis of those often-repeated beliefs. If Bondi and Patel maintain that the election was stolen, they either are liars – and lying under oath is a crime – or they are so detached from reality that they shouldn’t be trusted to run a two-person convenience store, much less the DoJ and the FBI.”

Former federal prosecutor and Columbia law professor Daniel Richman likens Trump’s nominees to his heavy reliance in his real estate career on Roy Cohn, the late mafia lawyer and chief counsel to rightwing senator Joseph McCarthy.

“Still casting about for a Roy Cohn replacement, Trump has gone to people like Bondi and Patel whose loyalty comes from their utter dependence on his favor,” Richman said.

Richman added: “But their lack of experience with the agencies he wants them to lead promises a rocky road ahead, both for them and the agencies.”

Richman noted: “Presidents can pardon and otherwise kill cases and his loyal minions can disrupt agency operations, but I suspect they will soon be railing at what they call ‘resistance’ and what everyone else calls rule-following.”

Such concerns about both nominees have been reinforced by their eager echoing of Trump’s conspiratorial obsession of going after “deep state” foes, as well as their old ties to Trump and backgrounds.

Patel, who lacks experience leading an agency, shares Trump’s obsession and vindictiveness towards political critics and the press who Trump has branded an “enemy of the people”.

Last year in his book Government Gangsters, Patel went further in an appendix where he included 60 “members of the Executive Branch Deep State” that consisted largely of top Democrats and Trump critics. Patel also wrote that Trump “must fire the top ranks of the FBI”.

“Then, all those who manipulated evidence, hid exculpatory information, or in any way abused their authority for political ends must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Patel said.

Patel’s incendiary comments and writings could lead to confirmation problems by the US Senate during hearings. Chris Wray, who Trump appointed as director after firing James Comey in 2017 and who Trump has often criticized, has three years left in his ten-year term, so he’d have to resign or be fired to make way for Patel.

“Kash Patel is manifestly unqualified,” said ex-federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig. “Given his intemperate support for retribution against the deep state and Trump’s political ‘foes’, he is temperamentally unqualified for the job.”

While Bondi is an equally staunch Trump loyalist, she is expected to have less confirmation problems. Trump tapped her for the post within hours of his first candidate for AG, ex-Florida congressman Matt Gaetz’s dropping out after serious allegations arose of sexual misconduct that led to a House ethics inquiry while he was in office.

Still, Bondi’s vociferous election denialism and attacks on the so-called “deep state” represent a sharp break historically with the rhetoric of attorney generals which critics are raising strong fears about.

After Trump’s defeat in 2020, Bondi co-chaired the law and justice section at the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute, which has supplied a few of Trump’s new picks, including billionaire Linda McMahon for education secretary.

Bondi also spent several years as a lobbyist for the powerhouse Florida firm led by Republican fundraiser Brian Ballard, where her clients included Amazon, General Motors, and the government of Qatar.

Often seen as a political operator, Bondi has ties to Trump that go back further and have raised some red flags. When Bondi was Florida’s attorney general in 2013, Trump donated $25,000 to a Pac backing her re-election. The donation’s timing drew scrutiny given that Bondi’s spokesperson told a newspaper just days before the donation that the AG’s office was reviewing a class action lawsuit by New York which had been filed against Trump University for fraud.

Veteran prosecutors warn that if the Senate confirms Bondi and Patel they could create a climate for violence against Trump’s foes.

“I’m more worried about threats, harassment and political violence than I am in the success of baseless investigations,” McQuade said. “Bondi and Patel will be unable to get bogus charges past a grand jury, a judge or a trial jury, but someone who believes this deep state nonsense could decide to take matters into their own hands.”

Looking ahead, Bromwich stressed too that if Patel and Bondi pursued baseless inquiries, they could boomerang.

“Lawyers and investigators who willingly participate in the pursuit of a revenge and retribution agenda risk losing not only the respect of their peers but their future livelihoods. In particular, lawyers who initiate investigations and pursue prosecutions without factual predicates risk being the subject of ethics complaints and the loss of their law licenses.”