After winning the 2024 election, President Donald Trump said on Nov. 30 that his new FBI director would be Kash Patel, a controversial lawyer and former Trump aide known for backing right-wing conspiracies.
Patel officially replaced FBI Director Christopher Wray, a 2017 Trump appointee, on Feb. 20, 2025.
By law, FBI directors serve a 10-year term to avoid White House political interference. Wray was in his eighth year. Patel stands outside the norm of FBI directors over the past century. They have generally been apolitical and independent investigators, upholding the rule of law. Patel’s own words, however, appear to contradict this.
Patel has supported Trump’s 2024 campaign vow to use federal power to “root out” political opponents.
“We’re going to come after you whether it’s criminally or civilly,” Patel said in December 2023. Patel’s 2023 book, “Government Gangsters,” includes a list of top-ranking government officials, which Democrats say is an enemies list.
As an FBI historian, I have researched political influence on the FBI. While it’s still early days, Patel’s confirmation has one clear, if century-old, comparison in FBI history.
William J. Burns served as FBI director from 1921 through 1924.Bettman/Contributor/Getty Images
The FBI of the past
Some observers have compared Patel to J. Edgar Hoover, the domineering FBI director between 1924 and 1972 who was renowned for FBI abuses. In 1956, Hoover created COINTELPRO, an illegal counterintelligence program that targeted communists, war protesters and even civil rights activists.
While Hoover also sometimes catered to White House political interests – such as monitoring foreign policy critics and providing information on political opponents – he did so only when it suited his particular interests. Hoover, who served under eight presidents, was an autonomous bureaucrat. He prioritized targeting communists and containing American culture from nontraditional forces, while vigorously promoting the FBI’s independence.
The more apt comparison to Patel in FBI history lies with Hoover’s immediate predecessor, William J. Burns, who served as director from 1921 through 1924.
Burns was a well-known author and owner of the Burns International Detective Agency, a private investigative agency. The public knew him as the American Sherlock Holmes.
Yet Burns never hesitated to use his power to protect the political interests of his superior, the politically connected attorney general, Harry Daugherty. The FBI is an agency within the Department of Justice.
Daugherty and Burns were at the heart of the so-called Ohio Gang, a corrupt cabal in the administrations of Republican Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge during the Teapot Dome scandal in the early 1920s. This scandal emerged after two oil tycoons bribed then-Interior Secretary Albert Fall, a friend of theirs, to secure contracts to drill on federal land at Teapot Dome, Wyoming.
Daugherty, although aware of this improper activity, refused to have the Department of Justice investigate. He also faced his own scandals involving graft, corruption and political intrigue.
Legislators of both parties eventually pushed back on Daugherty’s refusal. Still, it would take another two and a half years before the Department of Justice saw reforms.
The unfolding Teapot Dome scandal
Newspapers first raised questions about corruption in the Harding administration early in spring 1922 after FBI officials ordered an agent to drop a fraud probe to focus instead on the high price of bread. This FBI agent resigned in protest in May 1922 and passed his information to Congressman Roy O. Woodruff, a Republican from Michigan.
Various other senators and representatives of both parties following Woodruff’s lead cried foul and called for an investigation into the Justice Department.
Seeing no results, Congressman Oscar Keller tried to impeach Daugherty by the fall of 1922. Republican Party stalwarts, however, blocked the effort.
As retribution, Daugherty ordered Burns to investigate all the legislators trying to stand in their way.
FBI agents shadowedthese legislators, read their mail and listened to their phone calls all to find something against them. Others had their offices searched.
‘No quitter’
By October 1923, some six months after news of the Teapot Dome scandal first broke, Sen. Thomas Walsh, a Democrat from Montana, finally began to investigate Teapot Dome as a member of the public lands committee.
A few months later, Democratic Sen. Burton Wheeler, via a select committee, also began investigating Daugherty’s attempts to halt any investigation into Teapot Dome. Other senators, including Republicans, met with President Calvin Coolidge – sometimes remembered as “Silent Cal” – and urged him to pressure Daugherty to resign.
The president sat quietly and stared. Daugherty did not.
Daugherty boasted in February 2024, as reported by the Lincoln, Nebraska, newspaper Journal Star, that he was “no quitter.”
Quietly, Burns tasked his FBI agents, some undercover, with developing a bogus influence-peddling case against Sen. Wheeler. Allies also sought information about Sen. Walsh “to smear him.”
The FBI’s spurious probes resulted in a federal indictment in Montana against Wheeler on April 8, 1924, for influence peddling. Wheeler was easily exonerated in a delayed 1925 trial.
Before the case was tried, Coolidge in March 1924 finally relented and forced an uncooperative Daugherty to resign. The president appointed a new reformist attorney general, Harlan Fiske Stone, to clean up a corrupted Justice Department, including the FBI. Stone forced Burns out from the FBI two months later. He was replaced by Hoover.
In his first moves as the new attorney general, Stone ordered Hoover to rid the FBI of “incompetent or unreliable agents” and to hire only those “of known good character” with legal training. Stone banned political investigations, unethical tactics – including wiretapping and entrapment – and targeting political enemies. Stone told reporters after appointing Hoover: “There is to be no more rifling of the desks of senators and representatives.”
The FBI today
For the next nearly 50 years, Hoover led a politically independent FBI. The Watergate scandal of the early 1970s revived issues of a politicized Justice Department. Ever since, for half a century, the Justice Department and FBI have purposefully and pointedly created a culture of investigative independence outside of politics.
Attorneys general from the Carter through Obama administrations limited contact between the FBI and White House to avoid political influence. FBI Director Louis Freeh independently investigated every purported scandal of the Bill Clinton administration during the 1990s. Director James Comey protected FBI investigative independence and refused to declare loyalty to Trump during his first term.
Trump’s and Patel’s own words, however, portend the FBI returning to the open political targeting of the Teapot Dome era.
History whispers a warning.
Douglas M. Charles, Professor of History, Penn State
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
