'Instrument of Vengeance': Mehdi Hasan on how Trump could weaponize FBI against critics

We speak with journalist Mehdi Hasan, founder and editor-in-chief of Zeteo, about the incoming U.S. administration and President-elect Donald Trump’s picks for key roles, including lawyer Kash Patel to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Trump reportedly considered Patel for FBI deputy director during his first term but dropped the idea after pushback from within his own administration. Hasan describes Patel as a “toady” whose threats against political opponents and journalists should be disqualifying, but that he aligns with Trump’s goals of further politicizing the FBI. “He wants to use it as an instrument of vengeance.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi, let’s talk about Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to head the FBI. This is Kash Patel speaking to Steve Bannon in his War Room podcast.

KASH PATEL: We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. Yes, 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. And, Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we’re tyrannical. This is why we’re dictators, because we’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is Kash Patel speaking on the Shawn Ryan Show in September.

KASH PATEL: The FBI’s footprint has gotten so frickin’ big, and the biggest problem the FBI has had has come out of its intel shops. I’d break that component out of it. I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopening the next day as a museum of the deep state. 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. You’re cops. Go be cops. Go chase down murderers and rapists and drug dealers and violent offenders. What do you need 7,000 people there for? Same thing with DOJ. What are all these people doing here? Looking for their next government promotion. Looking for their next fancy government title. Looking for their parachute out of government. So, while you’re bringing in the right people, you also have to shrink government.

AMY GOODMAN: So, again, that’s Kash Patel. When President Trump wanted to make him deputy director of the FBI in his first administration, the attorney general, Bob [sic] Barr said, “Over my” — Bill Barr said, “Over my dead body.” Mehdi Hasan?

MEHDI HASAN: Yes, he did. Bill Barr, of all people, said the guy was completely unqualified, it was detached from reality to try and put him in the FBI. And he said, “Over my dead body.” Gina Haspel, who was director of the CIA in December 2020 during Trump’s lame duck, when Trump tried to appoint Kash Patel to deputy director of the CIA, she threatened to resign, and Mike Pence had to get involved and block that. So this is not some kind of liberal whining about Kash Patel. Prominent conservatives at the time said, “No way. This guy is completely unqualified.”

And you played that clip from the War Room, from the Steve Bannon show. I think that’s from December 2023. He put us on notice. He says in that clip, “We’re putting you on notice.” Well, we’re on notice. In fact, I’ve been warning about Kash Patel since 2022, when I predicted — when I was at MSNBC, and I predicted that Trump would make him FBI director, and he would go after the media. He’s making it very clear. He wants to prosecute journalists. In another time and era, Amy, those words would be chilling. Those words would disqualify him from the running. But, of course, Republican senators mostly will fall in line. We’ll see if the — you know, the Murkowskis and the Susan Collinses and Mitch McConnell, whether they’ll push back in the way they did on Matt Gaetz. He’s a deeply dangerous nominee. I would argue that clip you played from the Bannon War Room show makes him perhaps the most dangerous nominee so far, because he’s open about the fact that he wants to use the power of the state to crush Donald Trump’s opponents. He’s a sycophant. He’s a bag carrier. He literally wrote a children’s book about King Donald Trump. That’s how sycophantic he is.

And I would say to some of the progressives maybe watching your show this morning, Amy Goodman, who say, “Well, you know what? The FBI does need reform. We on the left don’t like the FBI. We think Kash Patel should go break it up,” well, look, you can not like the FBI, for good reason, but the only reason Kash Patel and the Republicans don’t like the FBI is because the FBI investigated Donald Trump over ties to Russia and because the FBI went to Mar-a-Lago and searched his home for stolen classified documents which he was keeping against the law in his home. So, they don’t actually care about reform or bureaucracy or deep state; they care about neutering all institutions that can stand up to Donald Trump and MAGA.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go more deeply into what he said in Bannon’s War Room, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens.” If you could explain more who you think he’s talking about, about Joe Biden rigging presidential elections, “We’re going to come after you,” Mehdi?

MEHDI HASAN: So, Patel is at the core of pretty much every major MAGA conspiracy theory about the deep state, about the election, if you go through the list. I mean, he came to prominence — he was a very junior, as I say, unqualified person. He was working on the House Intelligence Committee with Devin Nunes, the right-wing California congressman. And he came to prominence in going after Robert Mueller, going after the Russian investigation, coming up with this memo that — some of the stuff in this famous Nunes memo turned out to be true, some of it, the inspector general said, “No, not true.” That’s how he caught Trump’s attention. That’s how he ended up in the White House. That’s how he ended up on the National Security Council.

By the way, one of the many people saying he shouldn’t be given this job is John Bolton, his former boss — not exactly a kind of lily-livered liberal — John Bolton saying he should be rejected by the Senate 100 to 0.

But he’s at the core of every conspiracy theory, Amy, whether it’s about, you know, Donald Trump didn’t lose the election, whether it’s January 6th. He testified in a Colorado courtroom over January 6th and the election. The judge said he wasn’t a credible witness. He’s even had the endorsement, I think you mentioned in the intro, of QAnon. In one of the books he wrote, he actually handwrote a QAnon mantra into the book, and they just posted it on social media. By the way, the FBI regards QAnon as a domestic terror threat. Think about the irony, Amy, of putting a person in charge of the FBI who’s actually fine with this group that the FBI thinks is a domestic terror threat. So, he is at the core of all these conspiracies.

When he says he’s going after people — you asked me who he’s talking about — of course he’s talking about the Bidens and Clintons of this world, but actually it’s much more dangerous than that. It’s much broader than that. It’s anyone who they think — who they think is an opponent. I mean, let’s just be very — this is what authoritarianism looks like. I know it’s become fashionable since the election, even on parts of the left, to say, “Well, it was all exaggerated to say that Trump is a fascist threat to the Constitution or authoritarian threat to the media.” No, it’s not exaggerated. These people are saying it out loud, and Trump is appointing them or trying to appoint them to the most senior positions in the United States government and national security apparatus.

AMY GOODMAN: And let’s talk about who he would be replacing, Christopher Wray, whose term doesn’t end for several years, who was appointed by Donald Trump, and why an FBI director has a 10-year term, which goes back to, what, post-Watergate, when a president, Nixon, is trying to deploy his FBI director exactly in the way Kash Patel threatens to do.

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, so, of course —

AMY GOODMAN: So that they would span several terms.

MEHDI HASAN: Well, we know that J. Edgar Hoover was the man who abused more FBI power than any director in the history of the FBI. I think he was in charge — for what? Four decades? Five decades? Astonishing amount of time. No president dared to remove him. And the 10-year terms comes in after that, of course. By the way, I would credit my former MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown, who said appointing Kash Patel to the FBI director’s job would be like appointing a cross between J. Edgar Hoover and Alex Jones, which I think sums up pretty well who Patel is.

But, look, on the 10-year term, what’s interesting, Amy, is, of course, Donald Trump is the great precedent breaker, the great norm buster. When I hear Democrats talking about norms, Trump has already trashed all of them. In Trump one, in Trump term one, he got rid of James Comey, who, of course, he was angry at, even though James Comey, arguably, helped him win the 2016 election. But he got rid of Comey and put in Wray. And that itself was quite unprecedented, only the second time, I believe, an FBI director had been fired and replaced in the middle of their term. He appointed Wray. Then he got upset with Wray. Now he wants to replace Wray.

I would also make a side point to some of the progressives watching at home. Why is it that the FBI director is always a Republican, even under Democratic presidencies? It’s always a Republican. And Democratic presidents always keep on the Republican who the previous Republican appointed, which I just find so ironic.

But now he wants to get rid of Wray, put in Patel, which tells you, again, everything that he wants from the FBI. He wanted to use it as an instrument of vengeance, of score settling, of silencing dissent. He wants to use it to basically intimidate people. And that’s why he’s getting rid of Wray, not because he disagrees with Wray’s politics. Christopher Wray is a Republican who Trump appointed. But in this Trump term, he’s made it very clear what he wants the FBI to be doing.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about another of Trump’s picks. The New Yorker magazine’s Jane Mayer has an explosive piece in the magazine. Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, was forced out of leadership roles at two veterans organizations for misusing funds, sexually harassing women, being repeatedly drunk on the job. According to a whistleblower report, Hegseth once had to be restrained from joining strippers on the stage at a strip club. In another incident, he drunkenly chanted “Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!” at a bar in 2015. Meanwhile, The New York Timesreports Hegseth’s own mother accused him of a mistreating women. In 2018, Penelope Hegseth wrote him an email that read in part, quote, “On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” unquote. The email was sent a year after a woman accused Hegseth of raping her at a California hotel. This is Trump’s pick to head the Defense Department. Your final comments on this, Mehdi Hasan?

MEHDI HASAN: So, Amy, if you had asked me this a few weeks ago, I would have said, “Hegseth is the worst pick of all. You can’t get worse than Hegseth.” And then we got Tulsi Gabbard, and I said, “You can’t get worse than Gabbard.” And then we got RFK Jr., and I said, “You can’t get worse than RFK Jr.” Now we’ve got Kash Patel, and I’m telling you, “You can’t get worse than Kash Patel.” Donald Trump says “hold my beer” every time and keeps producing these nominees.

And look, while we’re focused on Patel, we’ve got more reporting on Hegseth. I mean, it’s astonishing. It’s almost beyond belief. If you were writing a TV show about the Trump years, if it was a Netflix show called The Trump Years, you would say these storylines are just too unrealistic. If you were sitting in the writers’ room, and you said, “You know what? Let’s have a scene where it turns out that Hegseth, the great Christian nationalist, tried to get on stage with strippers. Let’s have his mother write him a letter saying, 'I disown you because of all, you know, your misogyny,'” you would say, “Oh, come on. That’s a little unrealistic. Those are kind of beyond-parody characters.” No, it’s real life. This is the Trump administration. These are the people he’s appointing.

And I think it’s interesting, by the way, the Islamophobia is very worrying on Hegseth’s part, because there was this strain of thinking, even on some parts of the left, that, well, Trump won’t be as militaristic and belligerent as the Democrats. Not true. He’s putting in a guy at Defense Department who has crusader tattoos on his body, who said outrageous things about killing Muslims, supported the Iraq War. He’s going to be in charge of the Pentagon? You know, there’s no way this is going to be a, quote-unquote, antiwar presidency, if Hegseth is at the Pentagon and Marco Rubio is at the State Department. By the way, can you imagine, Amy, if Biden or Obama had a nominee who had been accused of screaming drunkenly “Kill Jews! Kill all Jews!”? It would be the end of the world. But, of course, with Muslims, no one cares, so this will be a minor story in the résumé of Peter Hegseth.

One last point, very quickly, is Hegseth’s mother is attacking him. Elon Musk’s daughter is attacking him. Bill Barr is attacking Kash Patel. Donald Trump was called Adolf Hitler by JD Vance. When people say, “Oh, liberals are deranged about Trump people,” it’s always other Republicans who are actually leading the charge and reminding us how awful these people are.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, it’s other Republicans who would have to approve these —

MEHDI HASAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — appointees, these nominations, unless —

MEHDI HASAN: Many of them will.

AMY GOODMAN: — this is done in a recess appointment. Twenty seconds, Mehdi.

MEHDI HASAN: Many of them will, Amy. They all roll over. They’re intimidated by Trump. A lot of them are scared to go against Trump. And it comes down to, basically, you know, the four who stopped Gaetz: Mitch McConnell, Murkowski, Collins and the new Utah replacement for Mitt Romney whose name I forget. But those four Republicans are basically the ones everyone’s going to look at and say, “Are you going to stand up for the Constitution? Are you going to stand against this unqualified nominee, Kash Patel; this dangerous nominee, Peter Hegseth; RFK Jr., who kids could die because of?” Let’s see.

AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi Hasan, I want to thank you for being with us, editor-in-chief of the new media website Zeteo.