Why J. Edgar Hoover’s biographer worries about Kash Patel running the FBI

President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel, a fierce loyalist, to be the next director of the FBI has sent politicians casting about for historical comparisons.

J. Edgar Hoover presided over the FBI with nearly unchecked power for about a half-century. Democrats invoke him as they warn about Mr. Patel, suggesting he will target political enemies. Republicans compare Hoover’s tenure to what they say is a modern “deep state” resisting and harassing Mr. Trump.

So we went to the expert. Yale University Professor Beverly Gage won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2023 for her book “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.” The book examines how Hoover built and operated the agency, and it was the first substantial work in decades to grapple with his complicated and often dark legacy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start big-picture. What do you make of these comparisons between Hoover and Mr. Patel?

What strikes me about it as a Hoover biographer is actually how different Kash Patel and J. Edgar Hoover are.

Hoover was a big institutionalist. He spent his whole career in government. He believed in the power and independence of the FBI. He loved the FBI. He probably loved the FBI too much, and came to see it as sort of the great protector of the American way of life.

Kash Patel, on the other hand, is kind of coming in with a wrecking ball. He has said that he wants to kind of reduce the independence of the FBI, make it much more responsive to the political needs and desires of the White House. And he really wants to, in a lot of ways, dismantle the bureaucracy that Hoover built. He has said that he wants to shut down the FBI headquarters inside the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

Hoover manipulated and sometimes threatened lawmakers, including presidents, who stood in his way. Between the isolated institutional power that Hoover gathered and the FBI being loyal to a president, which do you think presents more risk?

Hoover built a bureaucracy that he used for his own political ends. Sometimes that was promoting his own power. Sometimes that was protecting the FBI’s secret files. And sometimes it was making his power known in Washington. Famously, he had files on congressmen and members of the press and major activists like Martin Luther King.

He abused the civil liberties of thousands and thousands of Americans, often people who were doing things that were perfectly legal. So Hoover, in some ways, invented how to use a big institution like the FBI for your own political ends. But the interesting thing is that he was not partisan, quite, in the way that he did it.

Kash Patel is coming in and saying, “I believe in Donald Trump. I wrote a children’s book series about Donald Trump in which I call him King Donald. And I am here to do whatever Donald Trump wants me to do.”

We have a contrast between two different dangers. One is sort of an independent, unaccountable, unelected FBI, like the one that Hoover ran. And the other is this highly politicized, highly partisan version that Patel seems to want.

This seems strange to say, because I am no great fan of J. Edgar Hoover’s. But I do think that Hoover had a real understanding that for the FBI to maintain any kind of real legitimacy – in terms of its investigations, in terms of people believing what it said – it had to be outside of partisan politics, or its credibility was going to collapse. So in this moment, I do see this hyperpartisan, highly politicized version that Patel is promoting as probably the greater danger.

Are you worried about Mr. Patel at the head of the FBI?

I am worried about Patel at the head of the FBI.

Look, some of what he is saying makes a certain amount of sense. Some of what Patel wants, which are more checks and balances on FBI power – greater accountability and transparency – to the degree that he wants to realize those things with any sincerity, some of them are a good idea.

But I think that that is not his deepest agenda. His deepest agenda is to take this incredibly powerful, secretive institution and turn it against the enemies of the Trump administration. He’s openly said he wants to go after members of the press. He wants to go after politicians. He wants to build cases against people who criticize the president. And that seems to me to be both pretty dangerous and pretty hostile to traditions of free speech and democracy.

There’s this real tension and contradiction in what Patel says, between the “I am the great reformer; I am going to come in and make this an institution that serves all citizens with transparency and integrity and lack of partisanship,” and then these incredibly partisan “I’m going to crush the administration’s enemies, be they kind of elite politicians and media or movements on the ground.” And those things just don’t go together.

From the outside, I tend to see the partisan side outweighing the reform side. But I guess we’re possibly going to find out which one he really means.

Mr. Patel has described the FBI as “an existential threat to our republican form of government.” Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley told me the other day that he thinks the FBI has been operating “like J. Edgar Hoover on steroids.” Do you think criticisms like these are fair and warranted? Are there parallels between how the FBI operated under FBI Directors Christopher Wray and James Comey before him, and how it operated under Hoover?

I don’t think that Comey and Wray were running the FBI like J. Edgar Hoover. Honestly, they didn’t have the power to run the FBI like J. Edgar Hoover, even if they’d wanted to. They are in a much weaker director’s position. There’s a lot more transparency. There’s a lot more rule-bound and law-bound policy.

I think that [criticism] is mostly coming from a partisan place. But there are sort of interesting ways in which someone like Patel does sound like a pretty classic civil libertarian, whether you’re talking about the 1970s or you’re talking about the 1920s. In those moments, that critique was often coming from the left, not from the right, as it is today.

I think the [modern] FBI has tried to do the best it can. But by its very nature, when it’s involved in these political investigations, it cannot make perfect judgments that everybody’s going to agree to.

And of course, the FBI has a long and deep history of being hostile to the civil rights and civil liberties of all kinds of American citizens.

So in some broad perspective, does the FBI and a large intelligence bureaucracy pose certain dangers to civil liberties if used in the wrong way? Absolutely. Is that what’s genuinely inspiring this wave of attacks on the FBI? I am less persuaded of that.

The FBI director’s 10-year term was a post-Hoover, post-Watergate reform. Presidents haven’t always adhered to this standard, but it has been mostly upheld since Richard Nixon. What impact could Mr. Trump’s decisions to fire Director Comey in 2017 and force out current Director Wray have?

I think it is a problem. We do not want the FBI director basically being the president’s sidekick or loyalist. The FBI is supposed to stand apart from all of the partisan pressures of any sort.

It’s a very difficult thing to do to find the right balance between an institution that is going to be politically responsive, responsive to the public will, democratically responsive, and also is going to be outside of politics and able to make the really hard calls around highly politicized investigations.

That 10-year term was put there for a pretty good reason: It was supposed to be longer than the term of any single president, to give the FBI some insulation from politics, while at the same time making sure that nobody was going to serve 48 years in that job like J. Edgar Hoover did. It wasn’t a bad compromise. It seems like one that’s collapsing now.

Mr. Patel has discussed prosecuting Mr. Trump’s opponents, including political adversaries. How much do you think the post-Watergate reforms like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court will help act as a check on this?

I think there are real checks now to [guard against] that kind of very straightforward, authoritarian “I’m going to throw my political enemies in jail.” It’s hard to make criminal cases. There are lots of limits on that.

It’s a little bit easier to launch investigations, launch intelligence queries that are very expensive for their targets, that turn up all sorts of untoward information, that are forms of threat and harassment in their own right.

I think it’s totally possible that we will see things like that emerge.

But this is a big, powerful, autonomous bureaucracy, and it’s actually not very easy to change it.

I’m not enough of an insider at the bureau to have any sense of how this would go, but one of the big questions is: What will employees and officials at the FBI do? Will they resist these changes? Will they embrace these changes? How the rank-and-file responds is going to be one of the big determining factors of whether or not he can do what he says he wants to do.

There are some real laws and outside forms of accountability. But a lot of it is a matter of internal policy, and for outside organizations, whether you’re talking about Congress or ordinary citizens, through the Freedom of Information Act, even being able to find out what’s going on. So that seems to me to be an area which certainly has much more structure and many more safeguards than it did during Hoover’s era. But I think it’s still a real danger zone.