There are few good things to be said about Donald Trump’s plan to fire the F.B.I. directorslots 7 casino, Chris Wray, and install in his place Kash Patel, a thuggish lackey who has spent years fantasizing about taking revenge on Trump’s enemies. But there is one: Patel has helpfully provided us with a list of people President Biden should pardon before he leaves office.
Patel’s 2023 book, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy,” purports to show how government employees who defied Trump constitute a shadowy cabal that is “the most dangerous threat to our democracy.” The “deep state,” in Patel’s telling, is “as treacherous and evil as the villains portrayed in books and movies.” Virtually every investigation of Trump and his allies, Patel suggests, is part of a monstrous plot against “the people’s president.” The book strongly implies that Jan. 6, “the insurrection that never was,” was encouraged by “deep state” agitators and then used as a pretext to persecute patriotic Trump supporters. In a blurb on the book jacket, Trump wrote, “We will use this blueprint to help us take back the White House and remove these gangsters from all of government!”
Who are these gangsters? Patel lists 60 of them in a useful alphabetized appendix. It is not, as he acknowledges, exhaustive, since he limits himself to the executive branch, leaving out “other corrupt actors of the first order” like Senator-elect Adam Schiff, the former Republican House speaker Paul Ryan and “the entire fake news mafia press corps.” His catalog of the “deep state” includes some of Patel’s bureaucratic foes from when he served in Trump’s first administration, like Bill Barr, who as attorney general said that Trump could make Patel the deputy F.B.I. director only “over my dead body,” and Wray, the man Patel would replace.
Patel also lists both the current secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, and Trump’s secretary of defense Mark Esper. Cassidy Hutchinson, the brave young former aide to Mark Meadows who testified before the Jan. 6 committee, is on the list, as is Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump staff member who often criticizes her old boss on “The View.” Naturally, Biden, Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton are on it as well.
Except for himself, Biden should pardon them all, along with pretty much everyone else Patel has singled out by name and those who worked on the Jan. 6 committee. On Wednesday, Jonathan Martin reported in Politico that there’s a “vigorous internal debate” among Biden aides about issuing pre-emptive pardons to officials likely to be unjustly targeted by Trump. A drawback of such pardons, Martin wrote, is that they “could suggest impropriety, only fueling Trump’s criticisms.” After all, Biden may struggle to explain why he’s pardoning people who have done nothing wrong.
Patel’s appendix, however, makes the case for blanket pardons easier to convey. The breadth of it demonstrates his McCarthyite impulses better than his critics ever could.
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