On Thursday, the US Senate, in a 51-49 vote, approved Kashyap “Kash” Patel to be the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Patel’s chief qualification in leading the largest federal domestic police/intelligence agency is his unswerving loyalty to Trump and his program of vengeance.

A three-seat Republican majority in the Senate allowed Republicans Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) to join every Democratic and independent senator in opposing Patel without risking his confirmation.

As of 2024, Congress had appropriated the FBI a budget of over $11 billion. Currently the agency employs some 35,000 people across over 400 field offices and resident agencies in the United States. Since its inception more than a century ago, the agency has been one of the principal tools of government repression, targeting leftists, communists, socialists and civil rights groups fighting for equality.

Patel, 44, is a lawyer and fascist who played an integral role in Trump’s failed coup. After earning Trump’s loyalty while working under former Rep. Devin Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee, Patel moved to a White House position at the National Security Council. He was installed by Trump to be chief of staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller on November 10, 2020, three days after Democrat Joe Biden was declared the victor in the presidential election.

At the Pentagon, Patel served as an extension and direct liaison to Trump. He amplified Trump’s lies that the election was “stolen” and, according to testimony provided to the January 6 Select Committee by then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, tried to get Department of Justice officials to investigate bogus claims that two Italian men rigged the election for Biden using US satellites. During this time, Trump also sought to install Patel as deputy director at the Central Intelligence Agency.

On January 6, 2021, Patel along with Miller, purposely delayed the deployment of D.C. National Guard elements to the besieged Congress, allowing Trump’s far-right mob ample opportunity to penetrate the Capitol in an attempt to take lawmakers hostage and block the certification of Biden’s victory and Trump’s defeat in the Electoral College vote.

The 199-minute delay in sending troops was never properly investigated by the Democratic-led House Select Committee, which presented a false theory of a “one-man coup” of which Trump was the sole government leader. The purpose was to hide from the public the immense support Trump’s coup had within sections of the US government, including the police-military-intelligence apparatus and Supreme Court.

After leaving government following Biden’s inauguration, Patel was among the first to advance the “fed-surrection” narrative, which claims the FBI orchestrated the attack on Congress in order to entrap Trump supporters. In multiple appearances on Steve Bannon’s War Room and on Fox News, Patel has repeatedly claimed that January 6 was not an insurrection but a “protest that got out of hand.”

On the basedapparel.com store, Patel sells fascist merchandise in support of Trump and his formerly imprisoned followers. A T-shirt calling for “Justice for All #J6PC” notes that “net proceeds for sales of this t-shirt go towards select cases of January 6th victims.”

There is no question that Patel will use the powers of the FBI to pursue Trump’s political enemies, not only in the Democratic Party, but throughout the country. In a December 2023 interview with War Room, Patel said, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” He 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.”

Patel has even published a list of “deep state” enemies who should be targeted for retribution in his latest book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy. The list includes Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, former FBI director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, Trump’s former Attorney General William Barr, former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

He has emphasized that the list of people in his book is not exhaustive and that there are other “corrupt actors” who must be held accountable for their disloyalty to Trump.

While turning the focus of the FBI towards Trump’s political enemies, under a Patel FBI, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other fascists emboldened and cultivated by Trump will be allowed ample opportunity to advance their violent agenda.

Patel’s ascension to the FBI is part of the ongoing transformation of the US government into the personalist instrument of aspiring dictator Trump. At the White House earlier this month, after it was announced that FBI agents were being purged who worked on January 6 investigations, Trump said:

I got to know a lot about that business, that world. I got to know a lot about that world, and we had some corrupt agents, and those people are gone, or they will be gone, and it will be done quickly and very surgically.

Prior to Patel’s confirmation, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll to compile a list of all current and former FBI employees who were assigned at “any time” to a January 6 investigation in order to determine “whether additional personnel actions are necessary.”

The Justice Department confirmed in a court hearing on February 7 that a list of over 5,000 FBI agents, with their names and employee identification numbers, had been transferred to the Justice Department.

With Patel’s confirmation, all of the Trump’s nominees who were supposedly in danger have been rubber-stamped by the Republicans and in many cases, such as the unanimous vote for Senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state, joined by Democrats. The sole failure was the withdrawal of Matt Gaetz, the initial nominee for attorney general, who withdrew in the face of a House Ethics Committee report and widespread opposition from both House and Senate Republicans.

In response to the ongoing fascist transformation of the US government, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee held a sparsely attended press conference outside FBI headquarters in Washington on Thursday before the vote. In the brief press conference, Democrats called on their “Republican colleagues” to vote against Patel out of their shared love for the FBI.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (Democrat-Connecticut) recalled that as a “US attorney I worked closely with the FBI. Let me just say, no building in our nation’s capital better deserves the American flag than this one, because the FBI agents who work here… are patriots and heroes and they deserve better than Kash Patel.”

Senator Adam Schiff (Democrat-California) gushed there was no “finer law enforcement agency than the FBI” and that Patel lacked the “character” and “integrity” to the lead the domestic intelligence agency.