Let’s Not Go Overboard

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 02, 2024

 

Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, has every reason to be skeptical of Trump’s appointment to lead the FBI, Kash Patel.

 

Patel has cultivated an image of himself as a Trump flunkey — the author of a sycophantic children’s book about our “king” and a profiteer capitalizing on MAGA merchandise. He has also promulgated his intention to use the levers of the justice system to dole out vengeance against Trump’s adversaries, irrespective of constitutional niceties.

 

Patel has leveled sharp criticisms against the agency he has been tapped to lead, some of which have merit. But just because Patel is a critic of some aspects of an institution that demands reform doesn’t render him a good candidate to do the reforming. And because the Trump adviser’s attacks on the FBI speak to his qualifications more than does his résumé, the U.S. Senate is amply justified in applying uncompromising scrutiny to this nomination.

 

But in the pursuit of a searing rhetorical flourish, Bolton’s opposition to Patel’s nomination went a bit overboard:

Beria’s crimes extended beyond his instrumentality to Stalin’s political cult. According to post-thaw testimony, Beria used the domestic security apparatus he controlled to abscond with unsuspecting women on the streets who would be delivered to his soundproof rape room. Beria was among the foremost architects of the Great Terror, the author of many death warrants and extralegal executions unauthorized by any official edict. He engineered the show trials, the forced confessions, and the duress and abuse that produced them. “The Gulags existed before Beria, but he was the one who built them on a mass scale,” one former Soviet prisoner observed. “He industrialized the Gulag system. Human life had no value for him.”

 

Patel may not be the best qualified person to lead the FBI — indeed, his pick may signal Trump’s determination not to properly reform federal law enforcement, but to wield it as his own political tool — but Bolton is correct that the “FBI is not the NKVD.” And it will never become the NKVD because the United States is not the putschist Bolshevik regime.

 

The Soviet Union was established as a terror state. It was a lawless entity insofar as its every act was justified on the basis that the proletarian revolution had a monopoly on legitimacy. Jacobinism and its prescription for permanent domestic conflict against an evolving cast of internal enemies was baked into the Soviet self-conception from the jump. The Trotskyites who rewrote early Soviet history in the West comforted themselves with the notion that Stalinism was a perversion of the revolution, but Beria and his NKVD represented the full flowering of Vladimir Lenin’s terroristic enterprise.

 

Patel could not transform the FBI into a Chekist organization even if he wanted to (although merely wanting to would constitute more than sufficient grounds for the Senate to deny his nomination). Even if Patel is a bad fit for the Bureau, his critique of how that apparatus has conducted itself in recent years deserves a fair hearing. That should not be lost in a scattershot attempt to denounce Trump’s appointees that does collateral damage to America’s durable constitutional protections on liberty.

 

Donald Trump’s conservative skeptics will need to reserve all the credibility they can retain during the president-elect’s second term in office. They should jealously husband it.