Will Kash Patel turn out to be the next J. Edgar Hoover?

Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI chief, has said he wants to dismantle the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the agency’s concrete fortress headquarters in Washington, and disperse the 7,000 employees who work there to offices around the country. 

Patel could well succeed in demolishing the landmark building named for the FBI’s founding director. It was opened in 1974 and is now considered obsolescent; a replacement site in Maryland has already been chosen. But many of the incoming director’s critics worry that Patel worry he may return to the practices of the Hoover era, including unauthorized surveillance operations, massive collection of personal data and harassment of dissidents, activists and perceived political enemies.

Hoover served as FBI director from 1924 to 1972 — the first 11 years at its predecessor organization, the Bureau of Investigation — and built the agency from a small and obscure department of the federal government to the fearsome, sprawling security force of today. Currently, the FBI has a budget of $10 billion and employs 33,000 workers, including 13,000 special agents and 20,000 support personnel.  

Hoover became a national hero in the 1930s and ‘40s, when the FBI captured notorious criminals like John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and Machine Gun Kelly, and rounded up dozens of Nazi spies during World War II. 

But his legacy is quite different today. Most historians now regard Hoover as a racist and a misogynist. He belonged to an openly white supremacist fraternity as a law student at George Washington University; it is perhaps no accident that the FBI remained 99% white and all male until Hoover’s death in 1972. He fiercely guarded his autonomy, serving under seven presidents, none of whom dared fire him — perhaps because they feared what was in his voluminous files. He compiled enormous troves of information on senators, members of Congress and other public figures, and curried favor with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, among others, by sharing gossip about their political rivals. On occasion, he conducted secret wiretapping or surveillance for his bosses.

Although Hoover officially lived on a modest salary in a small home in Washington, not far from where he was born and raised, he supplemented his income with speaking fees, gifts from admirers and free travel. An enthusiastic gambler on horse races, he was rumored to have obtained inside tips from track officials, perhaps one reason he was considered to be “soft” on pursuing organized crime. 

In the 1950s, he targeted the Communist Party USA for special scrutiny, and by the end of that decade, an estimated 1,500 of the party’s 10,000 or so members were FBI informants. Historians estimate that the FBI bureau compiled files on 10 million Americans; of those, 20,000 were considered “subversive” and subject to detention in an emergency. After the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, Hoover offered to round up as many as 10,000 individuals immediately; President Harry Truman was horrified and rejected the idea. 

Hoover’s racism and anti-communist paranoia resulted in his notorious vendetta against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Hoover could not believe that Black people, whom he considered inferior and submissive by nature, would rise up and challenge the oppression they endured in the segregated South. He was convinced that the Soviet Union was orchestrating the civil rights movement and that King was a communist agent. Obsessed with destroying King’s reputation, Hoover ordered the wiretapping of King’s home and hotel rooms, collecting reels of tape documenting the leader’s extramarital affairs. His agents routinely mailed and telephoned death threats to King. Shortly before King’s assassination in 1968, the FBI sent a package to his wife, Coretta Scott King, containing tape recordings of his sexual escapades. 

Hoover kept this and other illegal actions secret, and his reputation remained largely intact until the legendary 1975 hearings held by Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat. Held in the immediate aftermath of the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s resignation, the Church committee hearings uncovered many rogue activities of the FBI and CIA. Among its most spectacular and alarming findings were the CIA’s many assassination attempts against Cuban leader Fidel Castro. 

After the Church hearings, Attorney General Edward Levi published a new and far stricter set of guidelines for the FBI. Later FBI directors, including William Webster and Robert Mueller, have reportedly followed them closely. James Comey, the FBI director fired by Trump in 2017, kept in his office a framed FBI letter requesting a wiretap on Dr. King. He called it a “reminder of the bureau's capacity to do wrong." 

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In an interview with The New York Times, Yale professor Beverly Gage, author of the acclaimed 2023 Hoover biography "G-Man," said the founding director would have been "appalled" at Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel. Gage said she found the most frightening aspect to be Patel’s sycophancy to Trump. "He’s making no secret that he will use the bureau to punish Mr. Trump’s enemies," Gage said.

The obvious question here is how far Patel is willing to go. Will he ignore agency guidelines and seek to persecute citizens that Trump considers enemies?

In 2023 Patel published a book entitled "Government Gangsters," in which he labeled the FBI "a tool of surveillance and suppression of American citizens" and "one of the most cunning and powerful arms of the Deep State." The so-called deep state, he continued, was "a dangerous threat to democracy" which used the FBI to target and persecute conservatives. At the end of the book, Patel included an appendix naming 50 current or former U.S. officials he labeled as "members of the Executive Branch deep state." That list included Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Bill Barr, John Bolton, Christopher Wray, James Comey and Gen. Mark Milley. 

In his first confirmation hearing on Jan. 30, Patel denied that the roster of names was an enemies list, describing it as "just a glossary."

"I have no interest, no desire, and will not, if confirmed, go backward," Patel told the senators. "There will be no politicization at the FBI. There will be no retributive actions taken by any FBI."

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, was not convinced. He called Patel "a dangerous choice" with "a wavering commitment to the rule of law," who appeared ready to "silence dissent."

Under current law, the FBI director reports to the attorney general, the recently confirmed Pam Bondi. She would be in a position to potentially limit a new director’s activities. 

If Patel does indeed conduct covert surveillance on innocent American citizens and persecute individuals he perceives as Donald Trump’s enemies, he will (consciously or otherwise) be emulating J. Edgar Hoover. If he follows the U.S. Constitution and sticks to FBI guidelines, then the dark days of Hoover’s secretive, vengeful reign will remain in the past.