Mark Fisher

Patel was, in the president's mind, the ultimate loyalist, someone he could absolutely trust.

So this was a team that you could see the president really envisioning as complementary.

And so the fact that neither of these guys had any experience in the FBI didn't seem to matter much.

FBI directors in the past have generally had long careers in criminal justice.

There have been judges.

There have been prosecutors, people who served as U.S.

attorneys running some of the largest U.S.

attorney's offices in the country, whether that be in New York or elsewhere.

They are people who have come up through the system and have long histories of public service.

And so Kash Patel has some of that.

Kash Patel indeed has been a public servant his entire life.

He's never worked for anyone but the government, except for some small businesses that he started on his own.

between the two Trump administrations.

Patel, however, never had that kind of long-standing experience with the FBI directly.

He did serve in the Justice Department in the first Trump administration.

He was on the national security side of the Justice Department, and we worked on some counterterrorism cases.

That's something that the FBI also does, but he didn't have the experience that his predecessors had in running an agency or in the sort of street crime that the G-men of the FBI have always been known for in the public imagination.

So there were a lot of people within the bureau who were very concerned that he would be coming in without the knowledge base, without the years of experience that would tell him how the FBI works, how its relationship with the Justice Department operates.

So there was concern about his relative inexperience.

Beyond that, I think there was a lot of concern that he was coming in as essentially a tool of Donald Trump, essentially someone who was going to be sort of forwarding the president's political agenda rather than sort of fighting for the men and women of the FBI.