Mark Fisher

Almost from the first day that Kash Patel took over the FBI, he has had as one of his top or perhaps his very top agenda item, the calling out and the investigation of people who the president sees as his enemies, people who the president sees as having investigated Trump himself, the folks who were involved in prosecuting Trump for his crimes.

taking classified documents down to Mar-a-Lago in Florida when he left after his first administration, the people who prosecuted him on all of the various other things that he was convicted of, financial misdeeds and so on.

So there's a long list of Trump enemies who Trump has talked about during his out years, the four years of the Biden administration.

And Kash Patel came into office with that list and with his own list, what he calls his list of government gangsters.

He wrote a whole book laying out who those people were and it was accompanied by a list of at least 60 people who he saw as Trump's enemies and therefore as Patel's enemies.

And so he has methodically gone through that list already, begun the process of coming up with evidence and seeking indictments of people like the former FBI Director James Comey, like other top officials of the FBI who were involved in the Russiagate investigation.

All of these investigations that characterized Trump's first term, these are now the people who have targets on their backs.

And as Patel has now told several people at the FBI, he sees it as his job to go after the people who the president wants prosecuted.

The president has not forgotten.

That's the line that Patel has used repeatedly.

over and over again to explain why he's going after some of these people.

It's ironic, of course, because Patel has staked his entire directorship on the idea that everyone who came before him had weaponized the FBI, weaponized the Justice Department for their own political purposes.

And yet now he stands accused of exactly the same infraction of going after people, using the power of the FBI to go after political opponents.

Yes, that's right.

So Patel has fired, by various accounts, dozens of agents for various infractions, most of which he doesn't detail in any sort of way.

But the reporting that I did, as well as other news organizations have done, has brought out the fact that Patel has fired agents for things such as having a gay pride flag at their desk or

or, as you mentioned, refusing to stage the classic perp walk in which the purported criminal is paraded before the cameras, in this case being the former FBI director himself, Jim Comey.

So there is, in the minds of many FBI agents, there is this view of Kash Patel as someone who is

vindictive on behalf of Trump and vindictive in ways that seem, at least on the surface, to be superficially just cruelty for cruelty's sake, compounded by the fact that Patel has told people within the bureau that he would not fire many of these agents if it were solely up to him, that he's getting direction from the White House, direction from the Justice Department,

And that he is firing a number of these agents on the president's say-so or to please the president rather than because Patel himself believes that the agent has done anything wrong.