Fool Me Twice, I’ll Make You FBI Director
Plus: Going along to get along in a time of democratic decline.
Roses are red,
The Bulwark is rad—
As we’ve always said:
Orange Man Bad.
We hope you have a happy Valentine’s Day, if you’re into that sort of thing. But even if you’re not a fan of pink cards and candy hearts, we think there’s at least one reason to be glad this weekend: Andrew Egger will be back Monday.
Heads-up: This coming Sunday, join Bill Kristol live on the Substack app at noon ET. He’ll be joined by Ambassador Eric Edelman, cohost of our Shield of the Republic podcast, for a discussion on Trump, Putin, and the world. Make sure you’ve downloaded the Substack app, and you’ll get a notification when they go live.
Happy Friday.
Taking a Stand
by William Kristol
Tim’s compelling argument for Republican senators to draw the line at Kash Patel for FBI director—read it below—brings to mind a point made by Juan Linz, the late Yale political scientist who was a leading student of the breakdown of democratic regimes.
Linz argued, based on many examples from all over the world, that democracies fail not so much because of the presence of anti-democratic challengers but because of the failure of their elites to stand up to such opponents. These elites often engage in “semiloyal” behavior, which Linz defines as “a willingness to encourage, tolerate, cover up, treat leniently, excuse or justify the actions of other participants that go beyond the limits of peaceful, legitimate patterns of politics in a democracy.” They go along to get along, coming up with excuses all along the way for the authoritarian challengers. They fail to stand unequivocally for democracy and the rule of law, and liberal democracy fails.
Sound familiar? All too familiar?
But yesterday, we saw an impressive example of an unwillingness to be complicit in illegitimate and unlawful behavior. The acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, resigned in protest rather than bowing to the orders of Trump’s acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, to dismiss well-founded criminal charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams in return for Adams’s support for Trump’s immigration policy.
“When I took my oath of office three weeks ago, I vowed to well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I was about to enter,” Sassoon wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi. “The reasons advanced by Mr. Bove for dismissing the indictment are not ones I can in good faith defend as in the public interest and as consistent with the principles of impartiality and fairness that guide my decision-making.”
Ms. Sassoon, not yet 40 years old, is a former law clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia. She was awarded the FBI Director's Award for Outstanding Criminal Investigation in 2024 for her work in the U.S. attorney’s office. She has a very promising professional career ahead. But rather than going along to get along, she took a stand. Is it too much to hope that others will follow?
Kash’s Honesty Problem
by Tim Miller
Yesterday, the Republican Senate confirmed as secretary of health and human services a left-wing avatar who, just a few months ago, had been known mostly for his radical environmental activism, anti-vaccine quackery, decades-long heroin abuse, vigilante bear-carcass disposal, and shirtless photographs that reveal a very unnatural body composition.
The fact that such a nominee would receive only a single no vote among Republicans in the Senate does not leave much room for optimism that there would be any personal or political affronts to conservative orthodoxy or moral decency that would impede a rubber stamp from the “Yes, Sir, May I Have Another” Congress.
And yet . . .
The most preposterous pierrot remaining among the nominees for Trump’s cabinet has beclowned himself in such an ostentatious manner this week that maybe, just maybe, it might merit a second thought?
For all the many, many, MANY faults of Trump’s other nominees, none of them impulse-lied to senators’ faces while under oath in a confirmation hearing, as if they were a troublemaking toddler telling their parents they didn’t drop the cake, hoping no one noticed their face was covered in chocolate icing.
But that seems to be what Kash Patel did—and not on a matter of negligible import. Patel told the Senate Judiciary Committee that “I don’t know what’s going on right now over there” in the FBI, and that he was “not aware” of plans to fire FBI agents and officials who had investigated Donald Trump and January 6th. But according to several whistleblowers and contemporaneous notes, this was not true. From the Washington Post:
“KP wants movement at FBI,” one attendee purportedly wrote in the notes Durbin reviewed.
This was just the latest in a string of ostentatious lies that Patel told the senators set to confirm him—and basically anyone else who has had the displeasure of recently encountering him. Here’s just a modest sampling:
Patel had previously said “we went to the studio and recorded [the J6 Prison Choir], mastered it, digitized it, and put it out as a song” but during his confirmation hearing he told Sen. Adam Schiff that the “we” repeatedly invoked in that sentence did not actually include him because he was not involved. He claimed he was using “the proverbial we”—I guess he means the royal “We”—you know, the editorial. It is the type of semantic lie that would make even Slick Willy blush.
A state court judge overseeing one of the January 6th cases said Patel was “not a credible witness” because his testimony was “not only illogical . . . but completely devoid of any evidence in the record.”
Patel has vastly exaggerated his résumé, claiming, among other things, that he was the “the Main Justice lead prosecutor for Benghazi” when in fact he had a junior supportive role—one he began after the investigation had started and left before the first case went to trial.
A Trump adviser told the Atlantic that Patel had more than once claimed he was the person who “‘gave the order’ for U.S. forces to move in and kill the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019”—even though he was not even in the Situation Room.
Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper wrote in his book that Patel’s lies about a Seal Team Six hostage rescue in Africa led to an international incident that put their lives at risk.
Patel has repeatedly lied about the FBI having a role in January 6th, advancing the absurd Ray Epps conspiracy theory.
Then there were his claims that he was present when Trump magically declassified the documents he was keeping at Mar-a-Lago, and then pleaded the Fifth when asked about it in front of a grand jury.
I could keep going, but really, the story of Kash is best summed up in this anecdote from Elaina Plott Calabro’s Atlantic profile. Calabro wrote that Patel often says he and Trump are “just a ‘couple of guys from Queens,’” when Patel isn’t even from Queens. He’s from Garden City! That’s not the 313.
This is pathological!
Who in their right mind would think a person who will lie to your face about everything from where they grew up to their clandestine campaign of retribution against law enforcement should be entrusted to run the FBI? It is simply madness to put a man such as that atop the bureau.
Because this is the thing about liars—they may be telling you sweet little lies, the sorts of lies you love to hear, in the moment. But they will turn on you the moment it serves them.
Republican senators, cozy in the knowledge that Patel’s lies serve their ends today, should cast their vote with the expectation that one day those lies will go sour, and they won’t have Democrats to blame for being lied to—only themselves.
Quick Hits
“A CASH BONANZA . . .” Jeff Bezos paid $40 million—almost triple the next-highest offer—for licensing rights to a forthcoming documentary about the first lady following a December dinner with her and the president at Mar-a-Lago. According to an Amazon spokesman, “We licensed the upcoming Melania Trump documentary film and series for one reason and one reason only—because we think customers are going to love it.” Sure, Jan. The Wall Street Journal has the story, and it certainly does sound like a bonanza: The sum is “the most Amazon had ever spent on a documentary.” Reportedly, Mrs. Trump and her agent also spent the inauguration selling $10 million “sponsorships” for the film, which would entitle the “sponsor” to a grateful mention during the end credits and an invitation to attend the premiere. It sounds like for Melania these days, it’s bonanzas all the way down.
DOGE’S APPROACH TO TRANSPARENCY. . . New reporting from 404 Media shows that not only was the DOGE.gov website hosted on a non-government server, but they left their database open, which means anyone could push updates to it:
The doge.gov website that was spun up to track Elon Musk’s cuts to the federal government is insecure and pulls from a database that can be edited by anyone, according to two separate people who found the vulnerability and shared it with 404 Media. One coder added at least two database entries that are visible on the live site and say “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro.”
Perhaps Musk, his racist aide-de-camp “Big Balls,” and the rest of the sweaty tech goon squad should get their own house in order before deleting the perfectly good government websites created by people who are actually experts.
I THINK YOU SHOULD LEE-VE. . . Mike Lee is getting some competition for the title of Utah’s worst public official from a state senator named Trevor Lee—a man who once suggested that Gov. Spencer Cox, an erstwhile Trump critic, “might even be transgender.” Lately, the latter Lee introduced legislation that would ban the Pride flag from Utah classrooms. The unusual thing, as the Salt Lake Tribune reports, is that Lee has put some serious thought into what sorts of flags should be approved for display in schools if the Pride flag is banned, and, well:
When he first introduced the bill, Lee said on the social media platform X that his goal was to ban pride flags. But Nazi and Confederate flags, he told the committee Thursday, would be included in the approved flags. “There are instances where in classrooms, you have curriculum that is needed to use flags such as World War II, Civil War,” he said. “You may have a Nazi flag. You may have a Confederate flag, and so you are allowed to display those flags… as part of the curriculum, and that is okay.”
It’s not the cringe sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, but it’s close.
Cheap Shots
Danielle Sassoon - and YET AGAIN it is a woman who is showing courage, a backbone and integrity. Add her to the long list that includes Liz, Ruby, Shaye, Cassidy, Sarah, Olivia and others I can’t ’ recall right now.
Kash Patel is a third-rate George Santos. The lies are much less entertaining.