It would become a regular feature at his rallies.
Some of the choir on that recording were convictedof assaulting police officers.
The song was released as a single, with proceeds going to the prisoners and their families.
Photo illustration by Matthew Cooley. Photographs in illustration by Jeffrey Markowitz/Sygma/Getty Images; Mandel NGAN/AFP/Getty Images; Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
The grim reality is that Patel wont need to remake the FBI from scratch.
But Trump and Patel are the last people who should do the reforming.
He has associated withfar-right extremists, and expressed his supportfor QAnon cranks.
Hessold Trump-themed merchandise, and pushed a pill he claimscounteracts the effectsof the Covid vaccine.
But Patels promises, even under oath, may not mean much.
Patel is also nowfacingaccusations he may have perjured himself during his confirmation hearing.
Patel answered, Im not aware of that, Senator.
Its just that their complaints misdiagnose the causes.
These in themselves, intelligence experts have said, were legitimate predicates for an investigation.
Agentshave also queried the systemfor information on journalists, politicians, activists, and political pundits.
That this was not an isolated incident is certainly cause for alarm.
They had to know everything they did would eventually be heavily scrutinized.
Conservatives have also criticized the bureau for its investigation into the alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov.
Gretchen Whitmer (D).
But this too is standard procedure at the bureau.
In some cases, informants focused on targets who suffered fromdepressionormental illness, or weredevelopmentallyorintellectually disabled.
It has consistently accumulated more power since September 11.
Theres no transparency and very little accountability.
But Id put political bias against conservatives very low on the list of problems.
(German emphasized that he and the Brennan Center take no official position on Patels nomination.)
I think an unnervingly large percentage of the agency will be sympathetic to what Patel wants to do.
And I think theyd be pretty open about that.
The question, then, is just how much damage could Patel do?
Longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover is infamous for his dossiers on the rich and influential.
He also didnt have much time for the constitutional barriers in his way, such as obtaining search warrants.
Hoovers decades of abuse were exposed during the 1975 congressional hearings led by Idaho Sen. Frank Church.
And you just keep going down the line.
The Church Committees work resulted in a number of reforms to the FBI and other intelligence agencies.
But within a decade, the Reagan administration then began rolling them back.
The rollback continued for 20 years, across multiple administrations.
The September 11 attacks were the final blow.
Many of those were for crimes unrelated to terrorism.
The overwhelming majority were related to drug crimes.
reasonable suspicion of a crime.
Mukasey created a new category of investigation, called an assessment, which requires no criminal predicate at all.
Agents can open assessments based solely on a hunch.
About half were related to national security; the others were for conventional crimes.
But were in the digital age now.
Remember that famous phrase from the Edward Snowden leaks total information awareness?
Its in this context that Trump and his supporters are right about the deep state.
The problem is that Patel doesnt want to end these abuses.
He wants to weaponize them against his enemies.
But those who study the FBI say what they can do under current bureau guidelines is worrying enough.
Nobody is administratively pure, German adds.
Look hard and long enough at anyone and youll inevitably find something.
Hoover would blush at the scope of it.
Trumps open-ended claim that undocumented immigrantsare leading an invasioncould justify similar surveillance of immigrant advocacy groups.
The FBIs power is dependent on the attorney general and the power vest in that office, Hunt says.
Of course the biggest worry is that Patel will direct the FBI to start arresting and jailing Trumps critics.
The experts I spoke to for this article said thats not at the top of their list of concerns.
I wont say it could never happen.
But if it gets to that point, were already in a lot of trouble, German says.
But in the time since German told me that, weve already seen movement in that direction.
An active investigation alone can be debilitating to people just trying to live their lives, German says.
that has given agents the power to ruin the lives of completely innocent people.
I helped destroy people, he said.
An unscrupulous FBI director could selectively release information obtained through assessments to ruin the reputations of Trumps perceived enemies.
An even more likely route for the administration is to open criminal investigations of advocacy groups.
Here too were already seeing some movement.
If upheld by the courts, such an order could effectively make a group like the NAACP illegal.
The administration already startedredirecting FBI personnel along with personnel from the DEA and ATF to assist with immigration enforcement.
(Immigration violations are a civil violation, not criminal.)
During his first term, Trump had revoked a similar Obama-era policy targeting violent immigrants.
He wanted to target people seeking asylum.
The administration also told federal law enforcement officersto be camera-readywhen making arrests.
Another fear is that under Patel, the FBI will stop investigating or even enable far-right violence.
The FBI has prioritized fighting radical Islamic terrorism since the September 11 attacks.
You have a constitutional right to be a white supremacist, Eddington says.
All of these are, unfortunately, live possibilities, Eddington says.
But the agency often only gets involved after public outcry, and is often inhibited by its ideological blinders.
The officers who beat that kid at the protest are trying to preserve it.
The DOJ identified 6,000 out of policy uses of force by Portland police.
Not a single civil rights violation was prosecuted.
It was a similar story all over the country.
We know from history that ideological fixations can preoccupy the bureau from its core mission.
This had the effect of alienating parts of the Muslim community, which only made agents more suspicious.
The bureau didnt seem to learn from its mistake.
Instead, the federal government adopted its Total Information Awareness approach to all things Muslim.
The FBIs approach after September 11 was to keep adding more hay to the stack.
For him, white supremacists are just the old KKK guys who meet at the Waffle House.
But in the end, these tactics just dont work.
I dont know how many more examples we need to prove this.
You prevent them by looking for evidence of criminality.
Radley Balko reports on criminal justice and civil liberties.
