TRUMP'S PURGE OF WASHINGTON FIVE WEEKS OF CHAOS, IN FOUR PARTS

ON JANUARY 30, Kash Patel, the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, went to Capitol Hill to attend to the formality of his Senate confirmation hearing.

- 

1.VENGEANCE IS HIS

The FBI is bracing for payback under Trump ultraloyalist Kash Patel.

BY ANDREW RICE

It’s a measure of how tightly Donald Trump now grips Washington that the author of the book Government Gangsters, which posits the FBI has been controlled by criminals, met with only token resistance. One of the 12 Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, Mike Lee, later posted a video of Patel’s entry into the hearing room scored to the badass opening riff of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” The committee’s ten Democrats flailed at him to little effect. Patel dodged and dissembled and occasionally flashed some irritation. When pressed on whether he’d fire agents involved in investigating Trump or open investigations of the president’s opponents, he gave guileless-sounding answers. “I have no interest, no desire, and will not, if confirmed, go backward,” he said in response to a series of pointed questions from Chris Coons, the Delaware Democrat. “There will be no politicization at the FBI; there will be no retributive actions taken.”

Even as Patel spoke, a purge of the FBI was underway. The bureau’s acting director and deputy director, Brian Driscoll and Robert Kissane, respectively, had been given their orders by Emil Bove, one of Trump’s former criminal-defense attorneys and acting deputy attorney general. According to notes later leaked to Senator Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat, Bove conveyed to them, “KP wants movement.” That afternoon, according to a former FBI official who was told about the events by participants, Driscoll and Kissane walked around the secure suite on the seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building where the bureau’s top leaders work. They entered offices along the corridor and delivered word from above: Retire or be fired.