What would a man do to the F.B.I

The F.B.I. Is Not A Liberal Bastion of Wakeness: a Few Years After the First Donald J. Edgar Comey Left the White House

What this independence illustrates is that the F.B.I. is not, as many MAGA loyalists believe, some liberal bastion of wokeness. No Democrat has ever served as an F.B.I. director. Even Democratic presidents appoint Republican officials to head the bureau, as Mr. Obama and Mr. Clinton both did in their presidencies.

Moreover, the idea of pointing a Trump loyalist like Mr. Patel goes against the fundamental approach all recent presidents have taken — which is that they’ve appointed nonpartisan figures, known for their independence. Directors, in turn, usually go out of their way to demonstrate clear independence from the presidents who appointed them. The relationship between Mr. Freeh and Bill Clinton was so strained that he turned his White House pass over to the president to avoid being seen with him. Mr. Comey infamously took it upon himself to excoriate Hillary Clinton publicly over her handling of emails as secretary of state to demonstrate his independence from the Obama administration and Justice Department.

Choosing anyone new at this point is concerning because it is a flagrant break with tradition. Congress enacted a 10-year term for the F.B.I. director in 1976, and that is how the current vacancies at the helm of the agency are found. It is meant to isolate the job from political influence, and Christopher Wray — originally nominated by Mr. Trump in 2017 — still has two years left to serve.

President-elect Donald Trump shocked even some of his most ardent critics when he announced he would nominate former national security aide Kash Patel to lead the FBI.

The former prosecutor said he would find ways to punish the Trump administration’s perceived enemies. Critics say that would be an appalling use of the justice system to carry out political ends.

It would not be the first time that would happen. The agency’s longest serving director, J. Edgar Hoover, authorized covert harassment campaigns against perceived enemies like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

There are more guardrails on the FBI now than there were decades ago, historian and author Beverly Gage told NPR’s Michel Martin. The big question is whether protections will hold up against the kind of pressure they haven’t been subjected to before.

Gage: When Hoover died in 1972, there would have been a lot of suspicion coming from the left and from liberals who were very critical about the FBI’s disruption of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement. He was an ideological conservative, but a lot of conservatives really thought of the FBI as the part of the state that they liked. And so one of the really interesting things that’s happened certainly in the last decade is that we can see that flip around, but we’ve never seen anything like what’s been happening in the last several years, which is certainly Trump and his allies, but in large part, the mainstream Republican Party has really turned on the FBI and the national security state in a whole new way.

She spoke to Morning Edition about what Patel’s pick means for the FBI and how the agency has in the past exerted vast amounts of power and influence, particularly under Hoover, its most notable director.

What is the history of the FBI? How did it start, and how did it evolve into what some people call the best law enforcement agency in the United States?

Hoover worked for four Democrats and four Republicans. He tried to keep the FBI out of politics so he did not think it would hurt the agency. He thought it was not right and would have never done what he is doing today.

Gage: It was a reaction to Hoover. In the ’60s and ’70s, it was assumed that future directors should not be allowed to have that sort of power because Hoover was invulnerable.

Liberals have long been suspicious of the FBI for their history of covert harassment campaigns. When did the right start to become suspicious of the FBI?

On the plan of a justice system to punish the perpetrators of the presidency-elect? Martin: Does the right thing to do is to look at people’s homes

How do you feel about Mr. Patel’s plan to use the justice system to punish those who targeted the president-elect? Is it possible for him to do that?

Martin: One of the things Hoover did was to give people the authority to look at what happened in people’s homes, and it is something that a lot of people do today. Are there any guardrails against that kind of conduct happening again?