LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The FBI's top leadership under the Trump administration will be two men with no prior experience at the bureau and a history of strong loyalties to the president. Former federal prosecutor Kash Patel was sworn in as FBI director last week, and Trump named the bureau's No. 2 in command - typically someone promoted from within the bureau - as Dan Bongino. He's a conservative podcaster and radio host whose law enforcement experience comes from the Secret Service and the New York City Police Department, but not the FBI. Democrats say neither have the right resumes, and both promoted the lie that Trump won the 2020 election. So what can we expect for the FBI under its new leadership?
Joining me to discuss is Thomas J. Baker. He's a retired FBI special agent and author of the book "The Fall Of The FBI: How A Once Great Agency Became A Threat To Democracy." Good morning, and welcome to the program.
THOMAS J BAKER: Good morning. It's great to be with you, Leila.
FADEL: So you wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal that the bureau has a chance now to become more efficient, less political and more committed to the Constitution. Why do you believe Patel and Bongino can do that?
BAKER: OK. Well, to be very frank, and this is the subject of your interview this morning, neither of these gentlemen would have been my first pick. They were both initially surprises, quite a big surprise. But Kash started to win me over at his confirmation hearings. He handled himself very well. And the reality is, it doesn't matter that they wouldn't have been my first choice. I wasn't elected the president. They're the president's first choice.
FADEL: Yeah, I think - the reason I'm asking is your concern is the politicization of the FBI. And Bongino specifically has said, quote, "my entire life right now is about owning the libs. That's it." And that's one of the nicer quotes. Kash Patel, the new FBI director, wrote a children's book that portrayed Donald Trump as a king and had promised political retribution but walked that back during his Senate confirmation hearing. If the FBI was becoming politicized under Biden and other administrations, don't these statements pretend it'll just become politicized in a different way?
BAKER: Yeah. Well, from both those gentlemen - and I think they've already both acknowledged this a little bit - that's a lot of hyperbole. It's easy to make these kind of, you know, off-the-cuff remarks or very loud remarks when you're not in the position of power. I never really used the term politicized for the FBI. My concern - I talked about the culture, and I certainly never used the term that others have used that the FBI was corrupt. The culture had changed under Mueller and then Comey from a law enforcement emphasis to an emphasis on being an intelligence-driven organization. That was Mueller's terminology.
And, of course, that sort of removes, and they were removing a lot of the guidelines of the Constitution. What I'd like to see the bureau get back to is a law enforcement organization where their North Star is the U.S. Constitution, and everybody's trained in the Constitution and its limits that it puts on domestic law enforcement in the United States.
FADEL: What specifically leads you to believe the bureau hasn't been true to the Constitution?
BAKER: OK. Well, when I was a new agent, we were all trained in the Constitution. All the special agents were trained in the whole Constitution, but mainly the Bill of Rights - the first 10 amendments. And there's the people in law enforcement and in prosecution and defense work, legal work - they focus on the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendment particularly, which you probably are familiar with, with the protections against unlawful search and seizure, for instance, and things like that.
And we were told back then by our instructors that we shouldn't look at the Constitution as an obstacle to be overcome, but we should embrace the Bill of Rights. And we were each given a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution and told to keep it in our breast pocket and that when we were interviewing a citizen in their home or going to search somebody's home, if we had the Constitution with us, we'd be less likely to go off the rails or go off the tracks - commit a violation.
That may sound corny to a lot of people today, but a lot of people took it to heart. And I'd love to see the FBI get away from the freewheeling intelligence approach and get back to being a law enforcement organization grounded in the Constitution. And I hope and I believe perhaps Kash Patel and Dan Bongino can do that.
FADEL: Thomas J. Baker spent 33 years as a special agent at the FBI. Thank you for your time, Thomas.
BAKER: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHET BAKER'S "TENDERLY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
