Why some senators are so afraid of confirming Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard

For years, the FBI and CIA have run Congress like an op. Forget the “secret squirrel” stuff. Many of their top officials have committed felonies in broad daylight with no accountability. By nominating Kash Patel as FBI director and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, President Donald Trump intends to change all that.

The shrill opposition to having tough, contrarian leaders clean out the intelligence community’s litter box has betrayed the secret. Some senators are afraid.

Congress has allowed the FBI and the rest of the intelligence community to become a state within a state that neither Congress nor the president can control.

For nearly half a century, Congress has shrugged off its duty to oversee the ever-growing central investigative and spy apparatus that it funded.

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) famously admitted in 2017 that any elected leader who challenges the intelligence community will be destroyed and that Trump, first assuming the presidency that month, was a fool even to try.

"Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC. “So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”

Gabbard last week reminded the Senate of Schumer’s warning.

More than anyone in Washington, Schumer would know. He was elected to Congress before Tulsi Gabbard was born.

Schumer sat on the House Judiciary Committee with oversight of the FBI from 1981 to 1999. He has been on the Senate Judiciary Committee, also with FBI oversight, since 1999 and is now the panel’s ranking member. Since becoming his party’s leader, whether in the majority or minority, he has been an ex officio member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Schumer knows that by neglecting its constitutional authority, Congress has allowed the FBI and the intelligence community to become a fearful master — a state within a state beyond the control of both Congress and the president.

Everything the FBI and CIA did to Trump and his allies would fill lesser politicians with fear.

Escape from accountability

Some senators show backbone. One is Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), who made two big revelations. He was first to confirm the report that some of his colleagues wanted to vote on Gabbard’s nomination in secret.

It wasn’t about a closed hearing to discuss classified matters, but to have the vote itself, including its final tally, a secret. The purpose, one can only presume, is to allow senators to escape any accountability for their vote.

Precedent for this does exist. Following the jihadist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted in secret, and concealed the tallies, on confirmation of nominees. It did this as a security measure because of fears that some would be targeted by terrorists.

The terrorism worry magically vanished in 2013, after the committee voted to confirm deep-stater John Brennan as director of the CIA. For some reason, establishmentarians were incensed that Brennan had any opposition at all. The committee released the tally, which was 12-3. But, as Roll Call reported, “the public had no official way of knowing which panel members voted against Brennan.”

Those three had to be exposed. One of them is still in office: Senator Jim Risch (R-Idaho).

Since then, the tallies of Senate Intelligence Committee votes have been public information.

Who, whom?

Now, with the push to hold the Gabbard confirmation vote in secret, who is afraid of whom? It isn’t Gabbard’s supporters who want a secret vote.

Real intelligence professionals will recall the Bolshevik question, “Kto kogo?” or “Who whom?”

It’s a slogan from Lenin’s 1921 musing, “The whole question is, who will overtake whom?”

Washington has become its own zero-sum power-and-money game. The uniparty members who tax and spend on the permanent bureaucracy, who issue the contracts to the industrial complexes, consider themselves “us.”

In true kto kogo spirit, everyone else — in other words, you and me — is actually “them.” The late great scholar of Russia Richard Pipes once said in a conversation with colleagues, “The FBI learned its worst lessons from the KGB.”

The uniparty loves the FBI as it has become. Retired FBI man Thomas J. Baker observed, “Big Brother is family now.”

Trump and his populist peasant movement want to hold Big Brother and his family accountable. Gabbard and Patel are the tip of the pitchfork.

So the secrecy of a vote on Gabbard — even to those who believe that reforms are overdue — appears driven by some senators’ primal fear of what will happen to them if they are caught helping to hold Big Brother accountable.

Ending the impunity

If Gabbard is confirmed, impunity is over.

“Every FBI director I’ve questioned has lied to me” in his 14 years on the Judiciary Committee, Senator Mike Lee told Kash Patel during his confirmation hearings last week.

Making any false statement to Congress is a felony. Lying under oath is another felony. Five years maximum for each. Four successive FBI directors committed federal felonies, by Lee’s account. They should have gotten 10 years in the slammer for each time they lied to Congress.

But they routinely got away with it.

So have the leakers throughout the intelligence community, who committed felonies every time they passed classified information. Many of those leaks were calculated to manipulate the Senate on who it would and would not confirm.

President Trump is ending the impunity. That’s why the fight against Gabbard and Patel is so vicious. The demons are howling at the exorcist. Some senators feel caught in the middle. That’s why they are so afraid.