Transcript: Trump’s Awful FBI Pick Is Already Revealing What’s Coming

Sargent: Let’s talk about what this would look like. Imagine President Trump says to Kash Patel, Man, X really pissed me off when he went on cable TV and said x, y, and z. So theoretically, he can and would try to open an investigation via the FBI into that person. Maybe that runs into some of these frontline obstacles like the inability to get a warrant. Do you think that there’s an actual prospect that he would essentially command Kash Patel, or that Patel would do this of his own accord—he would just break the law and proceed with wiretaps, investigations, etc.? What does that look like?

Sozan: I would like to think that that would not happen, Greg, but I am sufficiently worried as a lot of national security experts and others are. As we know, there’s really no guesswork in terms of the fact that Trump would like to break the law. He would like to be able to bend the media, bend his political opponents to his will; he’s already called them enemies of the state. He’s also said he’s going to be people’s retribution, so we know he’s going on a retribution tour. And he is willing to really bend the guardrails to test them as far as he can go.

That one way he would do it is quietly, or not so quietly, meet with his FBI director and his inner circle, and, as you indicated, bring up a couple of names of people he’s particularly angry at. It would be well understood, even if it were not directly said, that the FBI would be expected to start some probe of a person. That could start with electronic surveillance of them. It could start by making their life a little bit difficult in terms of requests for documents, in terms of having them followed. These things send a message to political enemies that the government’s watching you, Donald Trump is watching you.