A retired FBI supervisory special agent applauded President-elect Donald Trump's selection of Kash Patel to lead the agency and said Patel has the support of many active rank-and-file agents.
"This guy is completely and 100% qualified to run that organization. He's what's needed today. He's the right fix," Jeff Danik told Just the News on Monday.
Since Patel was announced Saturday as Trump's pick for FBI director, reaction from lawmakers has been mixed. At issue for some is that the FBI director's term is generally for 10 years; Christopher Wray, whose term ends in 2027, would need to resign or be fired by Trump.
"I've had no objections to the way that he's handled himself, and so I don't have any complaints about the way that he's done his job right now," Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said of Wray.
John Bolton, former national security adviser to Trump, compared Patel to Lavrentiy Beria, Soviet Union leader Josef Stalin's head of secret police.
But Danik points to Patel's experience in serving as a federal public defender and prosecutor, counterterrorism director at the National Security Council, senior counsel to the House Intelligence Committee, and chief of staff to the defense secretary and the director of national intelligence.
"He has the correct balance, in my view, having been there for almost 30 years," Danik told Just The News. "He has the correct balance of prosecutor, which is what we do. We feed the prosecution tube. Defense attorney, so the other side of that coin. Intelligence, the intelligence agencies, which is a key element to the FBI's either success or failure."
Former FBI agent Stephen Friend, who testified before Congress in 2023 as a whistleblower, accusing bureau leadership of weaponizing the FBI for political purposes, told Newsmax on Monday that Patel would fix the "broken" FBI.
"Kash is eminently qualified ... to assume leadership of a broken FBI that, for all intents and purposes, probably deserves to be shattered into a thousand pieces and scattered into the dustbin of history," Friend told Newsmax.
Danik, who said he talks to "agents all the time" in a counseling capacity, said support for Patel is high.
"And there's a large group that are highly, highly supportive of him," he told Just The News, noting that there are about 250 "high-ranking bureaucrats" in the FBI who have an "outsized control over the entire organization."
"By and far, the average day-to-day agent is doing really heroic work, sometimes in a desperate environment that these SES level agents hoist upon them," Danik said of senior executive service agents.