Why We Got Kash Patel and a ‘Gangster Government’

At the peak of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, set in motion by Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s Justice Department, President Trump reportedly cried out, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”

In 2025, having been burned in his first term by what he saw as an overreliance on establishment Republicans like Mr. Sessions, Mr. Trump is now filling his administration with MAGA loyalists — an army of Roy Cohns.

No one fits this pattern more than Mr. Trump’s nominee to head the F.B.I., Kash Patel, a fierce partisan who shares the president’s dream of using the federal government as an agency of personal retribution.

As Mr. Patel’s nomination comes under Senate review, it’s worth asking what exactly it means to have such a figure who appears to be handpicked to play a Roy Cohn role — a fierce courtroom brawler, but also a mob lawyer — as director of an institution as important, and as potentially dangerous, as the F.B.I. And why, for that matter, Americans knowingly elected a president who made no secret of his intent to govern in this way.

Mr. Patel has vowed to radically overhaul the agency because, in his view and in the view of Mr. Trump, it has been weaponized against conservatives.

Mr. Patel has been put forward as the head of an agency that abused power under its first director, J. Edgar Hoover. In the post-Hoover and post-Watergate era, the agency was dedicated to its independence within the executive branch.