The FBI has kept us safe

OPINION:

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, has vowed to turn the bureau’s headquarters into a museum of the “deep state.” Yet that same headquarters has kept us safe from a successful foreign terrorist attack since 9/11.

Every few weeks, the FBI announces arrests of individuals plotting horrific attacks by foreign terrorist networks to be carried out either by foreign nationals or Americans acting at their behest.

Those arrests are not a matter of luck. Two days after 9/11, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller was briefing President George W. Bush on the attacks.

“They talked about how the terrorists got plane tickets, got on planes, moved from one airport to another, and then attacked our citizens,” Andy Card, Mr. Bush’s chief of staff, told me for my book “The Secrets of the FBI.”

“And the president, while he was very interested in that report, said, ‘Mr. Director, that’s building a case for prosecution,’” according to Mr. Card. “‘I want to know what you have to say about the terrorist threats that haven’t materialized yet and how we can prevent them.’”

Mr. Mueller took the message back to headquarters: Instead of simply responding to attacks, interdict them.

To be sure, the FBI had always sought to prevent terrorist attacks. But up to that point, the FBI tended to treat each incident as a separate case instead of recognizing the larger threat and mounting an effort against the entire al Qaeda organization, as the bureau had done with the Ku Klux Klan and the Mafia.

That changed after Mr. Mueller came back from his meeting with Mr. Bush. Arthur M. Cummings II, who headed counterterrorism investigations and later became the FBI’s executive assistant director for national security, told agents: “The director said, ‘We’ve got this new mission. It’s a prevention mission.’”

Locking people up had always been the FBI’s primary goal. But Mr. Cummings told agents that doing so could put the country at risk. Instead of bringing a prosecution, the primary goal should be gathering intelligence to penetrate terrorist organizations and roll up future plots that could include weapons of mass destruction that could obliterate the U.S.

Besides keeping us safe from terrorist attacks, at the direction of the same FBI headquarters that Mr. Patel wants shut down, the FBI every day investigates espionage, organized crime, human trafficking, cybercrime, sabotage, civil rights violations, white-collar crime, violent crime, political corruption and assassinations, all coordinated by FBI headquarters.

Especially when it comes to counterintelligence and counterterrorism, investigations must be centralized to coordinate the effort seamlessly and work closely with the Central Intelligence Agency. Before the Patriot Act was enacted in 2001, the wall prevented the FBI and CIA from sharing information, leading to the breakdowns that allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur.

Now that this impediment has been removed, the last thing we want to do is to create more barriers by disbursing and fragmenting the command of investigations into plots that threaten our national security.

Contrary to claims that the bureau is politicized against Republicans, the FBI during the Biden administration has helped to bring criminal prosecutions of 11 major Republicans and 12 major Democrats, including Hunter Biden, former Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey and New York Mayor Eric Adams.

This is not to downplay the corruption of the FBI under then-FBI Director James Comey, launching investigations of Mr. Trump and his campaign based on no evidence whatsoever. But the fact is that all those FBI officials who outrageously abused their positions to get Mr. Trump are long gone from the bureau.

As Pam Bondi, Mr. Trump’s nominee for attorney general, has said: “There are about 40,000 great men and women of the FBI throughout this country. And there are a few bad ones in the Justice Department who are making the rest look bad. And that’s not fair to those great men and women who are out there risking their lives every day.”

• Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, is the author of “The Secrets of the FBI.” His book “The FBI: Inside the World’s Most Powerful Law Enforcement Agency” led to the dismissal of FBI Director William Sessions over his abuses.