Kash Patel spent years ingratiating himself with Donald J. Trump — regularly popping into the Oval Office in the first term, writing a children’s book starring “King Donald” during the interregnum, trailing him to rallies, banquets and bus tours on the bumpy ride back to power.
Few practitioners of the audience-of-one strategy have been quite so successful at translating loyalty and proximity to Mr. Trump into real influence. Fewer still are poised to be rewarded as significantly as Mr. Patel, 44, Mr. Trump’s pick to run the F.B.I., an agency with vast powers that he has vowed to radically overhaul.
What binds Mr. Trump and Mr. Patel is the shared conviction that the bureau has been weaponized against conservatives, including both of them. They argue it is politicized and the only way to fix it is to empower an outsider willing to faithfully execute the Trump agenda — a sharp divergence from the bureau’s historical norms and the decades-long practice of directors’ limiting contact with presidents.
The issue of Mr. Patel’s independence, or lack thereof, will be a flashpoint at a confirmation hearing scheduled for Thursday.
Mr. Patel’s embrace of Jan. 6 conspiracy theories and unflinching fealty are the coin of the realm in Mr. Trump’s orbit. But in the view of his many critics (and even some who publicly sing his praises), Mr. Patel’s oft-stated loyalty to the president poses one of the most significant challenges to the independence of the F.B.I. in the century since J. Edgar Hoover, its founding director, built an investigative citadel whose autonomy created leverage, and abuses of power.
Nominating Mr. Patel as F.B.I. chief is, above all, a defining example of Mr. Trump’s approach to exerting power in his second term. Not content to simply install subordinates to help enact an ideological agenda, the president is pushing hard to expand the post-Watergate limits on presidential authority. During his first term, demanding personal loyalty from appointees did not always work; making sure the top jobs are stocked with loyalists is the strategy now.