Michelle Goldberg
Opinion

There are few good things to be said about Donald Trump’s plan to fire FBI director Christopher Wray and install in his place Kash Patel, a thuggish lackey who has spent years fantasizing about taking revenge on Trump’s enemies. But there is one: Patel has helpfully provided us with a list of people President Joe Biden should pardon before he leaves office.

Patel’s 2023 book, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy,” purports to show how government employees who defied Trump constitute a shadowy cabal that is “the most dangerous threat to our democracy.” The “deep state,” in Patel’s telling, is “as treacherous and evil as the villains portrayed in books and movies.” Virtually every investigation of Trump and his allies, Patel suggests, is part of a monstrous plot against “the people’s president.” The book strongly implies that Jan. 6, “the insurrection that never was,” was encouraged by “deep state” agitators and then used as a pretext to persecute patriotic Trump supporters. In a blurb on the book jacket, Trump wrote, “We will use this blueprint to help us take back the White House and remove these gangsters from all of government!”

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Who are these gangsters? Patel lists 60 of them in a useful alphabetized appendix. It is not, as he acknowledges, exhaustive, since he limits himself to the executive branch, leaving out “other corrupt actors of the first order” like Sen.-elect Adam Schiff, former Republican House speaker Paul Ryan and “the entire fake news mafia press corps.” His catalog of the “deep state” includes some of Patel’s bureaucratic foes from when he served in Trump’s first administration, like Bill Barr, who as attorney general said that Trump could make Patel the deputy FBI director only “over my dead body,” and Wray, the man Patel would replace.

Patel also lists both the current secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, and Trump’s secretary of defense, Mark Esper. Cassidy Hutchinson, the brave young former aide to Mark Meadows who testified before the Jan. 6 committee, is on the list, as is Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump staff member who often criticizes her old boss on “The View.” Naturally, Biden, Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton are on it as well.

Except for himself, Biden should pardon them all, along with pretty much everyone else Patel has singled out by name and those who worked on the Jan. 6 committee. On Wednesday, Jonathan Martin reported in Politico that there’s a “vigorous internal debate” among Biden aides about issuing preemptive pardons to officials likely to be unjustly targeted by Trump. A drawback of such pardons, Martin wrote, is that they “could suggest impropriety, only fueling Trump’s criticisms.” After all, Biden may struggle to explain why he’s pardoning people who have done nothing wrong.

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Patel’s appendix, however, makes the case for blanket pardons easier to convey. The breadth of it demonstrates his McCarthyite impulses better than his critics ever could.

Though Biden is not much of a communicator, he could give a speech laying out the well-founded fears that Patel may try to harass the people on his list with spurious investigations. In addition to justifying sweeping pardons, such a speech could prompt a useful nationwide discussion about what it would mean to put a man like Patel in charge of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency.

We are entering a period when the ideal of Justice Department independence will almost certainly be swept away. Political persecution — the kind Trump and his allies claim, falsely, to have been subjected to — will become routine. Biden tried to defend the basic integrity of our imperfect institutions against Trumpist aggression, and he failed. All he can do now is help the American people understand what’s coming and try to protect the ones with MAGA targets on their backs.

Those who view the federal government as a nest of criminal conspirators would, of course, interpret a raft of pardons as confirmation of their worldview. But the fear that Biden’s aggressive use of the pardon power might embolden Trump seems naive, since all signs suggest that he will be unrestrained, no matter what Democrats do. The only reason for Trump to choose a person like Patel to lead the FBI is to bend it to his will. Democrats can’t arrest that process through fealty to norms that are about to be obliterated. Yes, pardons will give Republicans a cable news talking point. The question is whether denying them that talking point is worth letting Patel ruin people’s lives on Trump’s behalf.

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The pardons I’m proposing can’t cover everyone who is vulnerable to Trump’s vengeance. Elsewhere, I’ve argued that Biden should pardon all those involved in mailing abortion pills to states where abortion is banned, since the Trump administration could revive the long-dormant Comstock Act to investigate them. In doing this, Biden would be following a precedent set by Jimmy Carter when he pardoned most of those who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War. But you can’t pardon an anonymous mass of people for breaking unspecified laws; the pardon power wasn’t intended for those who’ve committed no conceivable crimes. If Trump and his cronies can’t use the justice system against those they hate most, they may use other tools, like the IRS, or find other scapegoats.

There’s no version of a Trump restoration that doesn’t result in both human and institutional destruction. Biden still has a duty to save who he can.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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