Amid a series of scandals and controversies that have enveloped the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under the Biden administration, President-elect Donald Trump announced the nomination of Kash Patel over the weekend to replace current Director Christopher Wray. Experts have expressed mixed feelings on whether Patel is the right person to reform the federal law enforcement agency but agree that an overhaul is crucial.

Recent scandals and controversies the agency has been embroiled in include suppressing the Nashville shooter manifesto, failing to comply with mandatory reporting requirements of sex crimes against children, targeting traditionalist Catholics and pro-life activists as potential terrorists, intimidating whistleblowers who exposed illegal gender transition procedures on minors, reporting inaccurately low crime data, coercing social media companies to censor stories damaging to the Biden administration, and executing the 2016 “Crossfire Hurricane” scheme to falsely accuse then-presidential candidate Donald Trump of colluding with Russia, among others.

With experts acknowledging an entrenched “Deep State” of bureaucrats that work within government agencies to undermine conservatives, Trump picked attorney and former national security official Kash Patel to lead the FBI. Before serving as chief of staff for the Secretary of Defense during the first Trump administration, Patel worked to oversee the House probe into allegations that Trump colluded with Russia during his 2016 campaign, eventually uncovering unlawful surveillance committed by the FBI and DOJ on the Trump campaign.

“Kash is a brilliant lawyer, investigator, and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People,” Trump wrote in announcing Patel’s nomination. “He played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability, and the Constitution.”

But some are questioning Patel’s qualifications. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board worried Sunday that while Patel “has experience in intelligence and defense, he hasn’t worked as an FBI agent. The FBI’s main responsibility remains fighting crime, and Mr. Patel’s experience on that score is thin.” The board went on to express concern that Patel’s main objective will likely be “to seek revenge against Mr. Trump’s opponents” rather than fight crime.

On Steve Bannon’s podcast in 2023, Patel suggested that he would go after more than government employees who conspired against Trump. “[W]e will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.”

“Down that road lies no end of political trouble for Republicans and the Trump Presidency, as the effort is sure to backfire,” argued the WSJ Board. “Voters didn’t re-elect Mr. Trump to practice lawfare the way his opponents have. The country wants a bureau it can trust, not a Republican version of the [James] Comey FBI.”

As for former FBI agents like Nicole Parker, they want to see an overhaul of the bureau. Without specifically endorsing Patel, she told Fox News on Monday, “It is of paramount importance that the new FBI director reform the bureau into an agency that Americans can trust, depend on for unbiased law enforcement and protect them while upholding the Constitution. The FBI needs to get back to its true mission of fighting crime, keeping communities safe and [being] the agency that solid agents can once again be proud to work for.”

Jonathan Gilliam, a former FBI special agent and Navy SEAL, agreed, but cautioned that Patel may not be the best candidate for gutting the agency.

“I think Kash Patel is a very loyal individual, and I think that that’s very important for Trump because there [are] not many loyal people in D.C.,” he told “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice Monday. “But the problem that I have with Kash Patel is that he’s an attorney, and his resume speaks of the things he’s done as an attorney. And that’s been a problem with the FBI since before [former FBI Director] Louis Freeh and after Louis Freeh. Louis Freeh is one of the only FBI [directors] [who] was an FBI agent. This is something that all the agencies in D.C. suffer from is that political appointees do not know the agencies that they’re representing.”

Gilliam continued, “[I]t would be easy to put Kash Patel in there and have him get rid of all the executives on the seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building and clean up that. But the problem is all of these, what I call ‘mafias’ within the bureau and all these other agencies — those people are not in plain sight. So if we don’t come up with an effective solution to purging these people and not letting them repopulate in 2028, they will just come out of hiding and repopulate their ranks. Because once they … get into a rank, into an authority position, they stack everybody in a supervisor position under them with like-minded people. That’s what all these agencies are like.”

The former Navy SEAL went on to contend that an FBI director should not be tasked with simultaneously running and reorganizing the agency.

“There needs to be … a reorganization czar who takes a team of people that are from these agencies, looks broadly at all of them to get like or similar issues and then look at them each individually to see where the Left and all these other mafias are entrenched and then systematically expose those people, show them to the director, to the AG, and allow them to get rid of them,” he explained. “But Kash Patel or anybody else that comes in and runs the FBI is not going to be able to do both of those things because we need a dedicated director of the FBI, and we need a dedicated team to purg[e] the FBI. Those are two totally different full-time jobs.”

Gilliam went on to detail how the FBI could be rebuilt from the ground up.

“First and foremost, the executive level needs to be gone,” he asserted. “… The other thing that is immediate is recruiting has to change, because if you fix the top but you don’t plug the hole at the bottom, then they’re going to continuously pull activists in and careerists in. … [O]nce those two things are done, they can start systematically looking for these mafias, and when I say mafias, I want you to understand exactly what I’m talking about: leftists. Leftists build a chain underneath them of like-minded people, SWAT team members who have little experience in anything. Maybe they’re an attorney, but they get into SWAT and they get up in rank. They will stack the board with SWAT team members who have no investigative experience in these particular areas. [Also], the lesbian mafia — it is real. And once they get somebody in position, they will stack the ranks under them with people that are friendly to their activism. … And they will go after, as we’ve seen, conservatives, Christians, and other people that they don’t agree with politically.”

“So systematically, they have to look for all these and purge those things and plug those holes,” Gilliam concluded.