Kash Patel likes conspiracy theories. Luckily for everyone else, conspiracists are normally kept far away from America’s federal law-enforcement and intelligence machinery, with all its powers of surveillance, investigation and arrest. Typically, though, Donald Trump has tested this premise in his choice of Mr Patel to lead the FBI. The 44-year-old lawyer—whose Senate confirmation hearing is on January 30th—has called that organisation “one of the most cunning and powerful forces of the Deep State”. If Mr Trump keeps his promise to retaliate against his enemies, the task will fall to his nominee.

Like Pete Hegseth, who won confirmation as defence secretary by a whisker, in pre-Trump times Mr Patel would have had little chance of running a government agency, let alone one this size. The FBI has 38,000 employees, 55 field offices and an $11bn budget. He lacks management experience, scorns the organisation, and his partisanship flouts a post-Watergate norm that law enforcement and intelligence gathering must be insulated from politics.

Mr Patel’s animus towards the national-security establishment started with the Trump-Russia probe. As a congressional aide, Mr Patel seized on real faults in the investigation, then exaggerated them. An FBI lawyer had doctored an email to support an application to wiretap a Trump campaign adviser; this was illegal, and Mr Patel helped expose it. In his telling, however, he discredited the whole inquiry as a nefarious plot to undermine Mr Trump, orchestrated by the justice department (DoJ) and the intelligence agencies. Mr Patel has called former top brass at the DoJ and the FBI corrupt “crooks” and “gangsters” and asked: “Who’s arresting these guys?”

Perhaps he will. An appendix to Mr Patel’s book names 60 deep-state baddies. Democrats call it the Trump administration’s “enemies list”. Steve Bannon, a MAGA troublemaker, recently conceded that the book “might not be a literary thing”—“more typing than writing”—but said that the list is a good preview of future targets. The president offered a more ambiguous preview on inauguration day when he ordered the attorney-general to scour the DoJ for past instances of lawfare and seek “remedial actions”. By lawfare he meant the two (now dismissed) federal indictments against him and the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate. Already more than a dozen DoJ lawyers who brought those cases have been fired.

Actual prosecutions against the president’s enemies would be hard. They would contend with judges, juries, defence lawyers and evidentiary rules. Investigations of the type Mr Patel would oversee involve fewer constraints. This is especially true when the FBI can cobble together a national-security justification. Then judicial review for, say, a wiretap becomes less burdensome. Everything is classified to boot.

At the FBI, a culture of complying with the law will militate against baseless expeditions, says Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University and former adviser at the bureau under James Comey, the director whom Mr Trump fired in 2017. But line agents and prosecutors will find it hard to object to an inquiry where there is a coherent basis for one, even if the motives behind it are political. Meanwhile, probes exact punishing costs from their targets.

Mr Patel is especially keen on pursuing leakers and their friends in the media. “When you have an underlying illegality committed by a government agent, anyone that participates in that illegality can and should be charged,” Mr Patel has said. He has also suggested “clawback mechanisms” for the money that news outlets make “by printing lies”.

Equally significant is what Mr Patel might deprioritise at the FBI: namely, investigations of far-right activity. This may pick up as groups that went quiet after January 6th re-form thanks to Mr Trump’s pardons. Mr Patel has insinuated that the FBI had a hand in the insurrection. That is a MAGA conspiracy theory, built on the fact that 26 FBI informants were there that day, including four who entered the Capitol. In truth the riot was among the largest intelligence failures in FBI history.

The fact that Mr Patel is even in contention for the FBI job underscores how much has changed between the two Trump administrations. In the first term, the president moved to install him as deputy director of the cia. Gina Haspel, then its boss, threatened to quit and Mr Trump backed down. He tried the same gambit at the FBI before Bill Barr intervened. Both Ms Haspel and Mr Barr had stature accrued over long, distinguished careers; with that came the wherewithal to say no. Mr Patel, by contrast, owes his ascendancy to Mr Trump. On a podcast last year, he intimated how he would handle a lawful but awful order from the president. “If the guy gives me a lawful chain-of-command authority, you want me to not execute it?”■