President-elect Donald Trump shocked even some of his most ardent critics when he announced he would nominate former national security aide Kash Patel to lead the FBI.

Trump called Patel a “brilliant lawyer, investigator, and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People” in a post on social media over the weekend.

Patel, a former Justice Department prosecutor and fierce FBI critic, openly vowed to find ways to punish Trump’s perceived enemies. Critics say that would be an appalling use of the justice system to carry out political ends.

But if that were to occur, it would not be the first time. The agency’s longest serving director, J. Edgar Hoover, authorized covert harassment campaigns against perceived enemies like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

There are more guardrails on the FBI now than there were decades ago, historian and author Beverly Gage told NPR’s Michel Martin. But whether protections will be strong enough to hold up against pushes they haven’t been subjected to, as could happen under Patel, is the big question.

Gage, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, also believes the FBI’s politicization could damage the American public’s view of it even further.

She spoke to Morning Edition about what Patel’s pick means for the FBI and how the agency has in the past exerted vast amounts of power and influence, particularly under Hoover, its most notable director.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Michel Martin: What is the history of the FBI? How did it start and how did it become what a lot of people call the preeminent law enforcement agency in the United States?

Beverly Gage: The FBI got started pretty informally and actually pretty controversially during the progressive era. The Justice Department decided it needed its own investigators. This was around 1908. J. Edgar Hoover became the head of the bureau in 1924, and he’s really the one who put his stamp on it and turned it into, as you said, our premier law enforcement agency, but also our domestic intelligence agency. And those things have sometimes gone very well together and sometimes not so much.

Martin: How did it happen that he led the FBI for 48 years? I mean, that’s just inconceivable today.

Gage: Hoover came in at a moment when the government was just starting to expand in the 1920s. And he really built the bureaucracy in his own image and kind of managed its politics really successfully for almost half a century.

Martin: The fact that the FBI director has a 10-year term, which exceeds the two terms allowed to a president, was that a reaction to Hoover?

Gage: It was a reaction to Hoover. The analysis at the time in the ’60s and ’70s – he died in 1972 – was that future directors should not be able to amass that kind of power because it made Hoover sort of invulnerable.

Martin: Was there a bipartisan consensus at the time that there needed to be these kinds of controls?

Gage: Hoover served under four Democrats and four Republicans. He was pretty careful to be nonpartisan, really tried to keep the FBI out of politics because he thought it would damage the agency. He thought that it wasn’t right and he never would have done what we’re seeing today.

Martin: Liberals have long been suspicious of the FBI because of that legacy of covert harassment campaigns. When did the right start to become suspicious of the FBI?

Gage: When Hoover died in 1972, there would have been a lot of suspicion coming from the left and from liberals who were very critical about the FBI’s disruption of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement. He was an ideological conservative, but a lot of conservatives really thought of the FBI as the part of the state that they liked. And so one of the really interesting things that’s happened certainly in the last decade is that we can see that flip around, but we’ve never seen anything like what’s been happening in the last several years, which is certainly Trump and his allies, but in large part, the mainstream Republican Party has really turned on the FBI and the national security state in a whole new way.

Martin: What do you make of Mr. Patel’s vow that he will use the levers of the justice system to punish those who he believes have unfairly targeted the president elect? Can he do that?

Gage: Look, there are a lot more controls on what the FBI can do, both legally and in terms of intelligence than there were during Hoover’s day. What Hoover did a lot of and where I think there is some more wiggle room even today, is in harassment campaigns, in wiretapping and bugging, the use of secret information. And in some ways, the great danger at the FBI is not going after people such that we’re going to end up in court. But the use of secret information, the use of the FBI’s surveillance and intelligence powers to specifically target people who are your personal enemies, your political enemies or your ideological enemies.

Martin: Well, one of the things that Hoover did is he authorized behavior that many people today look at as completely outside the boundaries, like, for example, discovering things about people’s personal lives. Are there any guardrails against that kind of conduct happening again?

Gage: There are more guardrails now than there were then. A lot of them are internal to the FBI and to the Justice Department. The question is whether they’re going to be strong enough to hold against a push that they have never been subjected to before. The major things that happened in the 1970s, after Hoover’s death, to begin to revise control, prevent the sorts of practices that went on during his time partly were about Congress. Congressional intelligence committees came into being. They had a lot more access to what was happening in the world of intelligence. There’s a little bit of law that’s now in place that looks quite different, but a lot of it was about internal reforms within the Justice Department and the FBI itself.

Martin: Which can be abrogated if the people who run that department so choose.

Gage: It does seem that that’s possible.

Martin: Do you have a sense of just what the public thinks about the FBI now?

Gage: I think that the FBI is in some real trouble with the public. The FBI’s legitimacy, its ability to do its work, its ability to have the support of the public really depended upon its nonpartisan image. And I think this latest appointment may potentially damage it even further. Trump seems to be saying, I want to use the FBI and its powers in order to go after my enemies and I want to destroy the FBI kind of from within. And he wants both of these things at once.

This article was edited by Treye Green. The radio version was edited by Adriana Gallardo and produced by Julie Depenbrock.

In Mickalene Thomas’ art work, Black women are front and center. Her subjects are often at leisure, resting on couches and chairs, sometimes nude, and frequently accentuated by rhinestones and rich colorful patterns.

“I would describe my art as radically shifting notions of beauty by claiming space,” she says. “We’ve been supportive characters for far too long and … my art gives Black women their flowers and lets them know that they are the leading role.”

The scale of Thomas’ paintings, often made of unconventional materials like glitter, sequins, and yarn, makes them feel larger than life, with the eyes of her subjects gazing directly at the viewer. Each piece begins as a collage.

“I love the instant, tangible way having my hands at it, as if I’m sculpting with the paper, allows me the immediacy of the process,” she says. “My scissors are sort of a way of drawing.”

Thomas often recasts scenes from 19th-century French paintings, centering Black sensuality and power. She says her ultimate goal is to celebrate the “sisterhood” that exists between Black women, and which she grew up experiencing.

Mickalene Thomas describes her work as “radically shifting notions of beauty by claiming space.”

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“The trials and tribulations of my own life as a child did not negate the fact that there was a lot to love and care and family and support and comfort, even when there was struggle,” she says. “So that’s what I bring forth in my work.”

Thomas’ latest exhibition, “All About Love,” is midway through an international tour with stops in Los Angeles, Philadelphia (The Barnes Foundation, through Jan. 12, 2025), London and France. The Barnes exhibition features 50 paintings, collages, and photography spanning over two decades, inspired by the women in her life, including her mother, who died in 2012.

Interview highlights

Thomas’ 2010 “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires” reinterprets Manet’s 1863 painting. Rhinestones, acrylic and enamel on wood panel.

Mickalene Thomas /Jean Pierre and Rachel Lehman Collection/The Barnes Foundation

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On her 2010 reinterpretation of Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe”

I decided to reinterpret or reclaim this space [by depicting] … three powerful women who are fully clothed, seated and not at a picnic, just lounging and giving each other their flowers.

On finding a home in art 

I think that art has saved my life, for sure. Growing up, going to after school programs at the Newark Museum, it was, for me, this safe haven, this comfort, this refuge. I loved going there after school. I loved doing all the craft projects, the papier-mâché, exploring different ways of making self-portraits or building houses with popsicle sticks and all those things. … It was just an outlet, a way of expressing myself, but also a place to go after school until my mother got off work.

On using inexpensive craft supplies 

When I was in Pratt, I couldn’t afford oil paint. I would rummage, often through the recycled stretcher bins, and gather my materials from that. And all I could afford was craft materials because they were cheaper than oil paint, like felt and different fabrics, glitter. … So I gravitated towards those materials because they were accessible and affordable for me. But what they did was open up a way of expressing myself. … There was a struggle of completing some assignments because some you had to use oil paint or some you had to use the traditional materials. … Sometimes people [would] throw away tubes of paint because they think it’s [finished] and [I’d] just cut it open, [and] there’s still paint in there.

[Now] I love using the high-end material and still the acrylic. I use both. But now I mix them up. And so you can’t tell what’s high or low, but that’s just part of life sometimes, right? You can wear H&M with a Prada jacket and still look fabulous. … Sometimes things that are so simplistic and that cost nothing are so much more rewarding.

On her late mother’s support of her work 

She got to see it, experience it, celebrate it. She was celebrated for it. She was admired and adored. She loved the fact that she was a part of my art. She loved coming to the openings. She loved coming to my friends’ openings. She loved supporting my community. So whether it was my opening or one of my artist friends’, she would show up. And so I love that about her. She was a great advocate. She’s always been an advocate for the arts. She always supported that. When I decided I wanted to be an artist, she never looked at it as, “Why you want to go and do that?” Some of those things were in my head, but she never vocalized that. She was supportive.

Ann Marie Baldonado and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.