It is no secret why President Trump forced out FBI Director Christopher Wray, his first-term pick to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer: Soon after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Wray told Congress that the Capitol siege was an act of “domestic terrorism.” And for the next four years, he oversaw the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history to bring the perpetrators to justice — including their instigator and cheerleader, Trump.

Even before Jan. 6, Wray repeatedly warned Congress that the problem of “domestic violent extremists” — DVEs, in bureau parlance — rivals or exceeds that of international terrorism. The threat “has been metastasizing across the country,” Wray testified in 2021, and “it’s not going away anytime soon.”

Trump, by his Day 1 blanket clemency for the Jan. 6 “DVEs,” has helped make sure of that. We’re all less safe as a consequence.

The president will have an ally in excusing right-wing extremism if the Republican-run Senate confirms the president’s choice to succeed Wray: provocateur Kash Patel, spreader of anti-FBI conspiracy theories and apologist for the Jan. 6 rioters. Patel’s confirmation hearing is set for Thursday.

For weeks Trump’s Republican allies have argued that his picks for national security posts in his Cabinet — Patel as well as Pete Hegseth, confirmed Friday for Pentagon chief, and Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence — should have been hustled to confirmation in the wake of the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans and a suicide truck explosion outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas.

Here’s the irony of that argument: Those reminders of the ongoing threat of domestic extremism only underscore why all three Cabinet picks are unfit to be security stewards. They not only lack experience for the jobs Trump wants to entrust them with, they have a record of undermining the essential institutions they would head.

Patel has warred against the FBI for years. Hegseth, aside from his history of alleged sexual assault, falling-down drunkenness and mismanagement, defended accused and convicted war criminals as a Fox News talking head and helped persuade Trump, in his first term, to grant them clemency. Gabbard, who would be in charge of all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, has opposed their past findings about Russia’s Vladimir Putin and since-deposed Syrian strongman Bashar Assad, echoing those murderous dictators’ talking points instead.

But all three Cabinet choices have the one qualification Trump cares about: loyalty to him.

That alone makes Patel, especially, a danger to America’s security. His zeal for attacking Trump’s political enemies would follow him into the FBI director’s office. Among those targets are former President Biden; former Biden, Obama and even Trump administration officials; prosecutors involved in the federal cases against Trump, now dropped, for trying to overturn his 2020 election loss and for making off with top secrets, and the witnesses in those cases.

Of course, Trump’s enemies aren’t America’s enemies. They’re not the ones whom Wray as well as numerous other security experts have warned about. Trump and Patel’s fixation on retribution would necessarily distract the bureau from the real threats, domestic and foreign, that endanger the nation.

And now Trump has exacerbated the danger by setting hundreds of Jan. 6 extremists free.

The now-pardoned QAnon Shaman, Jacob Chansley, quickly exulted on X, in all capital letters, that he was “gonna buy some [expletive] guns!!!”

Fortunately, Daniel Ball, jailed but not tried yet for allegedly assaulting officers and using an explosive on Jan. 6, wasn’t released despite the pardon because of a separate federal gun charge: He has been indicted on a charge of possessing a firearm despite past felony convictions (domestic battery by strangulation and resisting police with violence). Nice guy — and not alone among those pardoned and set free in having a criminal record.

The immediate threat, of course, is less to the American public than to the freed attackers’ families, friends and associates whom they blame for their legal travails.

Jackson Reffitt, who turned in his father, Guy Reffitt, after Jan. 6 and testified during his dad’s trial that Guy threatened to kill him and his sister if they did so, has moved and purchased two guns for protection. “I can’t imagine being safe right now,” the son lamented to MSNBC. “It goes far beyond my dad…. I get death threats by the minute now. ”

The younger Reffitt added that his dad, “an amazing father” before he came under Trump’s influence and became a leader of the anti-government Three Percenters, has been “further radicalized in prison.”

Tasha Adams, the ex-wife of Oath Keepers militia leader Stewart Rhodes, free after Trump commuted his 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy, and Rhodes’ oldest son, Dakota Adams, say that they fear for their lives at the hands of the man who, according to Tasha’s sworn statement, abused them for years. “He is somebody that had a kill list — always,” Tasha Adams told an interviewer last fall, fretting at the prospect of Trump freeing Rhodes. “And obviously, now I’m on this list and so are some of my kids, I’m sure.”

Rhodes, fresh out of prison, told reporters he hoped that Patel “cleans house” at the FBI. “I feel vindicated and validated,” he said — just as Jackson Reffitt predicted Rhodes and the others would.

Trump likes to claim, falsely, that other countries empty their jails to send criminals to America. Turns out he’s the one who’s sprung violent convicts on the land.

@jackiekcalmes