FBI director nominee Kash Patel has openly boasted of plans to use the government to exact revenge on President-elect Donald Trump's political enemies.
But Paul Rosenzweig, the former deputy assistant secretary for policy at DHS during the George W. Bush administration, thinks that Patel may have already blown up his own plans to go after Trump critics simply by talking about them in the open.
Writing at The Bulwark, Rosenzweig notes that criminal defendants are afforded significant protections from prosecution if they have evidence that they are the victims of a vindictive prosecution.
While such evidence is normally hard to come by, Rosenzweig believes that Patel has handed it to them on a silver platter.
"But if Kash Patel becomes director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as President Trump has suggested he should, he will be the poster child of vindictiveness—and his infamous public declarations of retribution may lead to the dismissal of any politically motivated prosecutions he initiates against his enemies list of 'Deep State' opponents," he writes.
ALSO READ: 'Nothing that can be done': Trump makes first comment on at-risk Pete Hegseth nomination
Rosenzweig also believes that Patel's overt thirst for revenge could sabotage his prosecutions even if he manages to uncover real crimes committed by Trump's enemies.
"Even if no presumption of vindictiveness arises because the prosecution is objectively reasonable, a defendant may still prevail if he can show that the prosecutor was actually vindictive in his prosecution," he contends. "In other words, a defendant can still succeed if he or she can present direct evidence showing that the prosecution was intended as retribution, notwithstanding the fact that actual crimes may have occurred."
Patel, he adds, "has gone a long way to supporting a claim of vindictiveness and helping defendants who might be charged to make their case" by literally publishing an "enemies list" and telling Steve Bannon that he intended to prosecute the media.