FBI Director Kash Patel announced this week that he has forged new law enforcement partnerships with China and Russia over the past year, citing the agreements as progress in combating transnational crime, including fentanyl trafficking, cyber fraud, and child sexual exploitation, per HuffPost’s confirmed live updates today. The FBI Director is describing collaboration with the two countries that the CIA, NSA, State Department, Defense Intelligence Agency, and every other component of the US intelligence community identifies as America’s primary foreign adversaries in the same period.
Patel made the announcement as a positive development. The partnerships are described as producing cooperation on specific law enforcement matters, which is either a pragmatic acknowledgment that criminal networks operate across borders regardless of geopolitical alignment, or an unusual framing of a relationship with governments that the rest of the US national security apparatus is simultaneously treating as existential threats. Both things are true at the same time, which is the condition that produces a Kash Patel announcement.
The fentanyl framing is relevant. Fentanyl precursors are produced in China and flow through Mexico to the United States. The Trump administration has imposed tariffs on China partly in response to Chinese fentanyl precursor production. The FBI is simultaneously partnering with China to combat fentanyl trafficking. These two positions represent a whole-of-government approach to fentanyl in the sense that two different parts of the government are doing two opposite things to China about fentanyl at the same time.
Russia is the country the US has been spending billions to oppose in Ukraine, whose invasion produced Chevron CEO Mike Wirth’s warning about the Black Sea as one of three contested maritime chokepoints, and whose intelligence services the DNI has described as actively working to undermine US elections. Patel has a new partnership with its law enforcement services.
The partnerships exist. The adversarial relationships exist. Patel announced one. The intelligence community produces reports about the other.
When the FBI Director announces partnerships with China and Russia while every other intelligence agency identifies them as primary threats, what exactly is the government’s position?
Sources
HuffPost: Live Updates — FBI Director Kash Patel, China, Russia law enforcement partnerships
HuffPost: Under Patel, FBI Forges Unprecedented Law Enforcement Ties With China, Russia
Raw Story: Kash Patel’s ‘unusual and sensitive’ trip draws scrutiny amid spending probe: report
