You're listening to the On the Media Midweek podcast. I'm Michael O'Ncher.

Prior to becoming FBI director, Cash Patel made no secret of his plans for the agency.

I'd shut down the FBI Hoover Building, and I'd take the 7,000 employees that work in that building

and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops.

We're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens,

who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.

We're going to come after you.

Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out.

But yeah, we're putting you all on notice.

Leading pundits and Democrats to warn of a return to darker days.

I think he's told us exactly what he's going to do.

It's the sort of things that we have not seen an FBI director do since J. Edgar Hoover.

Trump wants to politicize the FBI, to turn it back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover,

where the FBI has its own, really lawless agenda.

We've got a recipe for severe abuse that could happen.

The kind of abuse we haven't seen since Jay Edgar Hoover illegally wiretapping

and planting evidence against people he thought were a threat to him.

But according to Beverly Gage, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover in the making of the American century, some comparisons between these two offer more insights than others.

For instance, the current FBI could be politicized in ways that even Hoover would have rejected.

Hoover built the FBI, and Patel really wants to tear it down.

I asked her to chart the rise of Jay Edgar Hoover, who led the Bureau for 48 years,

and explain how he came to weaponize the agency under the pretense of defending a, quote,

...