Welcome to the beat, everyone. I am Ari Melburgh. I hope if you're coming off Thanksgiving weekend and holiday time and family time. I hope it went well for you. I hope you had time not only to enjoy with your loved ones, but to perhaps get away from all this. We do this for a living. Our whole team here at MSNBC and all the journalists. We are trying to keep track on Washington, the nation, and the world for you.

But a couple days off, I hope, did you well if you took it.

Our top story tonight is Donald Trump pushing past the guardrails of nonpartisan rule of law,

making good on the threats that he did publicly make throughout the year,

some of which involved potentially unlawful, illegal conduct done

within the halls of government. While Trump backed down on that big attorney general pick that was so

controversial, Matt Gates going into the holidays, he is now announcing that he plans to fire the FBI

director, who was a holdover, actually, from his administration, fire the FBI director

that's still serving as of tonight in the Biden administration, Chris Ray, part of a 10-year term,

and take that key post and fill it with a right-wing, established conspiracy theorist,

Cash Patel, who has talked about basically defund the police on a federal level,

taking apart the FBI as we know it, closing the headquarters is one of the things he's claimed he would do if he got in this kind of job.

Patel has worked as a prosecutor. He served in Trump's first administration. He is someone who says that he is loyal not necessarily to the country, the Constitution,

certainly not to the current FBI, which he calls the deep state or worse, but is loyal to Donald Trump.

And whatever he says, Trump's MAGA movement stands for.

He has also taken positions in his adult public life that are certainly at odds with anything

we've ever seen from any FBI director in

either party's administrations. For example, selling things that would sound like a scam or a type

of fraud, for example, anti-vaccine pills that would reverse the effects of the COVID vaccine.

That's not a medical thing. It's more of a misleading sort of money-making scheme. And Patel is someone

who has claimed that if he got this kind of power in the new Trump administration, that he would

seek retribution. Now, as I've told you before, we follow these things carefully. And it is perfectly

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