There's an old saying about an ungrateful dog that bites the hand that feeds it. 

Kash Patel is in nomination to take over as head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and we learn now that the FBI is already gnawing away at Patel's digits, and have been doing so for some time.

It’s going to be awkward at FBI headquarters next month when President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the bureau likely takes over.

According to a new government watchdog report, the FBI spied on its prospective new boss, Kash Patel.

Patel has promised to “clean house” at the Hoover Building, and hold all those who “abused their power” during the Russiagate “witch hunt” accountable.

He might start with the officials and agents who secretly vacuumed up his phone records and emails starting in late 2017, when he led a House Intelligence Committee investigation into the FBI’s reliance on Hillary Clinton’s false opposition research to surveil a Trump campaign official as a supposed “Russian agent.”

According to a nearly 100-page report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, the FBI subpoenaed the records as part of an investigation it opened to find out whether congressional staffers leaked classified information about its Trump-Russia “collusion” case to the Washington Post and other media.

There is a fair amount of house-cleaning to be done, and "house-cleaning" we can presume includes "firing a lot of people." The timing of all this is interesting, as is the FBI's pressuring private companies to turn over information but prohibiting them from informing the people whose information was turned over.

That's banana-republic stuff there, folks.

Working with career prosecutors at Justice, the FBI compelled Google and Apple to turn over the sensitive private information of subjects the FBI identified “between September 2017 and March 2018,” a period when Andrew McCabe was the acting FBI director. (Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions was out of the loop, the report said, having recused himself from the Russia probe.)

Mr. Patel knows now, though, and he's justifiably peeved about it:

But Patel remained in the dark until 2022, when Google finally was cleared to send him a copy of the subpoena. Outraged, he told me at the time: “The FBI and DOJ subpoenaed my personal records while I caught them doing this to Page back in 2017.”

He said the McCabe FBI didn’t want anybody to find out that it “literally copied and pasted” Democrat opposition research, wholesale, into wiretap-warrant applications.

The FBI, yes, needs major reform. Frankly, it would not be any over-reaction for Patel to simply dismiss anyone involved in this debacle. That would be what we might call "a good start." Another good step, frankly, would be to empty out the Hoover Building, sell it off as surplus property, and send the agents working there out to the field offices to be cops. That is their purpose, right?

But the problems at the FBI and indeed the Department of Justice are deeply ingrained and cultural - and cultural changes are the hardest to make and enforce. It took years to get our justice system to this point, where it is a two-tiered and deeply partisan setup. It will take years to get it straightened out, as well. Every journey, though, begins with a single step, and that single step (we hope) was taken on November 5th.

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A new broom, they say, sweeps clean. Mr. Patel, when he walks into the FBI headquarters to take charge, would be well advised to take along a great big old shop broom, because there's likely a lot of dust bunnies in many dark corners in the J. Edgar Hoover Building.