President-elect Donald Trump announced Saturday he would pick Kash Patel, the former chief of staff to to the acting secretary of defense during the first Trump administration, to serve as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“Kash is a brilliant lawyer, investigator, and “America First” fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People,” Trump wrote in a post to Truth Social, arguing Patel would “bring back Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity to the FBI.”
Patel, who will have to earn Senate confirmation to become FBI director, has earned a reputation as the ultimate Trump loyalist who has called for a purge of perceived enemies in the Justice Department and intelligence agencies.
A former public defender who rose to increasingly senior national security posts in the final year of Trump’s first term, Patel has promoted the falsehood that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump as well as baseless claims that federal bureaucrats in the “deep state” tried to overthrow the former president.
Patel has called for replacing “anti-democratic” civil servants in law enforcement and intelligence with “patriots” who he says will work for the American people, and in his memoir described the current political moment as “a battle between the people and a corrupt ruling class.”
“The Deep State is an unelected cabal of tyrants who think they should determine who Americans can and cannot elect as president, who think they get to decide what the president can and cannot do, and who believe they have the right to choose what the American people can and cannot know,” Patel wrote in “Government Gangsters.”
Former intelligence officers, Democratic lawmakers and Western officials worry that a hard-line Trump loyalist like Patel could reshape the makeup and mission of the nation’s intelligence apparatus, stripping it of its apolitical outlook and skewing assessments to adhere to a White House agenda. And they fear a worst-case scenario in which the spy agencies could be turned into tools to target political opponents.
During the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Patel gained favor with Trump as a congressional staffer after drafting a memo that accused the FBI of making mistakes in how it obtained a warrant to conduct surveillance of a former Trump campaign volunteer.
Many of the memo’s assertions were later disproved. An inspector general report found fault with the FBI’s surveillance during the Russia investigation, but also found no evidence that federal authorities had acted in a politically partisan way.
Patel went on to serve in Trump’s White House National Security Council, briefly as an adviser to the acting director of national intelligence and as chief of staff to Defense Secretary Chris Miller at the end of Trump’s first term.
During the closing months of Trump’s tenure, the former president proposed Patel to serve as the deputy CIA director or to take over the FBI. Then-CIA Director Gina Haspel, a career intelligence officer, threatened to resign if Patel was installed and the attorney general at the time, William Barr, vehemently objected. Trump ended up dropping his plans.
“Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency,” Barr later wrote in his memoir.
Patel and some other Trump loyalists suspected there was information hidden away in the intelligence community that could shed more light on bureaucratic plotting against Trump and in favor of Joe Biden, former officials said.
“It was a fairly conspiratorial environment at that point,” said Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to then-Vice President Mike Pence.
Echoing Trump’s “deep state” rhetoric
Patel has echoed Trump’s rhetoric labeling journalists as traitors and calling for “cleaning out” allegedly disloyal federal bureaucrats. In an interview last year with longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon, Patel vowed to go after “conspirators” who he claimed had abused their positions in government.
“The one thing we learned in the Trump administration the first go-around is that we have to put in all-American patriots top to bottom,” Patel told Bannon.
“And the one thing that we will do that they never will do is that we will follow the facts and the law and go to courts of law and correct these justices and lawyers who have been prosecuting these cases based on politics and actually issuing them as lawfare,” he said.
“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media — yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’re going to figure that out — but yeah, we’re putting you all on notice,” Patel said.
Trump and his allies first started referring to a “deep state” soon after the 2016 election, viewing the investigation into Russia’s interference in the election — and its outreach to the Trump campaign — as an attempt to sabotage his presidency.
Patel joined Trump on the 2024 campaign trail and has promoted his memoir, a film adaptation of the memoir and a line of children’s books featuring him as a “wizard” defending “King Donald.”
He has touted his charity, the Kash Foundation, as a way of helping the needy and providing legal defense funds to whistleblowers and others. But the foundation has released few details of its finances.
According to tax filings for 2023, revenue for the foundation increased to $1.3 million last year, compared with $182,000 in 2022, with much of the money coming from donations. The foundation listed expenses of $674,000, with about $425,000 spent on advertising and marketing.
He also has appeared on Truth Social peddling “Warrior Essentials” anti-vaccine diet supplements, which are supposed to “reverse” the effects of Covid-19 vaccines.
In his memoir, Patel recounts how after law school he dreamed of landing a job with a law firm and a “sky-high salary” but “nobody would hire me.” Instead, he became a public defender in Miami.
Referring to his stint at the Justice Department after his work as a public defender, Patel has claimed he was the “lead prosecutor” for a federal case against a Libyan accused of taking part in the lethal 2012 attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi.
“I was the main Justice lead prosecutor for Benghazi,” Patel said in an interview on a YouTube channel hosted by a former Navy SEAL, Shawn Ryan.
But in Justice Department announcements at the time, Patel was not listed as the lead prosecutor or as part of the legal team.
At a 2016 proceeding in Houston for a case involving a Palestinian refugee who pleaded guilty to supporting ISIS, a federal judge, Lynn Hughes, dressed down Patel and kicked him out of the chambers, according to a court transcript.
The judge repeatedly questioned why Patel had flown all the way from Central Asia to be present at the proceeding, as the judge said his presence was unnecessary. And he scolded Patel for failing to dress appropriately.
“Act like a lawyer,” the judge said. He accused Patel of being a Washington bureaucrat who would interfere in a case where he was not needed. “‘You’re just one more nonessential employee from Washington.”
In his memoir, Patel wrote that he had rushed back from Tajikistan and did not have a suit to wear to the courtroom, and that he chose not to talk back to the judge “who had it out for me” to avoid damaging the government’s terrorism case.