Patel has vowed to “come after” members of the media.
President-elect Trump’s controversial cabinet picks continue. On Saturday evening, Trump announced that he intended to nominate Kash Patel to serve as the next director of the FBI. “Kash is a brilliant lawyer, investigator, and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People,” he wrote on Truth Social.
Who is Kash Patel?
Patel, the child of Indian immigrants, was born in Long Island. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Richmond and his law degree from Pace University. He worked as a public defender in Florida from 2005 to 2013. In 2014, he became a trial attorney at the Department of Justice.
Patel is a staunch Trump loyalist who caught the president’s attention while working as a staffer on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He spearheaded the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Patel served as an aide to Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, and helped author the Nunes memo, a highly controversial report that alleged the FBI abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when investigating Trump’s advisers. Patel also worked on the National Security Council; served as a senior adviser to Ric Grenell, then-acting director of national intelligence; and later was Defense Secretary Christopher Miller’s chief of staff.
During Trump’s first impeachment trial, ex-National Security Council official Fiona Wray (Trump’s former top Russia advisor) told House investigators that she believed that during Patel’s tenure as a senior NSC official, he was secretly running a unauthorized backchannel between Trump and Ukraine — a claim Patel denied.
In 2023, Patel released a book called Government Gangsters, which purports to “pull back the curtain on the Deep State” and claims, according to the book’s own marketing materials, that “a sinister cabal of corrupt” government officials plotted to overthrow then-President Trump — which is textbook QAnon lingo. In the book, Patel calls for “a comprehensive housecleaning” of the Justice Department. Donald Trump himself hailed Government Gangsters in a blurb, calling it “a brilliant roadmap” and saying, “We will use this blueprint to help us take back the White House and remove these Gangsters from all of Government!”
Patel has regularly criticized the FBI — during an interview on the Shawn Ryan Show in September, he said he’d “shut down” the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. “on day one” and reopen it as a “museum of the deep state.” In a 2023 podcast interview with Steve Bannon, he said Trump’s justice department would “come after” journalists who he said “helped Joe Biden rig elections.”
“We’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have,” he said. (A spokeswoman for Patel later told CNN that Patel meant journalists “who break the law, not just aimlessly prosecuting.”)
Will Patel be confirmed?
Although Patel’s nomination is making shockwaves, this isn’t the first time Trump has tried to install him as the head of the FBI. At the end of his first term, he considered replacing FBI director Christopher Wray with Patel, a move which then-attorney general Bill Barr vehemently opposed (and eventually talked the president out of). Barr later wrote in his memoir, “Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency.”
CNN reports that Patel is considered controversial even among Trump loyalists and is viewed as a “relentless self-promoter whose value to the president-elect largely derives from a shared disdain for established power in Washington.”
John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser, compared Patel to Joseph Stalin’s chief of police and said, “The Senate should reject this nomination 100-0.”
What are Republicans saying about Kash Patel?
On Sunday, GOP Sen. Mike Rounds told ABC that he supports current FBI director Christopher Wray: “I don’t have any complaints about the way he’s done his job right now,” he told ABC’s “This Week.” Rounds added, “we’ll see” if Patel gets confirmed and said the Senate will perform its “constitutional role” and “go through a process” which “includes advice and consent.”
That said, several GOP lawmakers have expressed their support for the nominee. Tennessee Sen. Bill Haggerty told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Patel “represents the type of change that we need to see in the FBI” and has the “relevant experience” required to “see through the fix” with the agency. Florida Sen. Ted Cruz called Patel “a very strong nominee” and said his critics are “exactly the people who are dismayed about having a real reformer come into the FBI and clean out the corrupted partisans who sadly have burrowed into senior career positions at the FBI.”
Echoing Donald Trump’s statement, House Speaker Mike Johnson called Patel “an America First patriot who will bring much-needed change and transparency to the F.B.I.” Sen. Tommy Tuberville said he’s “the perfect pick.” Congressional rep. Mike Lawler seemed to stand behind Trump’s pick, telling CNN’s “State of the Union,” “Donald Trump campaigned on reforming the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice, so I don’t know why any of this is frankly surprising to people.”
What happens to current FBI director Christopher Wray?
FBI directors serve 10-year terms, which was put in place in part to shield them from political pressure. Christopher Wray, the current FBI director, was nominated by Donald Trump in 2017 after he fired James Comey. By nominating Patel to take over as Director of the FBI, this means that Wray either needs to resign or be fired when Trump takes office, as Wray still has three years left in his 10-year term.
President-elect Trump has not yet said whether he’d fire Wray, and Wray has not made a statement about if he intends to resign.
