Kash Patel wasn’t always a firebrand. Early in his career, as a federal prosecutor and national security lawyer at the Justice Department, Donald Trump’s current pick to head the FBI was thoughtful and level headed, according to a senior national security official who knew him during those years. It was only after Patel began digging into the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election that “it all changed,” the official says.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Initially, Patel didn’t even want the job that would change his view of the nation’s storied law enforcement agency. A friend had introduced him to Republican congressman Devin Nunes not long after Trump won the 2016 election under a cloud of Russian interference. Nunes, as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, was gearing up to look at how the FBI had handled the politically sensitive investigation of Moscow’s 2016 meddling.
After hearing about Patel’s work on terrorism prosecutions and as a legal liaison to Joint Special Operations Command, Nunes offered him a staff job on the Russia probe. At first, Patel said, ‘No.’ What Patel really wanted, he wrote in his memoir “Government Gangsters,” was to work at the National Security Council. But Nunes was persuasive, and later promised that if Patel did the grunt work for the investigation, he would “do everything he could” to get him a job in Trump’s White House.
Patel started working for Nunes, and in less than a year, Patel and South Carolina Congressman Rep. Trey Gowdy wrote what came to be known as the “Nunes memo,” detailing the thin and circular justifications the FBI had used to get a secret warrant to surveil Carter Page, a minor foreign policy advisor to Trump’s 2016 campaign, over concerns he had ties to Russian spy services.
When Patel first started digging, he said he had expected to find thorough and damaging information on Page in the FBI’s warrant applications. But instead, he found an over-reliance on salacious opposition research memos about Trump that had been paid for by allies of Hillary Clinton and written by former British MI6 spy Christopher Steele.
Patel was not alone in drawing damning conclusions about the FBI’s behavior in the Page investigation. In a December 2019 report, the Department of Justice’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, detailed 17 instances in which the FBI abused the warrant process, finding “serious performance failures” by the FBI agents and supervisors involved.
Horowitz found no political bias in the FBI’s misbehavior, but Patel decided there were darker forces at work. He became convinced that the “Russia Gate scandal” offered a “glimpse into how the government gangsters in the FBI operate, using methods of entrapment and extortion that would make the mafia proud,” he wrote. And in finding a dark conspiracy, he also got closer to Trump.
After the report came out Nunes made good on his promise and Patel was hired at Trump’s National Security Council, eventually rising to his dream job as senior director for counterterrorism. Patel wrote in his book that he barely remembers his first meetings with Trump in the Oval Office because he was “starstruck” but that “soon I had an extraordinary relationship with the president far beyond what would be expected.” The senior official recalls that Patel developed a reputation for going around the usual chain of command at the White House because he had developed “a direct line” to Trump.
That direct line may be the point for Trump. If Patel is confirmed by the Senate, the man who wrote an entire book about his concerns about political interference at the FBI could end up ushering in a new era of politically-motivated revenge. Trump has threatened to use the Department of Justice to prosecute his political adversaries. Patel wants to fire the top ranks of the FBI and has proposed shuttering FBI headquarters and moving it outside Washington. He has said he would “come after” reporters.
Patel’s confirmation is not a done deal. First, the current FBI director, Christopher Wray, who Trump appointed in 2017, still has nearly three years in his 10 year term, and would have to resign or be fired for Patel to take the job.
And there’s skepticism in the Senate over the 44-year-old Patel taking control of 10,000 special agents at the FBI with sweeping responsibility to protect the public from terrorism, organized crime, political corruption, and the threat posed by foreign adversaries like China. Trump’s former Defense Secretary Mark Esper wrote in his memoir that Patel had endangered a SEAL Team Six operation to rescue an American held hostage in Nigeria by making up an approval from the Nigerian government before it had been granted. When Trump wanted to place Patel as deputy FBI director during his first term, then-Attorney General Bill Barr said “over my dead body.” Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine says she wants to see him in a public hearing before making a decision—and review Patel’s FBI background check.
