Kash Patel would bring bravado and baggage to FBI role
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Mr Kash Patel’s record as a public official and public comments are likely to provoke intense questioning when the Senate weighs his nomination.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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WASHINGTON – Few people tapped for any top federal post, much less a job as vital as Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director, have come with quite so much bravado, bombast or baggage as Mr Kash Patel.
On Nov 30, Mr Patel, 44, a Long Island-born provocateur and right-wing operative, was named by US President-elect Donald Trump to lead the FBI
Mr Patel’s maximum-volume threats to exact far-reaching revenge on Trump’s behalf have endeared him to his boss and Trump allies, who say the bureau needs a disrupter to weed out bias and reshape its culture.
But his record as a public official and his incendiary public comments are likely to provoke intense questioning when the Senate weighs his nomination – and determines whether he should run an agency charged with protecting Americans from terrorism, street crime, cartels and political corruption, along with the threat posed by China, which Mr Wray has described as existential.
Here are some of the things Mr Patel has said and done that could complicate his confirmation.
Accused of botching a hostage rescue
In October 2020, Mr Patel, then a senior national intelligence official in the Trump administration, inserted himself into a secret effort by members of Seal Team Six to rescue Philip Walton, 17, an American kidnapped by gunmen in Nigeria.
Mr Patel, whose involvement broke with protocol, assured the State and Defence departments that the Nigerian government had been told of the operation.
But defence officials could not confirm the approval, and were forced to scramble to obtain the necessary clearance even as the aircraft circled over the target, according to accounts confirmed by a senior defence official familiar with the operation.
Walton was eventually rescued. But former defence secretary Mark Esper, writing in his memoir, said that Mr Patel “made the approval story up”, potentially endangering everyone involved.
Plans to shut down FBI headquarters
In a 2023 book, Mr Patel supported a plan to greatly weaken the bureau’s central command structure through a range of what he termed “reforms”, including shuttering the bureau’s headquarters and dispersing its staff and leadership to field offices around the country.
“We need to get the FBI the hell out of Washington, DC,” wrote Mr Patel, who has subsequently suggested the building be reopened as a museum to the Trump-slain deep state.
He said he wants to move the headquarters outside the capital and eliminate service in Washington as a step to promotion “to prevent institutional capture and curb FBI leadership from engaging in political gamesmanship”.
Trump, for his part, does not appear to be on board with that plan. Earlier in 2024, he opposed moving the FBI’s main offices to Maryland, writing on social media that “THE NEW FBI BUILDING SHOULD BE BUILT IN WASHINGTON, DC”.
The headquarters plan is no lark, however. It is part of a broader strategy, outlined in Mr Patel’s book, that would entail transferring some decision-making from Washington to lower-ranking Justice Department officials in offices around the country.
About 80 per cent of federal employees already work outside the capital.
Exaggerated role in Benghazi investigation
Mr Patel, who began his career as a federal public defender in Florida, took a job as a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s counter-terrorism division in 2014, a move that served as a springboard to prominence and power.
He has repeatedly claimed that during this period he was the “lead prosecutor” in the government’s pursuit of the perpetrators of a 2012 attack on a US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans.
He had no role on the Benghazi trial team. The pretrial investigation was handled by a team led by the FBI and the US attorney’s office in Washington. In his capacity as a junior prosecutor, he routed arrest warrants and the like up the chain for approval, according to multiple people involved in the case.
Pushed Trump’s “Russia hoax” narrative
Mr Patel, then a House Republican aide, cemented his alliance with Trump in 2018 when he helped write a memo detailing errors made by the Justice Department in securing surveillance warrants on a Trump adviser suspected of communicating with Russia during the 2016 election.
He was one of the first Trump allies to promote the idea that the investigation was, as he put it in his book, “nothing more than a political hit job”.
His efforts impressed Trump, who elevated him to a series of jobs in the defence, national security and intelligence establishment – where he chafed against officials with greater experience and institutional distance from Trump.
While the Justice Department’s inspector-general determined that the bureau had acted without political bias, investigators unearthed many mistakes associated with the secret surveillance warrants, a small part of the larger Russia investigation.
A four-year investigation by a special counsel appointed under Trump, Mr John Durham, determined that prosecutors had pursued the case too aggressively because they were convinced of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia.
But he found no evidence that officials had been motivated by political animus, contrary to claims by Trump and Mr Patel, and did not indict any of the senior FBI officials who oversaw the investigation and had been targeted by Trump’s allies. The report revealed little substantial new information about the inquiry, known as “Crossfire Hurricane”.
Promoted lies about fraud in the 2020 election
Mr Patel, who was working in the Pentagon during the 2020 election, has consistently promoted Trump’s false claims
He was so active in promoting falsehoods, and so wired in with the White House, that his superiors at the Defence Department took notice.
Mr Mark Milley, then the chair of the Joint Chiefs, summoned Mr Patel and another Trump-allied aide to warn them against violating the sacrosanct separation of the military from politics, according to an account in The New Yorker.
Over the past four years, Mr Patel has continued to echo Trump’s election falsehoods – and has gone so far as to suggest he would target journalists who dispelled the false claims if he ever returned to power.
“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections – we’re going to come after you,” he said in a 2023 interview with Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
Sold children’s books and diet supplements
Mr Patel stuck close to Trump during their four years out of power – politically and commercially.
He operates the Kash Foundation, a non-profit that he has said offers financial help to a range of recipients, including the families of people charged for their roles in the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Mr Patel has also devoted much of his time to personal moneymaking ventures. He established a consulting company that has collected about US$465,000 (S$625,000) from Trump’s social media company and political action committee.
Like Trump, he has embraced online retail (under the brand K$H, a logo he displays on his lapel and a scarf he often wears at Trump events). He has hawked wooden plaques, “Warrior Essentials” anti-vaccine diet supplements and pro-Trump T-shirts.
None of these wares are as striking as Mr Patel’s line of children’s books, in which he portrays himself as a wizard of the Gandalf type, wearing a midnight-blue robe covered with glittering stars and half moons.
Trump, broad-shouldered and crowned, is known as “the King”. NYTIMES
