Who is Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to replace FBI director Chris Wray?
Kash Patel, a staunch defender of Donald Trump, is the president-elect’s pick to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he said Saturday night.
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray would have to step down in the middle of his 10-year term, or Trump would have to fire him, for Patel to be nominated. If nominated, he would be subject to Senate confirmation.
“Kash did an incredible job during my First Term,” Trump said on Truth Social, citing Patel’s various roles including at the Defense Department and the National Security Council. The president-elect said that Patel would “bring back Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity to the FBI.”
Patel, who served as a senior official in the first Trump administration, is the author of a book that includes a list of “deep state” officials to target – which Trump called a “blueprint to help us take back the White House and remove these Gangsters from all of Government,” according to promotional material.
Here’s what to know about Patel.
He supports Trump’s push for retribution
Accounts of Patel’s rise from an obscure Hill staffer to one of the most powerful players in the intelligence community have centered on a key detail: his loyalty to Trump and willingness to go after his perceived opponents throughout the bureaucracy.
Patel’s appointment could stoke growing concern about potential retribution among those whom Trump has described as his enemies, in the government and beyond. Some named on his “deep state” target list have begun taking precautions, the Washington Post has reported.
In a 2023 interview on “War Room,” a podcast hosted Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s onetime chief strategist, Patel threatened to go after journalists if appointed to a role in a Trump administration. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly – we’ll figure that out,” he said.
The Associated Press described Patel this year as Trump’s “trusted aide and swaggering campaign surrogate who mythologizes the former president while promoting conspiracy theories and his own brand.”
He served in the first Trump administration
Patel held multiple roles: chief of staff to a cting defense secretary Christopher Miller, deputy assistant to the president, senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council and deputy to the acting director of national intelligence.
In his final job as the chief of staff at the Defense Department, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote in 2021, Patel challenged the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, nearly becoming the acting director of the CIA. Of his stint under the DNI, Ignatius wrote that Patel effectively ran the place.
In the last months of his presidency, Trump considered installing Patel as the FBI’s deputy director. That move was blocked by Attorney General William P. Barr. Barr reportedly told White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that Patel would be deputy director “over my dead body.”
Patel is a director on the board of Trump Media Technology Group, the company that owns Truth Social. He is active on the platform, frequently resharing Trump’s posts to his 1.35 million followers.
He played a key role in the Nunes memo
Patel served as an adviser to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., when Nunes chaired the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 and 2018. A memo written by Patel, claiming that the surveillance warrant targeting an adviser to the Trump campaign was flawed, quickly became the center of a political firestorm.
The Nunes memo, as it came to be known, said the application for a warrant to surveil Carter Page, a Trump foreign policy adviser in 2016, was based in part on information from a former British intelligence officer who allegedly was biased against Trump. The memo concluded that the warrant was invalid and thus the investigation into Trump regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election was tainted.
He is a child of immigrants
In his book “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy,” Patel describes his parents as working-class Hindu immigrants from India. The family did not eat meat at home, he writes, describing weekly jaunts to the Jackson Heights neighborhood in Queens with his father for butter chicken.
He was drawn to becoming a doctor, like a “stereotypical Indian American,” he writes, but gave up after looking up medical school programs and coming across a group of golf-playing defense lawyers while caddying at the Garden City Country Club in Long Island.
“Instead of being a first generation immigrant golf caddie, I could be a first-generation immigrant lawyer at a white shoe firm making a ton of money,” he wrote.
Patel attended the University of Richmond and earned a law degree at Pace University in New York before working for nearly a decade as a public defender in Florida.