Who is Kash Patel? Trump’s FBI director, Pick, has pledged to punish the media

As he completes his new administration, Donald Trumphis nominees ranged from utterly unqualified to ideological nightmares. But he may have just made his scariest hire yet.

On Saturday night, Trump announced that he was selected Kash Patel to drive on FBI. Patel is one of Trump’s most loyal enforcers and a conspiracy theorist — a 2020 election denier who wants to purge the so-called “Deep State.” Recently, he publicly pledged to investigate and prosecute Trump’s enemies in the media and government.

For years, Trump has personally promised to appoint Patel to a very senior role in a new administration if he wins. Patel is a hyper-MAGA, revenge-minded Trump loyalist, to the point that even some Trump advisers recognize it as an extreme liability — even if those aides and confidantes aren’t willing to do much to stay in Patel’s way, mostly because of Trump’s protection. of man.

For example, during the 2024 campaign, Patel announced to Trump’s enemies in the press and elsewhere: “We’re going to go out and find the conspirators — not just in government, but in the media.”

Some Trump campaign officials, who quietly worried that independent voters would take offense to some of Trump’s more authoritarian outbursts, saw Patel’s public comments as, in the words of one Trump aide, “an undisciplined travesty of what I was doing”.

Now, that supposed travesty is just the law enforcement reality of the country, if Trump gets his way.

Here’s what you need to know about Patel:

Patel is devoted to Trump.

Patel’s reputation as a Trump loyalist stems not only from his overt devotion to the president-elect, but also from his explicit willingness to do anything — rule of law and consequences be damned — to please his commander-in-chief.

In August, a Trump adviser said Atlantic that the president-elect understands that “Kash is the one you say, ‘Hey, I’m not telling you to join the DNC. But…'”

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While Patel has yet to orchestrate a break-in at the Democratic National Committee on Trump’s behalf, he has been involved in enough sketchy shenanigans to raise the hackles of some of the future president’s loyal adults.

The lows include allegedly misleading Pentagon officials that he had obtained approval for Seal Team 6 to enter Nigerian territory to conduct a hostage rescue, a deception that – according to defense officials involved in the operation – almost led to an international scandal that could have endangered the lives of the extraction team. The hostage was rescued, but officials noted that the incident occurred days before the 2020 election.

It’s that kind of one-sided swagger that makes Patel’s critics wary of how far he will go to prove his worth to Trump.

Patel has been a fierce critic of the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Practically since the beginning of Trump’s first term, Patel has made a name for himself as a staunch defender of the embattled president. Then an adviser to former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Patel was heavily involved in the committee’s counter-messaging efforts against special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s alleged ties to the operations of Russian influence. .

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Patel is said to have authored the book the controversial Nunes Memoa 2018 document alleging that the FBI improperly obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) warrant against former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page.

This year Patel he asked the security clearances of government officials involved in the Russia investigation to have their security clearances permanently suspended.

“It is not an act of revenge. They had an opportunity to retract and all 51 doubled and tripled,” he said of a group of 51 intelligence officials who opposed the release of Hunter Biden’s emails ahead of the 2020 election. “So pull them. I think he will.”

Patel is determined to dismantle the so-called “deep state”.

It’s not just intelligence officials involved in the Russia investigation who Patel wants purged from the government — it’s any so-called “deep state” operative who has in the past or perhaps in the future been an obstacle to Trump’s agenda.

In his book Government Gangsters: The Deep State, Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, Patel included a list of “members of the Deep State executive branch” he had marked for punishment.

“I would close the Hoover FBI building on day 1 and reopen the next day as a museum of the deep state,” he said. said in an interview at the beginning of this year.

Patel recently told right-wing commentator Steve Bannon that he has the “bench” ready to prosecute Trump’s enemies.

The potential appointment exemplifies a larger throughline in Trump’s second round of cabinet appointments, in which he has prioritized elevating people who have promised to exact revenge on his rivals as well as help him clean up the federal government by his critics and other undesirables. — replacing them, in turn, with magisterial ideologues faithful to his agenda.

“The one thing we learned in the Trump administration on the first try, is that we have to put all American patriots, top to bottom, and we took them to law enforcement. We took them for intelligence gathering, we took them for offensive operations. We have them for the (Defense Department), the CIA, everywhere,” Patel Steve Bannon said last December.

Patel vowed to punish Trump’s enemies, including members of the media.

Patel has made it clear that one of his priorities, should he be given any shred of political power, will be to act as an attack dog for Trump’s revenge agenda.

Last December, Patel said former Trump adviser Steve Bannon that he plans to “go out and find the conspirators — not just in government, but in the media,” he said. “Yes, we’re going to go after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig the presidential election.”

“We’ll come after you. Whether it’s criminal or civil, we’ll figure it out. But yeah, we’re letting you all know, and Steve, that’s why they hate us. This is why we are tyrannical. This is why we are dictators,” he added.

According to a source familiar with the matter and another person briefed on the matter, several senior Trump staff members were furious that Patel was publicly saying the quiet side out loud — and was perceived as a spokesman for the campaign and Trump’s policies.

Former CIA Director Gina Haspel threatened to resign when Trump considered installing Patel at the agency after the 2020 election.

Patel’s reputation in Trump’s intelligence community was so toxic that in 2021, the president-elect’s former CIA director Gina Haspel threatened to quit for good when reports reached her that Trump was considering Patel for a role with the intelligence agency.

According to a contemporary report from Axios, former Vice President Mike Pence intervened directly with Trump to prevent the schism.

Haspel wasn’t the only top Trump official to oppose Patel’s elevation to a senior position in federal law enforcement. When Trump last considered installing Patel in the FBI — as deputy director — former Attorney General Bill Barr apparently experienced Trump’s chief of staff and exclaimed that such an appointment would happen “over my dead body.”

More than four years have passed since Barr’s exit from the Trump administration — and the goodness of the president-elect. While Barr is very much alive, his ability to throw his political weight into Trumpworld is long gone. Patel could soon be running the FBI.