Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to serve as FBI director, has pushed a litany of wild conspiracy theories, complicating his aspirations to run the agency.
During a number of appearances on the War Room podcast of former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, Patel has argued that China is funding the Democrats and that the country is sending “military-aged males” across the northern and southern borders in an attempt to prepare for a preemptive strike.
Patel and others have also claimed that Barack Obama runs a “shadow network” in charge of the intelligence community and Big Tech to go after Trump. Another claim pushed on the podcast is that Attorney General Merrick Garland wants to put Trump allies in prison.
Patel argued in one podcast appearance that the Republican congressional majority should arrest Garland using a legal doctrine known as “inherent contempt,” which has never been used that way before. He now appears to be willing to use federal law enforcement to go after Trump’s detractors.
That’s just a few of the tales subscribed to by Patel, noted a new analysis by Vox.
When the first Trump White House faced allegations that the 2016 Trump campaign had colluded with Russian attempts to interfere in the election, Patel was a staffer for then-GOP California Rep. Devin Nunes, one of Trump’s top defenders at the time. Patel wrote the 2018 “Nunes memo,” which argued that the FBI application to surveil Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, was littered with errors and was politically motivated.
The memo increased Patel’s stature among Trump allies, and he later held several top roles in the first Trump administration linked to national security.
Patel thinks that foreign enemies, such as China, Iran, and drug cartels, are working to infiltrate the U.S. and that Democrats are aligned with them in the effort, Vox recounts.
While guest hosting the War Room podcast during Bannon’s stint in prison for contempt of Congress, Patel spoke to a discredited China expert, Gordon Chang, who said that the country was “planning an attack on our facilities on our soil” and that China had managed to install President Joe Biden in the White House.
“They were actually able to cast the decisive vote in 2020,” he baselessly insisted. He added that China “poured money” into the Biden campaign.
“I hope people are paying attention,” Patel chimed in.
Patel often argues that there’s a “two-tiered system of justice,” meaning that federal law enforcement uses two standards, one for allies of the “deep state” and another for adversaries. Allies, such as the Bidens, are only lightly scrutinized, while their enemies, such as Trump, are the targets of endless harassment.
The prosecutions of the president-elect are merely attempts to take down the man who threatens their control, according to Patel.
This is why Patel has an enemies list — the appendix of his book Government Gangsters lists people such as Vice President Kamala Harris and more obscure individuals, such as former State Department diplomat Elizabeth Dibble, Vox noted.
“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 on an episode of War Room last year. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
In private, Patel has said that he needs to clean up the statement, which has been widely reported since his nomination to lead the FBI, according to NBC News.
He told the network in February that reporters are “invaluable,” and backed down from his harsh words with Bannon, indicating that he thought his remark had been exaggerated. He said his threat was only for people who had broken the law.
“I would love for you to go back and get the whole quote and I appreciate you letting me talk about it,” Patel told NBC News at the time. “That full quote kind of speaks for itself. It was three words taken out of two sentences. But I basically said we’re going to use the Constitution and the courts of law to go after people criminally and civilly — if they broke the law.”
He also accused the press of working with the government to share false narratives about the former president.
“I have a problem with that,” Patel said, according to NBC News. “And I think there should be some form of accountability for it. I don’t know what that looks like.”
But he also said, “Reporters are invaluable. Like, who else is going to tell the world what’s going on in Washington or wherever, right?”
A Trump transition spokesperson told NBC News that Patel is “going to deliver on President Trump’s mandate to restore integrity to the FBI and return the agency to its core mission of protecting America.”
