Kash Patel spent years preparing for this moment. Whether out of sincere devotion or just cynically acting in his own self-interest, Patel has repeatedly demonstrated his subservience to Donald Trump, from publishing a kid's book claiming the president-elect was a victim of a "deep state" plot to lying to congressional investigators about the Jan. 6 insurrection.
A former aide to Devin Nunes, a California Republican who retired from Congress and now leads Trump's social media company, Truth Social, Patel is indeed best known for "being willing to do sort of whatever Donald Trump would like him to do," as NBC News reporter Ryan Reilly explained in an interview with PBS. In Trump's first term, Patel's devotion saw him rise from an aide to the National Security Council to chief of staff for Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller — this, according to the Wall Street Journal, after he urged Trump to fire his previous Pentagon chief, Mark Esper, for refusing to deploy troops against Black Lives Matter protesters.
Patel's loyalty — a willingness to embrace Trump's most extreme instincts — is why the president-elect has named him to lead the FBI. It's not just about Trump naming his own people: He already has one of his guys installed at the bureau, its current director, Christopher Wray, having been appointed to a 10-year term in 2017. But being a Trump-appointed Republican is not enough for Donald Trump anymore, who has since complained about Wray's role in the arrests of Jan. 6 rioters and the 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago.
Patel is not just another Trump guy, then, but properly understood as the leader of his official fan club.
"This is much worse than even the Matt Gaetz nomination," Michael Sozan, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told The New Republic's Greg Sargent. "This is all about loyalty," he said, "and this is all about another word that many of us will start using more and more: kakistocracy. That means government by the absolute least competent to run government, the most ill-qualified. That is Kash Patel."
That's not to say that Patel will merely bungle the job, Sozan noted, but that he will lead the FBI as a MAGA partisan, if confirmed. "My reaction really is one of alarm," he said, describing Patel as "one of Trump's henchmen from the very beginning, one of the most loyal of all of the loyalists in the small circle."
Patel, helpfully, has been vocal about what that could mean in practice.
“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, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice,” Patel told former Trump advisor Steve Bannon last year.
In a more recent podcast appearance, noted by ABC News, Patel called for stripping the security clearances of intelligence officials who had warned about Russian election interference and even shutting down the FBI's headquarters in Washington, DC, and transferring its thousands of employees to field offices across the country. "Open it up the next day as the museum to the deep state," he said.
Patel has also authored a book that Trump himself described as a "blueprint" for his second term and a "roadmap to end the Deep State's reign." As ABC News reported, that book, "Government Gangsters," is an explicit call for retribution against those within the FBI who dared investigate Trump and the far right — a call not just for purges but for prosecutions "to the fullest extent of the law."
According to Patel, "the FBI has become so thoroughly compromised that it will remain a threat to the people unless drastic measures are taken." Those measures include prosecuting officials involved in the FBI's investigation of ties between Russia and the Trump campaign as well as those who elected not to indict Hillary Clinton. All told, he added for clarity, the changes he envisions should make Democrats "very afraid."
Patel's MAGA posturing still needs buy-in from a majority of Senate, where Republicans' slim majority means only a handful of dissenters can derail a nomination. So far, at least, there is no sign of an open revolt. Appearing Sunday on ABC's "This Week," Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., stressed that the founding fathers envisioned a "constitutional separation" between the president and law enforcement. That said: "We accept that the president should have the people that he wants in his Cabinet and on his team. Every president wants that. We give them the benefit of the doubt."
People who have worked with Patel, however, aren't as interested in deferring to the president-elect's judgment.
“He’s absolutely unqualified for this job," Charles Kupperman, a deputy national security adviser during Trump's first term, told the Wall Street Journal. Patel is "untrustworthy," he said, and his nomination an insult. “It’s an absolute disgrace to American citizens to even consider an individual of this nature."
