If Kash Patel has his way, he has written, the FBI’s top ranks will be fired. The bureau’s headquarters in downtown Washington will be emptied out and shuttered, and its authority will be “dramatically limited and refocused,” he wrote in his 2023 book.
President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Patel to lead the FBI has set off spasms of alarm among many national security veterans, law enforcement officials and others who have worked with him. The former prosecutor and national security aide appears to have secured the support of at least some key Republican senators, but critics say Patel lacks the record and temperament needed to run the country’s premier law enforcement agency. They point to his lack of experience as well as his history of remarks attacking Trump opponents and threatening to punish perceived foes.
“The idea that he is going to become the FBI director is appalling,” said Charles Kupperman, who was deputy national security adviser in the previous Trump White House while Patel worked as an aide to the National Security Council. “His legal career is modest at best. His ideas are ludicrous.”
Heavy on bombastic rhetoric
Patel’s record is light on managing a large workforce and heavy on bombastic rhetoric and fervent loyalty to Trump, according to a review of his published writing and interviews with more than 20 people who have worked with him over the years. He also has at times overstated his achievements.
His detractors, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss information they were not authorized to disclose, said they fear Patel would weaponize an agency with sweeping powers and misuse sensitive intelligence.
Some Republicans have hailed the pick, however, saying that if confirmed Patel would bring needed changes to an agency they think has become too politicized. Trump, for one, called him “the most qualified” person ever tapped to lead the FBI. Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Oklahoma, said: “If you’re going to clean up the FBI … Kash is the perfect person.”
Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney general, has also backed Patel for the FBI job. During the first day of Bondi’s confirmation hearing Wednesday on Capitol Hill, Democratic senators repeatedly grilled her about the FBI nominee.
“I have known Kash, and I believe that Kash is the right person at this time for this job,” Bondi said. She also highlighted the chain of command.
“Mr. Patel would fall under me and the Department of Justice,” Bondi said, adding that she would make sure “all laws are followed, and so will he.”
Laudable accomplishments
Robert O’Brien, Trump’s last national security adviser, said in an interview that Patel had laudable accomplishments – including working to win the release of Americans held hostage overseas – “but never made a big deal about it.”
“Kash Patel has served in key national security positions throughout the government,” Trump transition spokesman Alex Pfeiffer said in a statement. “Kash won an award from the DOJ for his efforts as a terrorism prosecutor in the National Security Division. He is beyond qualified to lead the FBI and will make a fantastic Director.”
Since Trump announced his intent to have Patel lead the FBI, neither man has publicly detailed their plans for the bureau or outlined how, as director, Patel might try to reshape it. Patel’s book and public comments offer some detail about possible changes – including his desire to expel the FBI’s leaders and close down its headquarters – and more could emerge when Patel is questioned during his confirmation hearings.
In meetings with senators ahead of his confirmation hearings, Patel said he wants to increase FBI partnerships with local and state law enforcement throughout the country, according to a person familiar with those conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door sessions. He has also emphasized the need for increased transparency, as some senators have complained their requests for information from the bureau frequently go unanswered, this person said.
The bureau was run for decades by J. Edgar Hoover, whose tenure was marked by abuses of power and harassment. After his death, Congress passed a law limiting FBI directors to no more than 10 years on the job, a period that could insulate them from the political shifts spurred by presidential elections.
Patel would lead an organization with more than 30,000 employees, more than 400 offices across the country and dozens more around the world. He would succeed Christopher A. Wray, whom Trump picked to lead the bureau in 2017 – after firing the director at the time, James B. Comey, over his role in the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Wray would step down
Trump soured on Wray, too. He weighed firing him during his first term and then, after winning the 2024 election, announced plans to install Patel, effectively telling Wray to quit or be fired. Wray announced last month that he would step down at the end of the Biden administration.
Before taking over the bureau, Wray and former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III had both led the Justice Department’s criminal division of more than 600 lawyers, a job that entails coordinating with U.S. attorney’s offices around the country. Comey held a top Justice Department role and led the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which handles some of the highest-profile national security cases in the country.
Patel would bring a different résumé to the director’s office. Over the past two decades, he moved from working as an assistant public defender to serving as a Justice Department prosecutor, congressional committee staffer, White House aide and Pentagon staffer. He became deeply entwined with Trump’s world, serving as a close ally and an assiduous public critic of those investigating and prosecuting Trump and other perceived antagonists.
Patel has bristled in the past at suggestions that he was not experienced enough for top jobs in government. William P. Barr threatened to resign as attorney general when Trump considered making Patel deputy FBI director during his first White House term, Barr wrote in his memoir. Patel was not qualified and would be picked “over my dead body,” the memoir says.
In his own book, “Government Gangsters,” Patel wrote that he had worked in the government for 15 years and was the same age Barr had been when he was first named attorney general in 1991, during the administration of George H.W. Bush. (Before holding that post, Barr worked in top Justice Department jobs, including as deputy attorney general, the department’s No. 2 position. He was reappointed by Trump to lead the department in 2019.)
The book includes a list of dozens of former and current government officials whom Patel describes as corrupt or disloyal and calls “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State.” He declared that Wray was “corrupt,” depicted the bureau as profoundly politicized and said it was “directed against the political opponents of the ruling class.”
Several people familiar with Patel said his comments about the bureau suggest little understanding of how it operates. They expressed concern about him wielding control over investigative decisions and having access to immense amounts of sensitive intelligence.
The bureau is charged with everything from gathering evidence in investigations to deploying counterterrorism teams and tracking foreign spies on U.S. soil. Justice Department prosecutors assess evidence gathered by the FBI to decide whether to seek indictments, which happens in a small percentage of cases. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the agency’s work shifted to focus more on national security, terrorism and intelligence-related matters, in addition to high-profile domestic crime.
“The director is going to have access to the most sensitive intelligence in the United States just like any other principal,” said Chris Costa, a former counterterrorism expert at the National Security Council who spent more than three decades working in intelligence at the Defense Department and now directs the International Spy Museum. He did not speak directly about Patel.
Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Patel’s allegiance to Trump could mean he defers to the president when other FBI directors have maintained their independence. Wray and his predecessor both oversaw Trump-related investigations and probes into Democratic and Republican politicians.
“Donald Trump is going to get what I think he wants, which is total control over the prosecutorial apparatus,” Himes said.
Patel’s government career began in the public defender’s office in Miami, where he landed after a lucrative job at a prestigious law firm did not materialize, according to his book. Bennett Brummer, who served as the elected local public defender in Miami for more than three decades and ran the office when Patel was hired, said colleagues from the time remember him as unremarkable.
“If he were trouble, we would know,” Brummer said. “If he were exceptionally talented, somebody would’ve commented on that.”
Todd Michaels, who worked with Patel in that office, described him as “very much a part of the team. He was a very good lawyer … not afraid to try a case. Represented his clients well. Had a charm about him that played well with juries and was good on his feet.”
From there, Patel moved to the federal public defender’s office in Miami and then to Washington, working as a counterterrorism attorney in the Justice Department’s National Security Division (NSD).
“He was just a mid-level employee who did what he was asked to do,” one former NSD official said. “He’s exaggerated what he did, but the work he did was fine.”
One area where Patel appears to have amplified his record, this official and others said, was the federal prosecution of the ringleader of the 2012 attack on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. The assault killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador.
The case was handled by the local U.S. attorney’s office in Washington and the FBI. Patel wrote in his book that he was “leading the prosecution’s efforts” at the Justice Department headquarters in Washington and coordinating multiple teams.
The counterterrorism section in which Patel worked was not in the lead, according to the former NSD official. “He didn’t make any prosecutorial decisions,” this person said. Instead, Patel “was one of several line attorneys” supporting the U.S. attorney’s office.
Patel showed little respect for the chain of command, operating above his level of knowledge, according to two people familiar with the case. He left the Benghazi team after less than a year, when complaints reached senior officials in both the U.S. attorney’s office and the NSD, according to former colleagues.
Patel’s career then began shifting toward Trump. In the spring of 2017, Patel moved to Congress and worked for Rep. Devin Nunes, R-California, then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He co-authored a 2018 memo accusing the FBI of abusing its surveillance authority to monitor a former Trump campaign adviser.
The FBI denounced the memo. The Justice Department inspector general in 2019 found “serious” mistakes in applications to wiretap former campaign aide Carter Page but concluded that the bureau had acted without political bias in opening an investigation into potential links between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.
In his book, Patel wrote that he resisted working on the Hill, but agreed once Nunes pledged to “do everything he could to get me a job at the National Security Council (NSC) – a dream job of mine.” After Republicans lost control of the House, Nunes urged Trump’s White House to hire Patel to the council.
John Bolton, who was national security adviser at the time, resisted the effort, Patel wrote in his book. But Nunes kept pushing, and eventually Trump intervened and made it happen.
“I didn’t think he was qualified,” Bolton said in an interview. “He demonstrated no policy aptitude at all. I was forced to hire him.”
Kupperman described a 2019 meeting in the Oval Office where Patel was sitting next to the president and Trump said he wanted to expand his portfolio to ensure White House personnel were “completely loyal to the administration.”
At the time, Kupperman was Bolton’s deputy. He said he and others at the meeting voiced opposition to the idea, and it was eventually dropped.
In an interview with Trump last month, NBC’s Kristen Welker asked the incoming president whether he would direct Patel to launch investigations into perceived enemies. “No,” Trump said. “I mean, he’s going to do what he thinks is right.”
Welker followed up, asking whether Patel might think such investigations were the right thing to do.
“If they think that somebody was dishonest or crooked or a corrupt politician,” came Trump’s answer, “I think he probably has an obligation to do it.”
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