The Scariest Pick of All

Kash Patel is not a household name, but he’s about to become one.

Photo of Kash Patel. Alex Wong / Getty Images

Until this weekend, most Americans had never heard of Kash Patel. Unless you’ve been deep in the weeds over the battles between Trump and the Justice Department over Russian election interference, or regularly listen to Steve Bannon’s podcast, Patel’s name probably wouldn’t have come up much.

But to those of us focused daily on the possibility that the most dangerous people might be elevated to positions of authority in the incoming Trump administration, Patel is near if not at the very top of the list.

That’s because if Trump is bent on destroying democracy, and going after whom he calls “the enemies from within,” his first action would be to turn federal law enforcement into a political weapon with a guy like Patel in charge.

There’s a lot to unpack about Patel, and as his confirmation battle looms, much more will come out. But because he isn’t yet a household name like Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard or RFK, Jr., today’s piece will paint a fairly broad picture of him and his stated plans.

First, I’ll discuss Patel’s background and rise to prominence in Trump circles, highlighting his extremist views, shameless sycophancy and eyebrow-raising incompetence—qualities he shares with nearly all of Trump’s nominees.

Then I’ll lay out some of what Patel has promised, or perhaps I should say threatened, to do if handed the reins of the FBI, and why that is all uniquely bad and disturbing. The important thing to understand is that while Trump and Patel are pledging to “reform” the FBI, they are really out to seize more power with it.

Finally, I’ll assess what the confirmation process might look like for Patel and where it still might be possible to sink his nomination, even though nearly all GOP senators probably will vote to confirm him.

Russia, Russia, Russia

When the Justice Department under Special Counsel Robert Mueller launched its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump needed allies in Congress to throw sand in the gears. Help came from his toady Devin Nunes, then a Republican congressman from California who chaired the House Intelligence Committee. Nunes’s top aide was Patel.

Patel understood the assignment. He demonstrated a keen ability to deliver what Trump wanted by authoring what became known as the “Nunes memo.” That document was a broad attack upon the Justice Department and the FBI designed to discredit their investigations and the Mueller probe. It accused federal officials of bias against Trump, specifically that the FBI had improperly obtained a FISA warrant against former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page.

The memo’s declassification by Trump and release by Nunes occurred over the objections of the FBI and the intelligence community.

Trump loved how the memo, which had the imprimatur of an official document, could be used to redirect headlines, push misinformation, false equivalencies and conspiracies to his followers, and muddy up the Russia investigation. Trump began to promote Patel into increasingly higher positions, first as a staffer at National Security, then as a top advisor to the acting Director of National Intelligence.

The only reason Patel was blocked from being named deputy director of the CIA or FBI is that CIA Director Gina Haspel threatened to quit, and AG Bill Barr said “over my dead body.”

At the scene of the crimes

Near the end of the Trump presidency in November 2020, Trump named Patel chief of staff to Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller—a fateful decision given the controversy over whether to deploy troops to quell the mob attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. According to a Vanity Fair reporter embedded with Miller at the time, both Miller and Patel insisted that they “neither tried nor needed to contact the president on January 6” because they’d already gotten approval to deploy forces on that day. But senior Defense Department officials remember things differently, recalling, “They couldn’t get through. They tried to call him.” It felt to many at the time Patel was openly covering for Trump.

Patel was also given access to all of Trump’s presidential records following his term, supposedly to continue the propaganda about no Russian collusion. But when it became clear that those records contained many classified documents, Patel became embroiled in the Mar-a-Lago espionage case. He was out early with a ludicrous statement in defense of Trump, claiming to Breitbart News that Trump had declassified everything in a verbal order—a ludicrous assertion that no one else supported.

Later, after pleading the Fifth before the grand jury, Patel was hauled before it again and given immunity to testify about what really happened. Ever loyal to Trump, Patel made clear to the press at the time that his appearance was not voluntary and that he’d struck no deal with prosecutors. But if Special Counsel Jack Smith winds up publicly releasing his report on the Mar-a-Lago case, we may still learn what Patel testified to.

Patel has stayed close to Trump since, taking a position in both his campaign and in Trump’s propaganda machine at Truth Social where he has amplified QAnon conspiracies.

“Who the fuck cares?”

There are some notable stories about Patel’s prior work that demonstrate he is not only ambitious but in many ways incompetent. (A federal judge in Texas once even issued an extraordinary Order of Ineptitude against the entire Department of Justice after personally berating Patel when he was a low level federal prosecutor in counterterrorism. If you need a dose of schadenfreude, it’s a good read.)

We can take a bit of comfort in Patel’s ineptitude, because in order to be truly dangerous, Patel would need to be actually able to get things done. And on that score he has often failed. But even an incompetent radical can do a great deal of damage, as Patel’s record shows.

As Lucian Truscott wrote for The National Memo, Nunes and Patel, acting a bit the part of Dumb and Dumber, once claimed that they had documents from two sources that proved President Obama had tapped the wires of candidate Trump, and that they would be providing these to the Trump White House. But those same smoking gun documents had actually come from sources inside the Trump White House and have even been passed along to Nunes secretively one night in March of 2017. Nunes showed the documents to the press, then made a big deal of bringing them back to the White House to show Trump… even though the White House had possessed the documents all along. Remarking on this full circle circus, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) labeled Nunes “Inspector Clouseau” after the fictional bumbling French detective.

Nunes, with his trusty aide Patel, also traveled to London to try and meet with British intelligence to challenge narratives around Russian interference and the Trump campaign. But rather embarrassingly, no one from MI5, MI6 or GCHQ (the British office of government communications) would even meet with him. Nice going there, top aide.

Patel had attempted separately to track down and meet with Christopher Steele, author of the Steele dossier that purported to connect Trump to Russia. But that attempt was all done through unofficial channels, raising several eyebrows, and Patel never succeeded in speaking to Steele.

Truscott reminds us that Patel was part of the whole business that got Trump impeached the first time, writing that Patel

promptly inserted himself right in the middle of Trump’s botched attempts to use Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas – remember him? – to pressure Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to open a fake investigation of Joe Biden that Trump could use against him in the presidential campaign.

On one occasion, however, Patel’s incompetence nearly cost many U.S. lives. During a hostage rescue attempt near Nigeria, Patel was accused of misleading Pentagon officials, specifically that the U.S. had secured approval for Seal Team Six to enter Nigerian airspace. In fact, no approval had been granted, and the delay in securing it could have cost the extraction team their lives as they hovered nearby for an hour awaiting approval for a mission already underway.

Spy Talk did a write up on this incident:

As [Defense Secretary Mark] Esper recalled in his memoir, A Sacred Oath, “By the time Mike [Pompeo] and I spoke an hour later, he still didn’t have the okay from the remaining country. He also didn’t know where Patel received his information. Pompeo never spoke with him.”

“How did we receive the bad information in the first place?” Pompeo wondered.

Esper said his team “suspected Patel made the approval story up, but they didn’t have all the facts.”

Luckily, the mission still proved a success, and no U.S. forces were killed or injured. But Pentagon officials were furious. According to a report in The Atlantic, the official Patel had given the green light to confronted him in a rage.

“You could’ve gotten these guys killed!” he shouted at Patel, “What the fuck were you thinking?”

Patel responded, “If nobody got hurt, who the fuck cares?”

Patel wants to “come after people”

It’s tricky to sift fact from fiction, and concrete plans from bravado, with someone like Patel. For example, he has bragged that he would “shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and turn it into a museum of the deep state.” But it isn’t clear he could actually do this even if he tried.

He has also openly threatened to come after Hunter Biden for alleged Burisma-related crimes, even though the Justice Department via Special Counsel David Weiss had decided that it couldn’t charge Burisma-related crimes from 2014-15. As Ron Filipkowski noted,

Patel claimed in one interview after another that Hunter had gotten away with numerous felonies in connection with his business dealings in Ukraine and China, and that Joe Biden was also guilty and complicit in those crimes. James Comer spent two years investigating those allegations. He took dozens of depositions. Held numerous hearings. It was a disaster with one touted claim after another getting debunked when people actually had to present evidence under oath rather than on the internet.

Patel also said this in a separate interview specifically about Hunter:

“Hunter Biden is guilty of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Hunter Biden was shown to have been in bed with criminals from Ukraine and China to lobby the US government through the laundering of money that Hunter Biden received and leveraging his relationship with his dad. This DOJ should charge him, but they won’t. So I think that is where we need to focus (when we get in).”

That threat alone, paired with Patel being nominated as FBI Director, may have been enough to cause President Biden to change his mind on pardoning his son. After all, under an FBI run by Patel, Hunter Biden would become a constant target for a vengeful, politicized agency.

In one of his most chilling statements, Patel has also openly threatened to go after not just Trump’s political enemies but also members of the press. On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Patel said specifically that he would “come after people in the media” who had “helped Joe Biden rig elections”—combining an attack upon the freedom of the press with an outlandish false conspiracy over a stolen election. It bears noting that those who “helped Joe Biden rig elections” refers to initial efforts to suppress the Hunter Biden lap top story when it first came out because it seemed like a Russian psyop.

Patel also poses a long term threat upon the agency and its independence. As Aaron Rupar observed in his Public Notice newsletter, American democracy suffered for decades under an unaccountable FBI run by J. Edgar Hoover, who used the power of his agency to spy on and collect information about his political enemies, to seek to discredit civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., and to infiltrate organizations like the Black Panthers.

Patel is not hiding any of his intentions to resurrect this level of government surveillance and espionage upon its own citizens and leaders. But he’s also threatened to use the blunt hammer of FBI investigations and cases, both civil and criminal, to quash dissent by forcing those targeted by his agency to defend themselves in court, often at exorbitant, crushing expense.

As Tom Nichols of The Atlantic noted, the appointment of Patel is also intended to demoralize and even push out those who would refuse to serve under him:

Trump has made clear how much he hates the FBI, and he has convinced his MAGA base that it’s a nest of political corruption. In a stunning reversal of political polarity, a significant part of the law-and-order GOP now regards the men and women of federal law enforcement with contempt and paranoia. If Trump’s goal is to break the FBI and undermine its missions, Kash Patel is the perfect nominee. Some senior officials would likely resign rather than serve under Patel, which would probably suit Trump just fine.

The loss of many qualified and principled agents would make the FBI’s job of fighting crime and guarding the U.S. against foreign enemies all the more difficult, which of course would only serve to strengthen a criminal regime with ties to Russia and Saudi Arabia.

Olga Lautman, author of the Unmasking Russia newsletter, draws many parallels between Trump’s plans with Patel to what she saw in her own country. “Patel’s appointment would be a seismic shift toward a Russia-style system, where law enforcement is used as a tool of political control, not justice,” she writes. She warns of the risk of political arrests, expanding surveillance, militarized crackdowns, and legalized repression, where laws and law enforcement would no longer protect citizens but be “twisted into a tool for silencing them.”

Can Patel be stopped?

Patel has left enough of a damaging trail of extremist statements and been witness to enough Trump criminality that his appointment is by no means assured. While the Senate is controlled by the GOP 53 to 47, all Democrats are expected to oppose Patel, meaning there would need to be four GOP senators willing to risk Trump and MAGA wrath to vote down his nomination.

Should the GOP senate install him, they would be diminishing their own power in Washington and opening themselves up to the kind of intimidation and pressure that a weaponized FBI could bring to bear. GOP senators who oppose Trump in the future could find themselves the subject of surveillance, investigation and intimidation. For more centrist senators seeking to carve out a political path for themselves, it may be better to rally now to prevent Patel’s appointment than to try and resist Trump on anything later.

The press also must play a part here. Patel has never been vetted, and his background isn’t well known. At least, not yet. As we saw with Pete Hegseth, it is rare for someone to ascend in Trump’s eyes without carrying a great deal of baggage, some of it highly disqualifying. While some in the legacy media may shy from wanting to make enemies with the possible incoming FBI director, there are still many who relish the fight and understand that now is the time to take Patel down.

The public can also play a critical role here, especially citizens who live in states with Republican senators. Calls to their offices warning of the risk of a politicized, weaponized FBI are already beginning, and the heat must continue to build.

Patel is the most dangerous nominee we’ve seen, even though he is the least understood and known. It’s time to shine some serious light upon this threat and, if we can, defeat it.

Patel is a QAnon conspiracy theorist, staunch election denier and Steve Bannon protégé. If confirmed, Patel will target Trump’s political opponents, investigate the media, gut the FBI and move its headquarters out of D.C., then use it to crush domestic political dissent.

In short, he’d bring back the dark days of J. Edgar Hoover, but on steroids.

Opposition to Patel will be fierce, and expect a bruising Senate confirmation battle. For more, read “The Scariest Pick of All,” link in my bio.