7 Things You Need to Know About Kash Patel, Trump’s Dangerous Pick for FBI Director
Meet the unqualified, right-wing sycophant who could soon be in charge of America’s top domestic intelligence and law enforcement agency.
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Every time we think Donald Trump couldn’t possibly make a more shocking or egregious appointment or nomination, the president-elect goes and proves us wrong.
From Peter Hegseth to Matt Gaetz; Gaetz to Tulsi Gabbard; Gabbard to RFK Jr.
And now a Trump nominee perhaps more dangerous than them all: Kash Patel.
Back in August 2022, when I was at MSNBC, I did a deep dive into Patel’s past and concluded with this rather prophetic warning: “If Trump runs again in 2024 and wins the presidency, and seeks to crush all the investigations against him and the people who pursued them, who do you think Donald J. Trump will want to put in charge of the FBI? Yeah, this guy.”
On Saturday, Trump announced that he would appoint Kash Patel to be the next director of the FBI, sending “shockwaves through Washington” (technically, there isn’t even a vacancy as the current FBI director Christopher Wray, appointed by Trump in 2017, has three years left to serve on his 10-year term).
Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe told CNN he believes Patel’s nomination is part of “a plan to disrupt, to dismantle, to distract the FBI, and to possibly use it as a tool for the president's political agenda.” Former national security adviser John Bolton, who was once Patel’s boss in the Trump White House, even called on the Senate to “reject this nomination 100-0."
It is difficult to overstate how unqualified, disturbing, and dangerous this particular Trump nominee is.
Here are seven things you need to know about Kash Patel.
1. He Lacks Qualifications and Experience
The 44-year-old Kashyap “Kash” Patel is a former public defender and federal prosecutor who has risen through the ranks of the MAGA world at astonishing speed: He went from staffer on the House Intelligence Committee, to deputy director of national intelligence, to chief of staff for the acting defense secretary, in less than four years. He didn’t have any relevant qualifications for any of those posts – other than blind loyalty to Trump and an obsession with undermining the Russia investigation into the then-Republican president. “Each new title set off new alarms,” to quote from a wide-ranging profile of Patel in the Atlantic in October.
In 2020, when Trump tried to install Patel at the FBI as deputy director, Trump’s own ultra-conservative Attorney General Bill Barr opposed the move and later wrote in his memoir that Patel “had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency… The very idea of moving Patel into a role like this showed a shocking detachment from reality.”
Barr said he told then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that Patel would be appointed to the FBI deputy director’s post “over my dead body.”
2. He Was Blocked at the CIA
In December 2020, after losing the election but trying to cling to power, Trump attempted to appoint Patel to a senior position at the CIA. Then-CIA Director Gina Haspel threatened to resign if Trump went through with it. She knew how ludicrous and dangerous such an appointment would be. Then-Vice President Mike Pence and then-White House Counsel Pat Cipollone also intervened to stop Trump from making Patel the deputy director at the CIA. They, too, knew how ludicrous and dangerous such an appointment would be.
Four years later, Haspel, Pence, and Cippolone are no longer on the scene. And Patel is heading for the top job at the FBI.
3. He Is an Election Denier
Patel has never accepted his idol’s defeat to Joe Biden in November 2020, and his nonprofit, the Kash Foundation, according to the New York Times, “offers financial help to a range of recipients, including the families of people charged for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.”
As the Associated Press notes, Patel also “testified at a Colorado court hearing related to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the run-up to the violent Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Patel, who at the time of the riot was chief of staff to the then-acting defense secretary, testified that Trump had pre-emptively authorized 10,000 to 20,000 troops to deploy days before the attack. But a Colorado court later found that Patel was ‘not a credible witness’ on the topic.”
4. He Defended Trump Over Stolen Classified Documents
In the summer of 2022, Trump appointed Patel as one of his two official representatives on the classified documents case (in which the former president was later charged with 37 felony counts). Patel not only “appeared in 2022 before the Washington grand jury investigating Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after receiving immunity for his testimony,” reports the AP, but he also did the rounds of right-wing media claiming – against all evidence – that Trump had near-magical and miraculous powers of declassification. "He can stand over a box and say 'declassify.' That's it. Game over.”
What was the title of that big profile of Patel in the Atlantic? “The man who will do anything for Trump.”
5. He Wants to Prosecute Journalists
It isn’t just the “Deep State” and the federal bureaucracy that the conspiratorial and authoritarian Patel, the author of the 2023 book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, has in his crosshairs.
Consider his comments to his pal Steve Bannon in December 2023:
“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. 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. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. We’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.”
Chilling words from the man Trump wants to put in charge of the nation’s pre-eminent law enforcement and domestic intelligence agency. To quote my former colleague Hayes Brown over at MSNBC: “Kash Patel as FBI director would be like if you crossed Alex Jones with J. Edgar Hoover.”
6. He Wrote a Children’s Book About “King” Trump
In 2022, I kid you not, Patel published a children’s fiction book called, The Plot Against the King. Donald Trump is the “king” referred to in the title, while the villain is “Hillary Queenton,” and these not-so-fictional characters, per the Guardian, “provide a revisionist account of the [Russia] probe that dogged the first two years of the Trump presidency and eventually led to a special counsel investigation.” (Spoiler alert: Patel cast himself in his own book as a wizard – “Kash the Distinguished Discoverer” – who proclaims King Donald’s innocence to the realm.)
There are plenty of toadies in Trumpworld, but how many of them have written an actual children’s book lionizing their boss? Trump himself has called for Patel’s “amazing” book to be put in “every school in America.”
Incidentally, and worryingly, as HuffPost reported in September 2022, Patel promoted his “Plot” book on Trump’s social media site with a photo of a signed copy of the book that included a “handwritten QAnon salutation.” QAnon has been deemed by the FBI, for several years now, as a “domestic terror threat.” Is the FBI about to have a new director who is a fan of a bizarre cult movement that the FBI itself considers to be a violent threat to the nation?
7. He Is a Grifter
Like so many of the oddballs floating around Trumpworld and especially Mar a Lago, Patel has found multiple ways to monetize his closeness to the president-elect. It’s not just the children’s book.
As the New York Times reports, Trump’s nominee for FBI director has “devoted much of his time to personal moneymaking ventures. He established a consulting company that has collected about $465,000 from Mr. Trump’s social media company and political action committee.”
He has even come up with his own online brand, “K$H,” which he uses to hawk “wooden plaques, ‘Warrior Essentials’ anti-vaccine diet supplements and pro-Trump T-shirts.”
As for his nonprofit, ABC News reported last year on how Patel’s “tax-exempt charity raises questions, experts say.”
***
This is the man Trump wants in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A man Trump himself believes to be “crazy,” according to reporting from the Atlantic. “A lot of people say he’s crazy,” Trump once said of Patel, according to an adviser. “I think he’s kind of crazy. But sometimes you need a little crazy.”
Do we? At the FBI? Do we really?
Check out more of Zeteo’s coverage of the incoming Trump government:
I agree that this is the most unqualified, right-wing sycophant group that could soon be in charge of America’s top domestic intelligence and law enforcement agency. What a surprise for Trump's voters to find out who they vote for.
"Every time we think Donald Trump couldn’t possibly make a more shocking or egregious appointment or nomination..." that's when we need to ask ourselves how human beings can get so complacent, so quickly.
We KNOW what he is, don't we?
If we were at all honest, we knew what Biden was, too. Long before he facilitated this phase of Israel's genocide against Palestinians. Long before Kamala called him out for being a segregationist. Long before Obama made him his token-racist (to quiet the psychopaths claiming a black president would make white people slaves). Even before he made a perverse, and perverted, mockery of the "hearing" of Anita Hill's valiant attempt to warn her country about Clarence Thomas. Biden has NEVER failed to advance wars of aggression & conquest, and he has never failed to advance the confederate social-order.
Trumpism was on its way back into office, the moment the Democratic Party overlords hijacked the primaries, to shove Biden down the throats of their base. Biden was meant to block Sanders, not Trump.
Two parties, no representation. The problem is so much bigger than trump.