Kash Patel: From MAGA to FBI Director?
On the day of President Donald Trump’s Inauguration, Kash Patel, who has been nominated to serve as the next F.B.I. director, appeared before a sea of MAGA hats in Washington, D.C.,’s Capital One Arena and paid his respects to law enforcement. “Our police officers, our sheriffs, our federal agents are some of the greatest warriors that God has ever created,” Patel said. “We will put them first because they have our backs and now we will have your backs.” Hours later, from the Oval Office, Trump signed a stunning executive order that granted pardons to more than fifteen hundred individuals who had been convicted of crimes linked to the violent Capitol riot four years ago. At least six hundred of those who received pardons were convicted of assaulting or resisting police officers. Among them were individuals such as David Nicholas Dempsey, who, according to prosecutors, attacked officers with “his hands, feet, flag poles, crutches, pepper spray, broken pieces of furniture, and anything else he could get his hands on,” and who, until Trump’s pardon, was serving a prison sentence of twenty years.
Senator Durbin’s Grave Concerns
Last week, Senator Dick Durbin, who serves as the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, met with Patel and asked him to explain how he squared Trump’s pardons with his plans to run America’s top law-enforcement agency. According to Durbin, Patel said that he’d have to run the question “up the chain of command” before he could say anything that would be in the public record. Later, speaking from the Senate floor, Durbin expressed “grave concerns” about Patel’s fitness to lead the F.B.I., calling him a “staunch political loyalist who has repeatedly peddled false conspiracy theories and threatened to retaliate against those who have slighted him personally and politically.”
In a different era, this would have been the sort of excoriating appraisal that a Cabinet nominee would spend a great deal of time trying to rebut. And, presumably, in his confirmation hearing on Thursday, Patel, the nominee whose responsibilities are the most closely aligned with Trump’s agenda, will deflect, downplay, and deny. But, for Patel, the qualities that Durbin lists—flamboyant obeisance, a fluency in fringe narratives, and a commitment to a form of politics that openly flaunts aggression—aren’t liabilities. They are his principal assets.
The Rise of Patel: From Public Defender to FBI Nominee
In Patel’s late thirties, after working as a public defender in Miami and then as a Department of Justice trial attorney, he landed a job as a Hill staffer in the office of Devin Nunes, who was then the top Republican representative on the House Intelligence Committee. Patel, in his new role, became instrumental in helping to craft the G.O.P. response that aimed to discredit the investigations into suspected collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. For Patel and his colleagues, the conspiracy theories coming out of the extremist right presented a tremendous opportunity. If Patel wed himself to a narrative fantasy that spun the investigation into Trump’s team as litigation of Trumpism itself, then he could get Trump’s ear—and craft a successful and lucrative public persona. Indeed, he rose through the ranks quickly, landing a number of national-security roles. In the final months of the Trump Administration, he became chief of staff to the acting Defense Secretary, Christopher C. Miller. According to the Washington Post, he went to battle with the intelligence community, including the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, and, with Trump’s support, nearly wound up as the acting director of the C.I.A.
After Trump’s first, failed bid for a second term, and the events of January 6, 2021, when thousands of angry supporters, galvanized by election conspiracies, some of them armed with improvised weapons, overpowered law enforcement and stormed the Capitol, it seemed, to some, like the logical end point of the sort of soldierly fealty that Patel had come to represent—a case study in how right-wing personalities who harness the cultural power of conspiracy theories to secure personal power might, in the end, be consumed by the blaze turned bonfire of their own making. The riot had showed the violent underbelly of the MAGA movement, and was branded an insurrection. The former President left D.C. a pariah; he and his allies scrambled to distance themselves from the ugliness of what had happened. Trump called the riot a “heinous attack” and said that he was “outraged by the violence, lawlessness, and mayhem.” Meanwhile, as the January 6th arrests piled up, Patel faced an investigation by the Justice Department into whether he had mishandled classified information. (Patel described reporting about the investigation, which never resulted in criminal charges, as a “bald-faced lie.”)
I spent more than a year reporting on the Patriot Wing, and I watched it become an incubator for many of the same grievances that had brought the inmates to the Capitol in the first place. I saw how, with the help of activists, the men there were able to establish a media operation that enabled them to get their messaging out to sympathizers. What began as the inmates’ claims of poor treatment at the hands of jail officials soon morphed into a full-blown fantasy of political persecution that spread to the pro-Trump media, picking up momentum as Trump’s own legal problems mounted. The term “political prisoner” began to proliferate. Infowars ran headlines such as “AMERICAN GULAG: Political prisoners tortured in enemy-occupied DC jail.” A pro-Trump cartoonist published an image showing gaunt men wearing Trump merch, languishing in a jail cell together. These accounts helped animate a new movement of so-called January 6th activists, who wrote letters to the prisoners and raised money for their legal defenses. Trump’s most stalwart supporters in Congress at the time—Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, and Louie Gohmert—took up the narrative and got to work giving it legitimacy.
This new movement dovetailed precisely with Patel’s past work—and, to some extent, his own brush with the Justice Department—and he picked it up with relish. In September, he co-launched a new Web site, Fight with Kash; his own line of branded K$H apparel; and the Kash Patel Legal Offense Trust, which he described as a “fund designed to give those smeared by the fake news media and big tech a voice.” An archived “About” page touts Patel’s “distinguished career as a prosecutor, lawyer, and national security professional,” who took down “senior leaders” in ISIS and Al Qaeda and exposed “the deep state’s Russia collusion hoax against President Trump.” He promised that donations to the fund would “help send earth-shattering jolts through the Fake News media and Deep State.”
