The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is a pivotal, integral, and important post in the U.S. federal law enforcement community. Second to the U.S. Attorney General, the Director is the second most important figure in criminal justice administration. It is long standing precedent that the post be seen as non-partisan and independent from any branch of government, behold only to the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law.
As such, the role is immensely important. And Donald Trump’s de facto nomination of Kash Patel as the Director of the largest and most significant law enforcement agency in the United States indicates just how important the agency’s role is.
Kash Patel is a named most are unfamiliar with. The son of Indian Gujarati immigrants to the U.S., he became an attorney and worked as a public defender in Miami-Dade County and with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) before joining the National Security Division of the DOJ in 2014, serving as a liaison to the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and working as an aide to the House Intelligence Committee. Due to his work on the Committee, he became a favorite of Donald Trump, becoming a senior advisor to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and later Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Defense.
While these credentials are at first glance impressive, Patel is by no means a strong or capable choice of managing a security service with an almost $10 billion dollar budget, some 35,000 employees, spanning countless offices, divisions, agencies, and programs, and working thousands of criminal cases at any given time.
First, it is documented that while a public defender Patel was “a middling performer with a deep animosity toward the Justice Department prosecutors he found himself up against [shieing] away from filing motions he was likely to lose” and has claimed to be a “lead prosecutor” on the hunt for the perpetrators of the 2012 Benghazi attack, when he was not even “part of the trial team”. On the House Intelligence Committee, Patel authored “a four-page report that detailed what it said were errors the Justice Department made in obtaining a warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign adviser”. Known as the Nunes Memo, the report was found to be legally fallacious and the DOJ’s Inspector General eventually discredited many of the report’s allegations.
While assigned to Trump’s staff, one notable incident occurred. In October of 2020, while planning a mission to rescue American Philip Walton in Nigeria, Patel informed his superiors that the Secretary of State had gained approval for SEAL Team Six to enter Nigerian airspace. According to Elaina Calabro in her excellent profile of Patel, Secretary of Defense Esper learned that the U.S. did not obtain approval from Nigeria to enter their airspace nor had Patel called Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to even ask for permission; when confronted, Patel responded “If nobody got hurt, who the fuck cares?”. Patel’s actions, corroborated by numerous senior officials, could have resulted not only in a diplomatic incident, but also the loss of many American service members’ lives.
Since leaving office, Patel has served as a consultant to the Trump and Gaetz campaign, operated a nonprofit offering “financial help to a range of recipients” namely families of the January 6th attackers alongside serving as a consultant, alongside publishing a children’s book which talks about “’deep state’ enemies” while vilifying Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, and other prominent “enemies” of Donald Trump. In a December 2023 appearance on Steven Bannon’s podcast, after Bannon said that Trump would come after media personalities who “helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections” Patel concurred saying “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out”. He has also advocated for policies such as shutting down the FBI headquarters in D.C., transferring personnel to random offices across the country, these so-called reforms not only working to marginalize “experienced officials responsible for determining the legality, resource allocation and supervision of important investigations” but make it “easier for White House officials to apply direct pressure on frontline investigators without interference from superiors”. Patel has also advocated for “changing libel laws to make it easier to sue over coverage”, encouraging attendees at rallies to “antagonize [reporters] covering the events” and apparently once “told advisers he wanted officials to obtain phone records of a journalist covering him”. Finally, his tacit endorsement of QAnon adjacent conspiracy theories makes his judgment truly questionable.
This is not an individual who should be in control of the FBI. This is not an individual who should be involved in government in any way in fact. Like with so many other Trump appointees, this is an individual who will wield the power of the FBI to carry out reprisals and dole out retribution and vengeance against individuals who raised the alarm on Donald Trump’s behavior, illegal and unethical practices, and who pose a threat to this new administration. This is an individual who, like J. Edgar Hoover, is obsessed with secrecy, devoted to the chief executive, and highly desirous of being seen as such as well. His conduct, especially on the Nigeria mission, should immediately be disqualifying for any role, but also raises questions about his commitment to the rule of law and whether he would take the non-partisan nature of his office seriously. His entire history not only raises condemnations from likely sources like politicians and staffers, but also veteran FBI agents.
The entire point of having an FBI Director serve ten-year terms even is explicitly to have the individual who serves in the role be integrous, committed to the U.S. Constitution, and holding individuals, including those within the administrations they are serving, accountable. Kash Patel’s record in government service and history of campaigning and work on behalf of Donald Trump indicates he would not be holding up to the ethos of the office nor acting in accordance with the best interests of the Bureau, the Department of Justice, or the American taxpayer.
