“A lot of people say he’s crazy,” Donald Trump is reported to have once said of Kash Patel. “I think he’s kind of crazy. But sometimes you need a little crazy.”
If Trump gets his way, crazy will now be coming to the FBI, the 116-year-old national security and law enforcement agency charged with protecting the US from terrorism, cybercrime and other threats.
Last weekend the president-elect said he would nominate Patel as FBI director, the latest in a series of incendiary names plucked from the rightwing media ecosystem. Joy Reid, a host on the liberal MSNBC network, told viewers that he “might be the worst pick in the worst cabinet in US history”.
She was far from alone in raising concerns over Patel’s inexperience, extremism and subservience to Trump. The 44-year-old has called for “major, major reform” of the FBI that could include shutting down its headquarters, slashing its intelligence operations, and targeting officials and journalists who leak information. He has praised the QAnon conspiracy-theory movement, stating: “There’s a lot of good to a lot of it.” The Guardian has also learned of fresh questions over the conduct of Patel’s non-profit foundation.
His appointment is not yet a done deal. Trump would have to oust the current FBI director, Christopher Wray, whom he appointed in 2017 and who was supposed to remain in the post until 2027. Patel still faces the Senate confirmation process, in which senators would get the chance to examine his origin story, unremarkable legal career and emergence as a bombastic Trump provocateur.
***
Kashyap “Kash” Patel is the son of Indian immigrants. His parents, of Gujarati ancestry, moved to the US in the 1970s after his father, Pramod, fled the oppressive regime of Idi Amin in Uganda. Pramod became a financial officer for an aviation company.
Patel was born and raised in Garden City, a well-to-do village on Long Island, New York, living in a home that included his father’s eight siblings. In his memoir, he writes of an extended family setting off for Disney World every year in a 15-car convoy and watching the New York Islanders play ice hockey. His official biography on the Pentagon website notes: “Kash is a life-long ice hockey player, coach, and fan.”
Raised Hindu, he was one of the few students of colour at Garden City high school. His senior yearbook quotation, taken from the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, was: “Racism is man’s gravest threat – the maximum of hatred for a minimum reason.”
Patel’s early exposure to the legal world came through caddying for affluent defence lawyers as they played golf at the local country club. He gained qualifications from the University of Richmond, in Virginia, and the University College London Faculty of Laws in Britain before graduating from Pace University Law School in New York in 2005.
But Patel writes in his book: “Dreams of the sky-high salary at the prestige law firms never materialized,” because “nobody would hire me”. Eventually he took a job as a local public defender in Miami-Dade county, Florida, followed by work as a federal public defender in the southern district of Florida.
But by then he had become more conservative, he writes, making his choice of career a “strange fit”. He describes his public defender colleagues as “the far left of the left wing”. He was also increasingly suspicious of prosecutors from the justice department, foreshadowing his fierce critique of the so-called deep state.
As a lawyer, Patel had a reputation for being good but not great. The New York Times reported: “Mr Patel’s former colleagues remember him for offering himself as a prize in a charity auction of eligible bachelors, for wildly patterned socks and for having his suits custom-made on visits to India.”
The paper quoted Patel’s former supervisor Michael Caruso, who led the southern district of Florida office at the time, as saying: “My enduring image of him is with his shoes off and his feet up on the desk, reading the Wall Street Journal.”
But in late 2013 Patel found work in Washington as a terrorism prosecutor in the justice department’s national security division. He has asserted that he was the “lead prosecutor” of the perpetrators of the 2012 attack on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans; in fact he was not part of the trial team but rather a junior justice department staff member.
Patel first came to prominence in Trump’s orbit as an outspoken critic of the FBI’s investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign.
As a staffer on the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee, chaired at the time by the Republican congressman Devin Nunes, Patel helped write a four-page report – dubbed the “Nunes memo” – that detailed what it said were errors the justice department had made in obtaining a warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign adviser.
He made a positive impression on some in the administration. Sean Spicer, Trump’s first White House press secretary, said: “These questions about his qualifications are a dog whistle. The guy has served in several senior positions in the intelligence world.
“He’s tenacious, he’s hard working, he wants to get to the bottom of a lot of stuff. There’s no question he wants to shake things up. Washington needs to be shaken up and the leadership of the FBI has lost the trust of the American people and it needs to be restored.”
Spicer added: “He’s funny, he’s intelligent. I’ve enjoyed hanging out with him. He’s a loyal friend, too: he’s someone who sticks by his friends. I understand why the left is worried about him but he’s someone who can get things done.”
In 2019, Patel served on the White House national security council before becoming chief of staff to the then acting defence secretary, Christopher Miller. He denied allegations that he ran a clandestine backchannel to Trump regarding Ukraine.
The former attorney general William Barr wrote in his memoir that, when Trump tried to appoint Patel as deputy director of the FBI, Barr told another official that it would only happen “over my dead body”. Gina Haspel, then the director of the CIA, also threatened to resign over the prospect of Patel becoming her deputy there.
Patel also played a role in several legal investigations into Trump. In 2022 he appeared before the Washington grand jury investigating Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida after receiving immunity for his testimony. He was part of a small group of supporters during Trump’s recent criminal trial in New York who accompanied him to the courthouse, telling reporters that Trump was the victim of an “unconstitutional circus”.
Since Trump left office, Patel has expressed his loyalty through commercial ventures. Records show that he earned hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from consulting for Trump-related entities, including a political action committee and the company that owns Truth Social.
He wrote a book called Government Gangsters, part memoir and part screed against the deep state, and children’s books that lionise Trump. The Plot Against the King features a thinly veiled Hillary Clinton as the villain going after “King Donald” while Patel plays a wizard who thwarts her plans.
He has also promoted various products marketed to Trump supporters including a dietary supplement that claims to be a Covid-19 vaccine “detoxification system”. He helped produce And Justice for All, a rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner sung by a group of men incarcerated for their role in the Capitol riot.
In addition, Patel launched the Kash Foundation, a non-profit organisation that funds defamation lawsuits, offers help to people including families of the January 6 rioters, and peddles merchandise such as branded socks and other clothing with the “K$H” logo.
The foundation has drawn scrutiny over its financial practices, the Guardian can disclose. Its tax filings in both 2022 and 2023 reported that it did not compensate its board members, according to the watchdog group Accountable.US. But an updated version of the filings reveal that the organisation paid more than $275,000 to a company owned by its vice-president, Andrew Ollis.
A further disclosure, detailing the contractual agreement between the Kash Foundation and Ollis’s company, indicates that Ollis would receive a minimum of tens of thousands of dollars every year. The Kash Foundation did not respond to a request for comment on the discrepancy.
Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable.US, said: “Not known for his subtlety, Kash Patel has sought to make money off the Trump brand in several ways including selling a children’s book on election denialism. This enrichment also appears to extend to his friends and partners. Sadly, this appears to be the same old Trump economic model that only looks out for the lucky few at everyone else’s expense.”
Meanwhile Patel has become a regular guest on rightwing podcasts and livestreamed shows hosted by Steve Bannon, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Stew Peters, a conspiracy theorist identified by Right Wing Watch for promoting anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry, white nationalism and virulent antisemitism.
On Bannon’s War Room podcast last year, Patel vowed: “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
And in an interview on the Shawn Ryan Show in September, Patel declared: “I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state’. Then, I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops – go be cops.”
This resolve to upend the FBI and radically reshape its mission is already causing alarm among the bureau’s agents. Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant director of the FBI who served there for 25 years, said: “I am getting calls from people primarily at headquarters who are saying as soon as Trump won the election, they realised they were in for a destructive period for the institution regardless of who got nominated.
“Many people are probably saying, ‘Hey, here’s my résumé, can you help spread the word? I’m looking for a job.’ Now, since Patel has been nominated, more of those calls are coming. There are people who are out there trying to look for other work.”
Figliuzzi predicted that, if field agents feel there is political interference in their work, for example in which cases to pursue and which to drop, there will be “tremendous pushback”. He added: “In this age where nominees are remarkably unqualified, that’s not what worries me most. What worries me most is his blind allegiance to Trump and willingness to do anything for him.”
Trump, who will be sworn in next month, has teed up a cabinet of disrupters and extremists tainted by scandal. Matt Gaetz, his first choice for attorney general, was forced to withdraw amid allegations of sexual misconduct and replaced by Pam Bondi, an election denier. Pete Hegseth, nominated for defence secretary, is facing a barrage of accusations about womanising, infidelity and heavy drinking.
Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “In many ways Kash Patel is the most nakedly aggressive appointment because Kash Patel has made it very clear that he has no respect for the institution, that he would use it as an institution of retribution, that he has no other agenda other than personal loyalty to Donald Trump. Trump has appointed as the head of the FBI someone whose agenda is to destroy the FBI.”
He added: “There’s a big question mark over whether he is confirmable but it makes it very clear what Trump’s agenda is going to be. He may not get Matt Gaetz, he may not get Kash Patel, he may not get Peter Hegseth, but we have a very clear idea of the direction that he is going. He wants absolute loyalists to himself who are committed to running roughshod over the institutions that they’re being appointed to.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting
