President-elect Donald Trump has tapped yet another MAGA loyalist to serve in his administration, announcing Saturday that he’d like former aide Kash Patel to head up the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Patel, 44, is perhaps best known for his work undermining that agency: In 2018, while working as a staffer for a congressional intelligence committee, he authored a controversial and widely circulated memo that accused FBI officials of acting with bias against Trump. (In a rare public statement, the FBI expressed “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”) From there, Patel went on to serve in a number of behind-the-scenes roles in the first Trump administration. Most recently, he’s been peddling quack Covid cures, election-related conspiracy theories, and “fantastical” MAGA-themed books for kids.
That resume might make it challenging for Patel to win Senate approval to the FBI post, which current director Christopher Wray was not scheduled to vacate until 2027. Trump appointed Wray to the 10-year term in 2017, but promptly soured on his one-time pick over the FBI’s investigations into Russian election interference and Trump’s handling of classified documents.
Patel, on the other hand, has practically fallen over himself to embrace both Trump’s agenda and the president-elect’s various grievances, including vendettas against the media and federal bureaucracy. His 2023 book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, claims that a network of “corrupt law enforcement personnel, intelligence agents, and military officials” operate at the highest levels of government. His children’s books, meanwhile, advance the false conspiracy theory that Democrats rigged the 2020 election: After triumphing over “Hillary Queenton and her shifty knight,” as the plot of one of his children’s book goes, Patel’s “King Donald” is unjustly bamboozled by “a terrible scheme to elect Sleepy Joe.” Patel himself features in the picture books as a berobed wizard, dispensing wisdom from a high tower.
In an interview last year on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Patel also said a second Trump administration should punish government officials and journalists who helped “rig” the 2020 election. “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,” he said. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
While that swagger has made Patel popular with Trump, it hasn’t exactly endeared him to the wider defense or intelligence communities. In the final months of his first term, Trump reportedly floated the idea of making Patel a deputy director of the FBI or CIA—a promotion that stalled when then CIA Director Gina Haspel threatened to resign in protest. Former Attorney General Bill Barr also said in his memoir that he opposed the move: Patel would become the FBI’s deputy director “over my dead body,” he wrote.
In addition to his writing career and his work in the first Trump administration, Patel is the founder of the Kash Foundation, an organization that funds defamation lawsuits and sells an impressive variety of pro-Trump merch. He has also promoted a “Christian conservative” cell service provider, a right-wing apparel brand and a “vaccine detoxification” supplement, and serves on the board of Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns Truth Social.
