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Who: Kash Patel
Patel is a former public defender, federal prosecutor and veteran of the first Trump administration. He’s also a fierce critic of the Justice Department and the FBI.
Nominated for: director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, part of the Justice Department
What this role does: The director oversees the FBI, which is the United States’ premier law enforcement agency, and the more than 35,000 people who work there. The FBI investigates federal crimes, everything from terrorism and violent crime to civil rights and public corruption.
In less than a decade, Kash Patel has risen from a largely unknown congressional aide to become a MAGA-world fixture. He has held senior national security jobs, sold self-branded merchandise online and written a children’s book called The Plot Against the King, featuring a wizard named Kash and a king named Donald.
Patel is now President Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, the country’s premier law enforcement agency, which is responsible for everything from catching terrorists and spies to investigating cyberattacks and public corruption.
On Thursday, Patel is set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Democrats are expected to press him about his qualifications to lead the bureau and whether he can — or even wants to — maintain the FBI’s traditional independence from the White House.
Those questions are fueled by Patel’s fierce loyalty to Trump but also by the long list of Patel’s own past statements about rooting out the “deep state” and going after Trump’s perceived enemies, including at the FBI, at the Justice Department and in the media.
Those comments also dovetail with Trump’s own statements during the presidential campaign about seeking vengeance against his opponents.
Republicans, who hold the majority in the Senate, have largely been supportive of Patel’s nomination, and he can win confirmation with only GOP support while still losing three Republican votes.
The president and his supporters accuse the FBI and the Justice Department of being weaponized in recent years against conservatives, and they view Patel as someone who will put the FBI on the correct course.
The Biden Justice Department rejected those allegations, noting that prosecutors brought cases against President Biden’s own son as well as powerful Democratic members of Congress.
Patel’s rise
The FBI director’s job comes with a 10-year term, although neither of Patel’s immediate predecessors served that full term. Trump fired James Comey in 2017 and replaced him with Christopher Wray.
After Trump’s 2024 election win, he made clear that Wray would not be allowed to stay and nominated Patel to replace him. Wray left before Trump’s inauguration.
Patel’s résumé is not typical for an FBI director. Wray, for example, had run the Criminal Division at the Justice Department, while Comey had previously served as U.S. attorney in Manhattan and as deputy attorney general, the No. 2 job in the department.
Patel, in contrast, worked as a public defender in Florida before working as a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s National Security Division for a few years.
In 2017, he moved to the House Intelligence Committee, where he was a top aide to the top Republican on the panel, Rep. Devin Nunes of California. It was here that Patel gained attention for helping investigate the investigators who were probing possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.
His efforts raised questions about failings in the FBI’s work on the probe, and it made Patel a hero among Trump supporters. It also helped him land a job on Trump’s National Security Council and later as a top aide to the director of national intelligence and to the secretary of defense.
Toward the end of the first Trump administration, the president tried to install Patel in top positions at the CIA and the FBI but backed down in the face of opposition from senior leaders at the Justice Department, Congress and elsewhere.
After Trump’s 2020 election loss, Patel became a frequent guest on right-wing podcasts.
It is in those podcast episodes that Patel has made many of his controversial statements. He has railed against what he calls the deep state, which he views as people in senior national security roles who he claims have weaponized the justice system and intelligence agencies and pose a threat to democracy.
In one appearance on Shawn Ryan’s podcast, Patel vowed to shut down the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., “on Day 1 and reopening the next day as a museum of the deep state.”
“And I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals,” he added. “Go be cops. You’re cops— go be cops. Go chase down murderers and rapists and drug dealers and violent offenders.”
He also wrote a book called Government Gangsters that includes a list of deep state actors whom Patel’s critics have described as an enemies list.
All of this sets up what could be a tense confirmation hearing.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut and a Senate Judiciary Committee member, called Patel “unqualified and unprepared” to lead the FBI.
“Anybody who has an enemies list that would be targets for retribution, anyone who wants to shut down the FBI here in Washington, anyone who wants to purge an agency that has to investigate impartially and objectively, is unfit for this job,” Blumenthal said.
Blumenthal said he met with Patel ahead of the hearing and pressed him on his statements about using the FBI as a political weapon. He said Patel responded with “totally unpersuasive assurances.”
“What he offered in these vague assurances — was ‘Oh, I would never do anything like that’ — but he has said he would do exactly that, so he’s going to have to explain himself,” Blumenthal said.
Republicans, meanwhile, appear to have largely swung behind Patel’s nomination.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who has met with Patel as well to discuss his potential confirmation, acknowledged that for some people, some of Patel’s past statements could be controversial.
“Obviously, Kash was engaging in a lot of political rhetoric, and I think he understands the difference between that and actually doing the job at the DOJ and the FBI,” Cornyn said. “And I think the FBI needs a course correction, and he’s certainly capable of doing that.”
