US president-elect Donald Trump has tapped Kash Patel to be FBI director, nominating a loyalist to lead the chief US law enforcement agency — which Trump has long derided as corrupt.
Patel rose to prominence expressing outrage over the agency’s investigation into whether Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
With the nomination of Patel, Trump is signaling that he is preparing to carry out his threat to oust FBI Director Christopher Wray, a Republican first appointed by Trump during his first term as president, whose 10-year term at the FBI does not expire until 2027.
Photo: AP
FBI directors by law are appointed to 10-year terms as a means of insulating the bureau from politics.
Trump first signaled he viewed FBI leadership as an enemy under former FBI director James Comey, who opened an investigation in 2016 into whether Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia to interfere in that year’s presidential election. The investigation was closed without charges. Trump fired Comey.
Wray, who Trump hired in 2017, has been a frequent target of Trump supporters’ ire.
During Wray’s tenure, the FBI carried out a court-approved search at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate to look for classified documents and he has also faced criticism for his oversight role of a directive by US Attorney General Merrick Garland aimed at working to protect local school boards from violent threats and harassment.
Trump in an announcement on his Truth Social network called Patel “a brilliant lawyer, investigator and ‘America First’ fighter” who played a “pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax.”
During Trump’s first term Patel served as a senior adviser to then-US acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell and as chief of staff to then-US acting US secretary of defense Christopher Miller.
Patel, 44, previously called for stripping the FBI of its intelligence-gathering role and purging its ranks of any employee who refuses to support Trump’s agenda.
“The biggest problem the FBI has had, has come out of its intel shops. I’d break that component out of it. I’d shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state,” Patel said in a September interview on the conservative Shawn Ryan Show.
In his book Government Gangsters — which Trump has called a “blueprint to take back the White House” — Patel endorsed calls to fire government employees who undermine the president’s agenda.
“We must identify the people in government that are crippling our constitutional republic,” Patel told the Conservative Political Action Conference in July.
Patel previously worked as a federal public defender and a federal prosecutor, and was instrumental in working to lead House Republicans’ probe into the FBI’s 2016 investigation into contacts between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia during his stint as an aide to former House intelligence committee chair Devin Nunes.
Later, during Trump’s first impeachment trial, former US National Security Council official Fiona Hill told House investigators she was concerned Patel was secretly serving as a back channel between Trump and Ukraine without authorization.
Patel denied those allegations.
After Trump left office in January 2021, Patel was one of several people Trump designated as a representative for access to his presidential records.
He was one of the few former Trump administration officials who claimed, without evidence, that Trump had declassified all of the records in question. He was later subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in connection with the probe.
Patel’s nomination is likely to garner pushback from Senate Democrats and possibly even some Republicans, although Patel has received public support from some high-profile Republicans such as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
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