On June 5th, Kash Patel, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was in Austin, Texas, to record a podcast interview with Joe Rogan. Patel had recently declared that the F.B.I. had moved on from its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes, but his agents were still looking into other “coverups,” including the Covid-19 lab leak and the role that the Bureau’s own operatives supposedly played in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In Rogan’s studio, Patel, wearing an olive-green hoodie and smoking a fat cigar, laid out a new conspiracy, in which the Chinese Communist Party was systematically killing Americans with fentanyl as part of a “long-term plan” to “wipe out tens of thousands of Americans a year” who “might grow up to serve in the United States military or become a cop or become a teacher.”
Rogan said, “Oh, that is such a dark, dark thing.” Patel fired up his stogie with a butane lighter and exhaled a billowy cloud of smoke. “It is,” he replied. “But we’re on it.”
Rogan was clearly impressed. “What is it like to be the head of the F.B.I.?” he asked at one point. “How weird is that?”
“It’s completely effing wild,” Patel said. “I mean, I don’t even know how to describe it.”
Many of Patel’s past associates are similarly astonished. Bennett Gershman, a professor at Pace University’s law school, where Patel got his degree, described Patel as an “at best average” student who was interested in issues of social justice and identity politics. “He seemed to be on the side of the left,” Gershman said. Former colleagues in Miami, where Patel spent eight years as a public defender, called him an “adequate” attorney. “We had two hundred lawyers, and he was neither one of the best nor one of the worst,” Bennett Brummer, the elected Miami-Dade public defender at the time, said. Kushagra Katariya, a cardiothoracic surgeon who became friends with Patel in Miami, said Patel’s passions were hockey and exploring ways to get rich. “I never imagined him getting to this point in his life,” Katariya said. “It’s a good surprise.”
In Patel’s 2023 memoir, “Government Gangsters,” he describes himself as “an unknown, first-generation Indian American hockey fanatic” from “Queens and Long Island” who “ended up being the lead investigator who uncovered the greatest political scandal in American history.” The kid-from-Queens line is one of Patel’s favorites, a reminder that another kid from Queens, who also struggled to win the respect of the establishment, happens to be the leader of the free world. The bit about uncovering a historic scandal is a reference to “Russiagate”—in 2017, Patel, who was then a staffer for Devin Nunes, a Republican House member from California, helped identify the ways in which the F.B.I. had cut corners in seeking a wiretap on Carter Page, an adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign. Nunes eventually told Trump that Patel’s investigation had, as Patel later put it, “saved his presidency by revealing the unprecedented political hit job designed to take him down.”
During the first Trump Administration, when Patel held roles at the National Security Council, the office of the director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Defense, he gained a reputation as a loyalist who was widely disliked within the White House. He was seen as “lazy” and “had no significant achievements,” a former senior official told me. Patel later wrote in his memoir that members of Trump’s Cabinet complained that he was going over their heads to speak directly with the President, leading Defense Secretary Mark Esper “to request I be fired.” The lesson he drew from the episode was that “nothing makes you enemies faster in Washington than being effective.” (A source close to Esper said that he never requested that Patel be fired.)
Like Trump, Patel often accuses the government of being an obstacle to freedom and efficiency. His book includes a catalogue of “government gangsters” who pose a “dangerous threat to our democracy.” But, also like Trump, Patel often puts on a show of bravado, only to back down or change course. On a podcast recorded in 2024, he promised to shut down the F.B.I. headquarters and open it up as a museum of the deep state the next day. “We need to get the F.B.I. the hell out of Washington, D.C.,” he wrote in his memoir. At Patel’s confirmation hearings a few months later, when senators asked about the comment, he said, “The F.B.I. headquarters should not be moved out of the D.C. area. On a podcast, I used hyperbole about opening a museum in the Hoover Building to make a broader point.”
On Rogan’s show, Patel had said that podcast interviews are, “like, the best way to get information out.” “The haters hate Kash Patel because he’s a truthteller,” Grant Stinchfield, who hosts a show on a conservative streaming platform, told me. “He’s not trying to be the smartest guy in the room. He’s a legitimate, likable guy, and that’s rare in Washington. He doesn’t take himself too seriously.” But, as a former senior Trump Administration official who worked with Patel told me, the disparity between what Patel says publicly and what he’s done as the F.B.I. director is “an illustration of just how juvenile the guy is.”
The former official declined to be named because he believes that Patel, who has declared him a “government gangster,” would retaliate against him. “I never had any fear of my own government till now,” the former official said. “This guy is a seriously dangerous character. I’m one of those people who pooh-poohed the idea that Trump and his Administration would go off the rails, but I was wrong.”
When Patel arrived at F.B.I. headquarters, a hulking, brutalist concrete behemoth on Pennsylvania Avenue, there was hope in the ranks that he would focus on fighting crime and empowering agents. In his book, Patel had written that “the next president must fire the top ranks of the FBI.” But, during his confirmation process, he had promised that “no one will be terminated for case assignments.” According to a former F.B.I. official, he later said that the special agents in charge, the leaders of the field offices, would determine what kinds of crimes their staffs would investigate. Bureau leaders gave Patel “the benefit of the doubt,” a former senior F.B.I. official said. “But they quickly figured out that he wasn’t really in control.”
Patel had told the F.B.I. Agents Association, a nonprofit advocacy group, that he would name a member of the Bureau as his deputy director. Instead, he selected Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who had gained prominence as a pro-Trump podcaster and a Fox News commentator. According to Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat, who obtained F.B.I. personnel data earlier this year, almost a quarter of the F.B.I.’s more than thirteen thousand agents have been assigned to work on the apprehension of undocumented immigrants, which has not historically been a major focus for the Bureau. Hundreds more have been sent to support local police in cities that Trump has targeted, including Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Portland, Oregon, despite the fact that violent crime in these cities was already on the decline. “It’s a universe of fear now,” a current agent knowledgeable about staff assignments said. “A foreign counterintelligence agent was pulled off a case involving China to walk around D.C., making D.W.I. arrests.”
At the same time, Patel, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has fired agents who had worked on investigations into Trump’s role in the January 6th attack and his mishandling of classified documents. Patel disbanded CR-15, the public-corruption unit in the Washington field office, which had investigated Republican efforts to overturn the 2020 election, saying that it was “corrupt” and had been “weaponized.” Michael Feinberg, an agent who ran the field office in Norfolk, Virginia, was pushed out in June, because he was friendly with Peter Strzok, a former F.B.I. agent who had helped to lead the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. After James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, was indicted on charges of lying to Congress, an agent was reportedly fired for refusing to arrange a perp walk for him. In September, Patel fired a group of agents who, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, in 2020, had taken a knee during a demonstration, seemingly to build rapport with protesters. The following month, he fired an agent-trainee who had displayed a gay-pride flag on his desk in the Los Angeles field office.
Patel isn’t just enforcing the President’s agenda. In July, the Times reported that he had expanded the use of polygraphs—a tool that the Bureau has relied on for decades as part of routine renewals of security clearances—to include questions about agents’ loyalty to their new director. (An F.B.I. spokesperson denied this.) “Anybody who can retire is retiring because you don’t know when you’re going to be fired,” Christopher O’Leary, who worked at the Bureau for two decades before he retired, in 2023, told me. Russian intelligence officers must be “foaming at the mouth, because we’re populating the pond with people who had access to classified information, and now they could have grievances.” (Through a spokesperson, Patel said that agents had been fired only “for failing to meet the requirements of the mission. Anything to the contrary is fake news fuel.”)
Patel is also lowering hiring standards. During the summer, he and Bongino proposed a plan to slash the duration of the F.B.I. Academy’s training program for some applicants from eighteen weeks to eight, and to remove a requirement that all new agents hold a college degree. Patel has explained that he wants the Bureau to hire people from other agencies who often lack college credentials. O’Leary, who focussed on Middle Eastern studies in college with an eye toward counterterrorism work, said that the Bureau’s reputation for excellence “attracts high performers, people who want to make it through this crucible.” Hires who clear a lower standard won’t “be accepted as peers in the F.B.I. Nobody wants to be mediocre.”
In September, three former senior agents filed a wrongful-termination suit against Patel and the Attorney General, Pam Bondi. According to the complaint, in the weeks before Patel was confirmed, the acting Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, ordered Brian J. Driscoll, Jr., then serving as the acting F.B.I. director, to assemble a list of agents who had been involved in cases against those who stormed the Capitol—the largest investigation in the Bureau’s history. Driscoll pushed back, arguing that agents shouldn’t be punished for having been assigned to a particular matter. But after speaking to the Bureau’s general counsel he handed over a list of six thousand employees, identified by employment number, not by name. Driscoll claims that, in January, Patel told him that, as long as he wasn’t prolific on social media and hadn’t donated to Democrats or voted for Kamala Harris, he would have no trouble passing muster with the Trump White House. In August, one of Driscoll’s subordinates received an e-mail directing him to print out a letter and give it to Driscoll. The single page, on the director’s letterhead, was a memo from Patel firing him.
In April, Patel promoted Steven Jensen, a former special agent in charge in Columbia, South Carolina, to help run the D.C. field office. When a group of January 6th sympathizers learned that Jensen, who had overseen the investigations into the attack, had been given more responsibilities, some of them took to social media to demand that he be fired. Patel went on Fox News to defend Jensen and urged him to sue his critics for defamation. In mid-July, Jensen alleges in the lawsuit, Patel invited him to his office, told him he was “crushing it,” and gave him a Patel-branded “challenge coin”—a large token of appreciation inscribed with “Ka$h Patel”—and three cigars, one of which came from Trump’s Inauguration. Three weeks later, one of Jensen’s subordinates received an e-mail to print and hand to Jensen. The note, on Patel’s letterhead, said that Jensen was “being summarily dismissed . . . effective immediately.”
A senior official who recently left the Bureau told me that Patel has suggested that, if it were solely up to him, he would have retained some of those who have been fired. A current agent said, “He’s just telling everyone who’ll listen, ‘Yeah, I just did this to keep my job.’ ” According to the complaint, Patel told Driscoll that the director’s job depended on firing agents who had worked on cases against Trump. “The F.B.I. tried to put the President in jail,” Patel said, “and he hasn’t forgotten it.”
Patel’s parents flew in from India, where they own an apartment and spend part of the year, for his confirmation hearing, in January. In the ornate Senate Judiciary Committee room, Patel bowed down to touch their feet—a sign of respect in Hindu culture. At his swearing-in ceremony, in February, he took his oath on the Bhagavad Gita, the revered Hindu text. “I am living the American Dream,” he said.
Patel’s family is originally from the village of Bhadran, in Gujarat, on India’s west coast. His grandparents migrated to Africa in the mid-twentieth century. His father, Pramod, grew up in Uganda, and his mother, Anjana, in Tanzania. In 1972, Uganda’s dictator, Idi Amin, promising “to transfer the economic control of Uganda into the hands of Ugandans,” ordered the entire Asian community to leave the country within ninety days. Pramod returned to India, where he met Anjana, who had left Tanzania around the same time. They married and emigrated, first to Canada and then to the United States. Pramod, an accountant by training, worked his way up at a company that sold airplane bearings, ultimately becoming its chief financial officer.
The Patels, who have two children—Kash has a sister, Nisha—settled in Garden City, on Long Island, where they initially lived with Pramod’s seven siblings, their spouses, and a half-dozen children. The family made an annual pilgrimage to Disney World in a caravan of fifteen cars. Kash’s parents were registered Republicans, but, by his account, they were mostly apolitical. Growing up, he devoted himself primarily to sports. At Garden City High School, he played hockey and was a kicker on the football team. But he also showed an early interest in social issues. In his yearbook, he quoted the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Racism is man’s gravest threat to man—the maximum of hatred for a minimum reason.”
During high school, Patel worked as a golf caddy at Garden City Country Club, where the rules still state that “hats may only be worn with the bill forward.” A group of defense attorneys adopted him as their favorite caddy. “Obviously, he’s not a white kid—not a member’s son,” a Garden City golfer who knew Patel in those years said. “He’s carrying their bags and listening to them for four hours, and, as a middle-class, lower-middle-class kid, he’s learning about a different world.” Patel, who had been considering a career in medicine, began to gravitate toward studying law. He won a scholarship granted by the caddy association and went to the University of Richmond, where he majored in history and criminal justice. After graduation, he returned to New York, to attend Pace University’s law school, in Westchester County.
Even among fellow-strivers, Patel stood out as especially ambitious. “I can see him standing there after class, blustering,” Bennett Gershman, who taught a course in criminal procedure, told me. “He was outgoing, very cocky . . . the kind of student you don’t forget.” Gershman remembers Patel often visiting his office hours to talk through tough questions in criminal law. The course focussed, in part, on police overreach. Patel “sided with the victims,” Gershman recalled. “He was more interested in the rights of the people police were mistreating.”
While at Pace, Patel registered as a member of New York’s Independence Party, a populist, centrist group that endorsed Ralph Nader for President in 2004. He also signed on to an amicus brief supporting the consideration of race in law-school admissions and participated in the Judicial Intern Opportunity Program, a diversity effort aimed at “members of groups that are traditionally underrepresented in the profession, including students from minority racial and ethnic groups.” Patel, who interned for a federal judge in Chicago as part of the program, has since become an opponent of such initiatives. Earlier this year, the F.B.I. removed “diversity” as one of its “core values.”
Patel completed his law degree at Pace in 2005, but he has sometimes omitted the school’s name when listing his prior experience. His official F.B.I. bio frames his education as follows: “Mr. Patel graduated from the University of Richmond in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and history. He later returned to New York to earn his juris doctor and earned a certificate in international law from University College London Faculty of Laws in the United Kingdom.” In 2004, while a student at Pace, Patel participated in a semester-long exchange program at University College London, but the program appears to have offered no such certificate. Gershman referred to the item on Patel’s résumé as a “fraudulent credential.” (A spokesperson for Patel said that he stood by his characterization of his education.)
Nevertheless, Gershman recalled thinking that Patel had potential. “My law school isn’t Yale or Harvard,” he said. “Getting a job in a public defender’s office is a very good result for us.” Miami-Dade’s public defender’s office was not Patel’s first choice. His goal, he said in his book, was to land at a “white shoe firm making a ton of money,” but “nobody would hire me.” He applied for the Miami position, and, “surprisingly, I got the job.”
Public-defender work, despite chronically low pay and long hours, is highly esteemed in the profession. Brummer, Miami-Dade’s public defender from 1977 to 2009, said that, when Patel applied, the office got about a thousand applications a year for thirty positions. “He had to fight his way into the job because he wasn’t an intern here and they get priority,” he said.
Patel served for four years at the Miami-Dade public defender’s office, then moved up to be a federal public defender. Lawyers at both offices say he was not very interested in writing briefs but he performed well in court. “He’s not a deep thinker like the coastal élites he criticizes,” one of Patel’s former colleagues said. “But he’s sharp. He knows how to be in front of a jury.”
Attorneys who worked with Patel in Miami said that they rarely heard him talking about politics. One recalled Patel reading books by the former Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly, but, if anyone had told the attorney that Patel would one day run the F.B.I., “I would have been astonished, because our job was to fight the F.B.I.,” he said. “They were the other side.” Another attorney, who occasionally debated reproductive rights with Patel, assumed that he was generally right of center. But she saw no sign that he was particularly animated by politics. “We disagreed, but we just disagreed,” she said. “The person we know in the public—I just didn’t know that person.”
In Florida, Patel served on the board of the South Asian Bar Association of North America, which touted its “commitment to inclusion” and advocated for diversity programs. In later years, even as Patel embraced right-wing positions, he continued to occasionally speak like a moderate, even a liberal. “I’ve always said prosecutors need to spend a night in jail before they start their duties so they know what it’s like to cage a human being,” he wrote in his memoir. Addressing Trump’s failure to quickly deploy the National Guard during the riot at the Capitol on January 6th, Patel said, “Nobody wants the president to have unilateral authority to deploy military troops within America as he pleases. That’s a recipe for tyranny.” Two years later, Patel has embraced Trump’s use of the National Guard in several U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C.
In 2013, Patel got a job at the Department of Justice, in Washington, where he initially worked on persuading judges to approve arrest warrants. He moved up rapidly, joining the counterterrorism division a few months later. For years, Patel has claimed that he was “part of the team conducting the criminal investigation” into the 2012 terrorist attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed. He has described himself as “leading the prosecution’s efforts at Main Justice.” But others who worked on the investigation say that the case was run primarily out of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, not the D.O.J.’s headquarters. “It was such a small group,” a retired senior F.B.I. official told me. “And Patel wasn’t in it. I would know. I never heard his name. He just was not there.”
Patel has maintained that the deaths of the Americans were “completely avoidable” and that he had “reams of evidence against dozens of terrorists,” which, he says, were ignored by superiors who chose to prosecute just one man, the ringleader of the attack. In fact, the Justice Department filed about a dozen sealed complaints, but, because the terrorists had not been captured, their cases didn’t move forward. This year, during Patel’s confirmation process, he said only that he had “collaborated on cases tied to the Benghazi attacks.” Patel told senators that “these statements are not inconsistent if one understands the role of the Main Justice lead prosecutor.”
In 2016, while Patel was in Tajikistan interviewing witnesses in one of his investigations, he decided to travel to Texas, for a hearing on a separate case involving a Palestinian accused of providing support to ISIS. With no expectation that he’d be appearing in court, Patel hadn’t brought a suit on his overseas trip. When he arrived at the courtroom in Houston, he was mercilessly confronted by U.S. District Judge Lynn Nettleton Hughes. Hughes was known for his antipathy toward D.C. prosecutors who flew in to bigfoot local attorneys. “You’re just one more nonessential employee from Washington,” he told Patel.
Patel had arrived in court wearing a borrowed, ill-fitting jacket, wrinkled khakis, and boat shoes. Hughes asked, “And where is your tie? Where is your suit?”
The judge demanded to see Patel’s passport. “If you want to be a lawyer, dress like a lawyer,” he said. He then asked Patel what purpose there was “to me and to the people of America to have you fly down here at their expense, eat at their expense, and stay at their expense. . . . You don’t add a bit of value, do you?” The judge tossed Patel out of his chambers and sanctioned him with an obscure disciplinary measure known as an “order on ineptitude.”
Hughes had a history of making inappropriate comments in court about minorities, including Indian Americans, and Patel believed that Hughes had singled him out for abuse. A Washington Post story that chronicled Patel’s humiliation—and the judge’s cruelty—was meant to be lighthearted, but Patel viewed the piece as a hit job. Years later, he was still stewing over the coverage. “They ran with it and dragged my name through the mud,” he wrote in his book. “It was far from the last time the media would slander me.”
The tie incident “was very personal for Kash,” an attorney who worked at Main Justice at the time said. “It was the beginning of his turn.” In the years that followed, Patel would lash out at the D.O.J. for refusing to “stand up for me after being attacked by the unstable judge in Houston.” He also began to malign news organizations that “will do anything to stop you.” Since 2019, Patel has filed defamation lawsuits against the Times, CNN, and Politico, all of which he either later withdrew or saw thrown out by a judge. Patel has also proposed requiring federal workers to sign nondisclosure agreements and have their phones and laptops scanned monthly for any contacts with the press. “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig Presidential elections,” he told Steve Bannon on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, in 2023. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
A number of Patel’s colleagues told me that he is prone to viewing the government, the media, and career politicians as part of a larger cabal. Rogan joked with him about this tendency. “We love conspiracies, don’t we?” he said during their interview. “We love the craziest conspiracies. They’re exciting.”
Patel chuckled and said, “They’re our thing.”
After the 2016 election, Devin Nunes, then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, approached Patel and offered him a position investigating allegations that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia. Patel turned it down, thinking that a job in the Capitol would be a bore. “I NEVER wanted to work on the Hill,” he wrote in his book. He was hungry to get to the White House, ideally to the National Security Council. But Nunes persisted, telling Patel that, if he accepted the job, the congressman would do everything he could to parlay the position into a White House gig. Patel took the deal, a decision that, he said, “would change my life—and change America—forever.”
Patel’s methods quickly became controversial. Soon after joining the House-committee staff, in 2017, he pushed to subpoena the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the N.S.A., seeking evidence that the Obama Administration had tried to “unmask” the names of Trump campaign officials who were mentioned in intelligence intercepts. A couple of months later, Patel and another Republican staffer travelled to London, where they showed up at the law office that represented Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent who had compiled a since-discredited report alleging strong ties between Trump and Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. Patel reportedly failed to inform either the American Embassy or Democrats on the Intelligence Committee about the visit. He wrote in his book that he and his colleague did not go to London to find Steele, but were there on an unrelated matter and decided, impromptu, “to stop by the office.” Patel wrote that he “left immediately after we were told that he was unavailable,” and “then enjoyed a full English breakfast, got on the plane, and headed home.”
That summer, Patel and Nunes went to Vicenza, Italy, on a congressional junket to, as Patel put it, “improve our intelligence community.” One night, the two men met in the town square for Negronis. It was a ritual that Nunes called “the final,” a chance to recap the day’s work. Patel had already learned that the F.B.I. had relied on the Steele dossier to obtain a wiretap on Carter Page. He now pressed Nunes to subpoena records from Fusion GPS, the research firm that had contracted with Steele to gather intelligence on Trump. Nunes was reluctant, but Patel told him that the records would reveal who had paid for the Steele dossier in the first place. “If I was wrong,” Patel said, “he could fire me right on the spot.”
The subpoena eventually came through. As the Washington Post later reported, Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee had financed the Steele dossier. Patel, who at that point had never met Trump, had helped to show that the F.B.I. had omitted potentially exculpatory information in its application for the wiretap on Page. His findings were compiled in a four-page report, known as the Nunes memo, which was released over the objections of the F.B.I. In right-wing media, it was heralded as proof that the investigation into Russian interference in the election was an anti-Trump conspiracy. A Justice Department inspector general’s report in 2019 confirmed that the F.B.I., as Patel had alleged, had unfairly emphasized evidence supporting the idea that Page might have been a link between Russia and the Trump campaign, leaving out or mischaracterizing evidence to the contrary. But the inspector general also concluded that there was no evidence that political bias had prompted the investigation into Russian influence. (Clinton’s campaign and the D.N.C. were eventually fined for failing to properly disclose their payments for the opposition research.)
Near the end of 2018, Patel asked Nunes to fulfill their deal and help him find counterterrorism work at the White House. According to a senior National Security Council official, Nunes spoke to Trump on Patel’s behalf, and the President told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hire Patel onto the N.S.C. But this was the first Trump Administration, when high-level Republicans were still resisting the President’s impulses. John Bolton, Trump’s national-security adviser, was intent on keeping Patel out of the N.S.C. “Nunes kept calling us, saying, ‘This guy’s great—he’s tenacious,’ ” Bolton’s deputy, Charlie Kupperman, told me. “Kash came over and I interviewed him and I said, ‘We don’t have anything.’ ”
Kupperman and Bolton had concluded that one of Patel’s primary motives was to find a place in Trump’s orbit. “He had no real politics of his own,” Kupperman said. “He’s always cultivated people that can help him get into the limelight, and Trump has supported him at every turn because he’s one-hundred-per-cent sycophant.” Bolton and Kupperman were alarmed by what Bolton called Patel’s “résumé puffery,” including exaggerating his role at Justice in the Benghazi case. They also concluded that Patel couldn’t be trusted with secret information. On Nunes’s staff, he was seen as a serial leaker. “We would give information to the committee,” a senior official during Trump’s first term said, “and it would be on Fox News in twenty minutes.”
Eventually, Trump prevailed upon the N.S.C. to find a spot for Patel. “Devin Nunes keeps calling,” the President said, according to Kupperman. “You have to take him.” (Nunes did not respond to requests for an interview.) The only available position was in the N.S.C.’s international-organizations section, which coördinated U.S. policy on the United Nations and other such bodies. “We weren’t going to just make up a job for him,” Kupperman said. Patel replied, “I’ll take anything to get into the N.S.C.”
Once inside, Patel managed to quickly endear himself to the President. One day, Kupperman arrived at the Oval Office for a meeting with the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, the N.S.C. legal adviser John Eisenberg, and Trump. “Lo and behold, there’s Kash,” Kupperman recalled. The President wanted Patel to act as his political commissar on the N.S.C., serving as Trump’s eyes and ears, and insuring that staff members remained loyal to the Chief Executive. Kupperman said that he and Cipollone told the President, “We don’t need that.” Then, in the middle of the meeting, the Fox News host Sean Hannity called Trump. “The President puts him on the squawk box and introduces everybody,” Kupperman said. “And Sean says, ‘Oh, I love Kash Patel.’ ”
Five months later, when an opening arose in counterterrorism, Bolton felt pressured to give it to Patel, a decision he quickly regretted. Patel “proved less interested in his assigned duties than in worming his way into Mr. Trump’s presence, which evidenced he was duplicitous, manipulative, and conspiratorial,” Bolton later said. Bolton and Kupperman were eventually included on Patel’s “government gangsters” list.
Resistance to hiring Patel was not limited to the N.S.C. According to Kupperman and Bolton, in December, 2020, when Trump was considering Patel for the role of deputy director at the C.I.A., Gina Haspel, the agency’s director, threatened to resign in protest. Trump backed down. (Haspel declined a request for an interview.) A few months earlier, Attorney General William Barr had “categorically opposed” Trump’s proposal to make Patel the deputy director of the F.B.I. Barr wrote in his memoir that he told the White House chief of staff that “it would happen ‘over my dead body’ ” because Patel had “virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency.” He added that “the very idea . . . showed a shocking detachment from reality.”
At the N.S.C., Patel coördinated hostage negotiations and rescues. To celebrate successful operations, he and his colleagues kept a barrel of bourbon on hand. (They later donated the barrel to Trump’s Presidential library.) After each confirmed kill of an Al Qaeda or Islamic State member, Patel would X out their faces on charts that he’d hung in his office, “using one of President Trump’s famous sharpies that he gave me personally.” In 2019, during the U.S. raid that killed the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in Syria, Patel, seated next to Vice-President Mike Pence in the Situation Room, shouted, “Fuck, yeah!” Both Democrats and Republicans viewed Patel “as a loyal operative who was not there based on his ability,” Eugene Vindman, a Democratic House member from Virginia who formerly was a lawyer at the N.S.C., told me. “I spent a lot of time correcting his work—the content, the factual information, and also the writing was not very good. Both sides saw through him.”
The history of the F.B.I. is heavily inflected by its first director, J. Edgar Hoover, who, for nearly half a century, led the Bureau’s crusades against communist infiltrators—both real and imagined—and anything else he deemed un-American. Hoover’s Bureau decimated the Ku Klux Klan; it also harassed Martin Luther King, Jr., targeted antiwar activists, and tormented gay people. But Hoover’s avid curation of the Bureau’s image, which included reviewing scripts for the long-running ABC drama “The F.B.I.,” managed to keep its reputation for thorough law enforcement largely unchallenged for decades. Tim Weiner, the author of “Enemies: A History of the FBI,” told me that the paramount rule governing agents’ behavior throughout Hoover’s long reign was “Don’t embarrass the Bureau.”
Hoover’s successors generally fit a type—they tended to be clean-shaven, conservatively dressed, and deeply loyal to the Justice Department. All of them were white men. Patel broke the pattern in many ways, not least by promising retribution against the Bureau’s own agents. After the 2020 Presidential election and Trump’s failed attempt to reverse the result, Patel posited that the F.B.I. had planted confidential sources inside militia groups and encouraged them to take a more violent approach during the January 6th attack. He declared that the arrested rioters were political prisoners and promoted their recording of “Justice for All,” an off-key anthem defending those who stormed the Capitol. In 2023, Patel told the podcaster Tim Pool that, “to defeat the insurrection narrative,” it would be vital to prove that F.B.I. informants were seeded into the crowd that day.
The F.B.I. was a frequent target on Patel’s own podcast, “Kash’s Corner,” which was produced by the Epoch Times, a right-wing news organization associated with the Falun Gong, a Chinese dissident religious group. “What was the F.B.I. doing planning January 6th for a year?” Patel asked in 2022. He claimed that the Bureau had been “completely politicized” during the Obama and Biden Administrations. He demanded that the Bureau investigate Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whom Patel suspected of covering up the origin of the Covid-19 virus. “We now know the true nature of their corrupt ways,” he said of the F.B.I.
After Trump was indicted, in 2023, for secreting classified documents to Mar-a-Lago, Patel told listeners, “When you’re President and you leave, you can take whatever you want. And when you take it, whether it’s classified or not, it’s yours.” (The Presidential Records Act of 1978 prohibits former Presidents from taking any official records, classified or not, with them when they leave office.) Patel said that he had seen Trump declassify documents before leaving the White House, but, when prosecutors looking into the case summoned him to testify to a grand jury, he invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. After prosecutors granted him limited immunity, Patel appeared a second time and answered questions, but at his Senate confirmation hearing he refused to discuss his testimony, saying that he wasn’t permitted to do so, a statement that, as several senators noted, was false.
During his time out of public service, Patel found other ways to cash in on his anti-government invective. He created the Kash Patel Legal Offense Trust, “to give those smeared by the fake news media and big tech a voice.” The trust’s website, fightwithkash.com, was set up to sell his “K$H” clothing line and raise money for January 6th defendants and others he deemed victims of a weaponized Justice Department. He promoted dietary supplements that promised to “undo the damage” from the Covid-19 vaccine. (“Reverse the vaxx n get healthy with @warrioressentials.”) He wrote three “Plot Against the King” children’s books, allegorical tales in which Kash the Wizard heroically leads a battle on behalf of King Donald to identify the bad guys who were scheming to elect Hillary Queenton on Choosing Day. The books, he said, teach “the importance of service, mission, faith and truth.”
The Kash Foundation, a charity that Patel founded, promised to make grants to “those who have the courage to stand up against government wrongdoing.” The foundation’s latest publicly available tax returns reported revenue of $1.34 million, and six hundred seventy-four thousand dollars in expenses—but the foundation dispensed only about two hundred thousand dollars in grants, mostly in “direct cash assistance” to fifty unnamed individuals. About half of the group’s expenses went to advertising and promotion of its programs, including two hundred seventy-five thousand dollars to a company owned by Andrew Ollis, the foundation’s vice-president and a business partner of Patel’s. Patel has said that the gap between the foundation’s marketing expenditures and its charitable grants reflects only “standard, ordinary-course business transactions at fair market values.”
Patel also started Trishul L.L.C., a national-security and intelligence consulting firm named after a Hindu term representing the three states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, and sleeping. Trishul had contracts with the Trump Media group, which paid Patel’s company more than a quarter-million dollars in 2022 and 2023, according to S.E.C. filings; Patel oversaw an investigation into two of Trump Media’s founders, who were accused of mismanaging the company’s launch. In January, Trump Media granted Patel, who served on the company’s board, and who was then the nominee for F.B.I. director, stock shares valued at nearly eight hundred thousand dollars. On the day of his Senate hearing, Patel said that he had decided not to accept the award, “to avoid any appearance of any conflict.”
Patel also consulted for Elite Depot Ltd., the parent company of Shein, a Chinese fast-fashion retailer. He held investments of between a million and five million dollars in Elite, whose board included investors with alleged ties to China’s military and the Communist Party. Democrats and Republicans in Congress have raised questions about Shein’s use of forced labor in China, an allegation that the company has strenuously denied. Patel told the Justice Department’s ethics office that he saw no need to divest his holdings in Elite and that, if Trump gave him a waiver, he could handle matters related to its businesses.
Another Trishul client was the government of Qatar, which paid Patel an undisclosed amount for consulting services. The news site Responsible Statecraft reported that Patel’s work for Qatar included helping with security ahead of the 2022 World Cup and offering advice on counterterrorism and election monitoring. Patel pledged to recuse himself from matters concerning Trishul that might arise at the F.B.I., but he refused to sell off assets related to his firm, which paid him more than two million dollars in 2024. In March, he got a waiver allowing him to handle Qatar-related matters.
Earlier this year, the public-interest lobby Public Citizen filed a complaint alleging that Patel, by failing to disclose his work for Qatar or to register as a foreign agent, had violated federal rules requiring officials to report income from overseas entities. The day after the complaint was filed, Attorney General Bondi limited enforcement of the rules governing such income, saying that criminal charges would be considered only in cases involving “traditional espionage.” Craig Holman, one of Public Citizen’s lobbyists, told me, “They rigged the whole system to make sure we never knew what Kash Patel was doing for Qatar.”
In 1993, President Bill Clinton fired his F.B.I. director, William Sessions, after a Justice Department report concluded that Sessions had used F.B.I. aircraft to visit friends and relatives, often with his wife. In 2023, Patel said on his podcast that the Bureau’s jet should be grounded because the then director, Christopher Wray, spent “taxpayer dollars to hop around the country.” But, since joining the Bureau, Patel has travelled extensively, often donning F.B.I.-branded gear at news conferences and field-office visits. O’Leary, the F.B.I. veteran, told me, “He wants to play with toys and dress in camouflage.”
In March, Patel flew on a government jet to Las Vegas and attended an Ultimate Fighting Championship bout, at T-Mobile Arena, in Paradise, Nevada. He posed for a photo with Dana White, the U.F.C. president, and discussed bringing in mixed-martial-arts fighters to help F.B.I. agents with their conditioning. (White said Patel was “dead serious” about the proposal.) During the fight, Patel sat cageside next to the actor Mel Gibson. A day earlier, the Justice Department had fired a pardon attorney who had refused to recommend restoring Gibson’s right to possess firearms, a privilege he had lost in 2011 after he was convicted of battering a former girlfriend. Gibson’s gun rights were restored the following month. (The Justice Department said the Gibson matter played no role in the attorney’s firing.) In Paradise, Patel was photographed giving Gibson a fist bump.
Patel has used the Justice Department’s Boeing 757 and its G5 to attend U.F.C. fights not only in Vegas but in Miami, where he was seated behind Trump. “You never saw Mueller, Wray, or Comey at U.F.C. matches,” a current agent said of the Bureau’s previous three directors. Patel also used a government jet to fly to New York with the hockey great Wayne Gretzky to attend an Islanders game at which Alex Ovechkin, of the Washington Capitals, broke the all-time N.H.L. scoring record. An F.B.I. spokesman told NBC News that Patel, who remains a member of the Dons, an amateur team in northern Virginia’s MedStar Capitals Iceplex Adult Hockey League, “has and always will support his friends on and off the ice.” (Patel has said that he uses government aircraft because the F.B.I. director is required to fly on planes equipped for high-security communications, and that he reimburses the government for personal travel.)
Since 2022, Patel’s home address has been in Las Vegas. Last year, he joined the Poodle Room, a private club on the top floor of the city’s Fontainebleau hotel; membership costs an estimated twenty thousand dollars a year, though Patel has said that he paid about ten thousand dollars. When in Vegas, he lives in a two-bedroom home backing onto a golf course in a gated community. The house, valued by tax assessors at three hundred seventy-six thousand dollars, is owned by Michael Muldoon, a real-estate entrepreneur and a frequent donor to Republican candidates and organizations. (Both men use the house as their home address.) Muldoon, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, owns companies in the time-share industry. He was sued in a class action by customers who accused his businesses of “bait-and-switch fraud” and “grandiose promises.” The case was settled out of court, with Muldoon’s companies admitting no wrongdoing. Patel rents the house from Muldoon, but, Patel’s spokeswoman, Erica Knight, said, “he doesn’t have any other business with Kash.”
Patel’s girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, a twenty-seven-year-old country singer, lives in Nashville. Patel has used government planes to fly there at least five times, though he appears to have visited the city’s F.B.I. field office on only one of those trips. He also “requested executive protection for his girlfriend,” a former senior agent said. “None of the other F.B.I. directors had executive protection for their wives, let alone a girlfriend.”
In late October, after a former F.B.I. agent turned podcaster, Kyle Seraphin, criticized Patel for using government aircraft to visit Wilkins, the Bureau requested that its jet be removed from the public tracking site FlightAware. “What ever are you going to grift, create fake outrage and post about now, Kyle?” Wilkins said on X after the removal. Seraphin quickly noted that it remained easy to track the F.B.I. plane on other sites. Patel jumped on X to defend his girlfriend. “The disgustingly baseless attacks against Alexis—a true patriot and the woman I’m proud to call my partner in life—are beyond pathetic,” he wrote. “And to our supposed allies staying silent—your silence is louder than the clickbait haters.”
After his Nashville visit, according to the Wall Street Journal, Patel flew to San Angelo, Texas, to spend a few days at the Boondoggle Ranch, a hunting resort owned by the family of C. R. (Bubba) Saulsbury, Jr., a Republican donor. The luxury ranch is home to exotic animals, such as addax and Nile lechwe, and its guests can hunt from a custom Hummer. Patel called the Journal’s reporting “hot garbage.”
On September 10th, a gunman on a rooftop on the campus of Utah Valley University shot the conservative activist Charlie Kirk to death. Minutes before local and federal officials in Utah held their first media briefing on the assassination, Patel declared on social media—without consulting other Bureau leaders—that a suspect was in custody. Moments later, Utah’s public-safety commissioner said authorities were still working “to find this killer.” Patel quickly reversed himself, posting that “the subject in custody has been released after an interrogation.” Patel added, “Our investigation continues.”
Patel was in Manhattan that evening, dining at Rao’s, an Italian hot spot in East Harlem. Even loyal members of Trump’s base criticized the director’s rush to social media. The conservative activist Christopher Rufo called on Republicans to “assess” whether Patel “is the right man to run the FBI.” Joseph Biggs, a leader of the Proud Boys who was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to seventeen years in prison for his participation in the January 6th attack, blasted Patel on X, asking, “Why is the head of the @FBI speculating like everyone not in the know? Stop all this click bait shit you keep doing.” (Trump commuted Biggs’s sentence on his first day back in office.)
Patel decided to fly out to Utah. At a news conference the next day, he bade farewell to Kirk, saying, “Rest now, brother. We have the watch. I’ll see you in Valhalla.” The benediction did not go over well at the F.B.I. “Valhalla is where warriors go to die,” the former senior Bureau official said. “Now he’s a Viking warrior? He was a lawyer at the Justice Department. He’s just not a serious guy.”
That morning, Patel had convened a video call with about two hundred F.B.I. officials, in which he berated his staff for what he called “Mickey Mouse operations.” He told the assembled leaders that it was unacceptable that agents in Salt Lake City—the field office closest to the site of the shooting—had waited nearly twelve hours to show him a picture of the suspect. A few weeks earlier, Patel had forced out the agent in charge of the Salt Lake office, Mehtab Syed, a well-regarded former counterterrorism agent. The alleged shooter, a twenty-two-year-old named Tyler Robinson, turned himself in to authorities, ending a thirty-three-hour manhunt. At the press conference announcing Robinson’s arrest, Patel said, “This is what happens when you let good cops be cops.”
The wrongful-termination suit against Patel and Bondi had been filed on the morning of Kirk’s murder. The third plaintiff, Spencer Evans, who had been dismissed a month earlier, was formerly the head of the F.B.I.’s Las Vegas office, which supported the hunt for Kirk’s assassin. Jensen, the former head of the D.C. field office, had overseen the investigation into the murder of two Israeli Embassy staff members outside the Capital Jewish Museum. Margaret Donovan, an attorney who represents the former agents in their suit, noted that Patel had also fired the head of the Bureau’s Critical Incident Response Group, who would have helped to lead the investigation into the shooting. “Who did Kash fire?” Donovan said. “Everybody who would have helped him, he had just fired.”
Patel was already facing criticism for the closing of the Jeffrey Epstein case. Before coming to the F.B.I., he had demanded that the Bureau cough up Epstein’s supposed client list. In 2023, on Benny Johnson’s podcast, the host asked why the F.B.I. was “protecting the world’s foremost predator” by refusing to release his clients’ names. “Simple,” Patel replied. “Because of who’s on that list.” But, as the F.B.I. director, Patel has grown frustrated that many of Trump’s followers don’t believe him when he says that there was no client list, and that Epstein’s death in a Manhattan jail was indeed a suicide. Patel has said that court orders prevent him from releasing the remaining F.B.I. and Justice Department documents from the Epstein investigation, and that those records contain nothing new about Epstein’s misdeeds. “Do you think that myself, Bongino, and others would participate in hiding information about Epstein’s grotesque activities?” Patel asked Rogan. “Do you really think I wouldn’t give that to you if it existed?” In August, however, a U.S. District Court judge wrote that the remaining documents are not secret and that the F.B.I. is “the logical party to make comprehensive disclosure to the public of the Epstein Files.”
In September, at hearings before the Senate and House Judiciary committees, Patel lashed out at several Democrats who questioned his handling of the Epstein case. Senator Adam Schiff, of California, who served as Congress’s lead manager during Trump’s first impeachment, is known in Patel’s children’s books as “Shifty,” a bad guy upon whom the great wizard Kash unleashes the Dragon of Jalapeños (D.O.J., get it?), which chases Shifty “out of the kingdom, never to be seen again.” In the hearing, Schiff rejected Patel’s explanation of why Epstein’s longtime assistant, Ghislaine Maxwell, had been transferred from one federal prison to another, much more comfortable, one shortly after she answered questions from Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General and Trump’s former defense lawyer. Patel had said that it was the Bureau of Prisons’ decision to transfer Maxwell. “You want the American people to believe that?” Schiff asked. “Do you think they’re stupid?”
“No,” Patel said, raising his voice and waving his arms. “What I am doing is protecting the country, providing historic reform, and combatting the weaponization of intelligence by the likes of you, and we have countlessly proven you to be a liar, in Russiagate, in January 6th—you’re the biggest fraud to ever sit in the United States Senate.” At the end of his tirade, Patel added, “Go ahead and run to the cameras.”
When another veteran of Trump’s first impeachment, Representative Eric Swalwell, of California, named in Patel’s memoir as a “corrupt actor of the first order,” asked how many times Trump’s name appears in the Bureau’s files on Epstein, Patel replied, “Your fixation on this matter is disgusting.”
Later that day, a photo of Patel during his testimony, holding a series of notes handwritten on his personalized F.B.I. stationery, went viral. The first line read “Good fight with Swalwell.” Then “Hold the line,” “Brush off their attacks,” and “Rise above the next line of partisan attacks.”
On November 12th, Democrats in the House released a set of e-mails in which Epstein said, in 2011, that Trump “spent hours at my house” with one of “the girls,” who was described by the House Oversight Committee as “a victim of sex trafficking.” Trump has long acknowledged that he and Epstein were once friends, but claimed, in 2019, that “I wasn’t a fan.” He has urged Congress to back off from its investigation into Epstein’s sex trafficking. In one of Epstein’s e-mails, a 2011 message to Maxwell, he called Trump the “dog that hasn’t barked.”
Patel, like Trump, has done his best to change the subject. In October, he gave Congress more than two hundred pages of F.B.I. documents from 2022, in which his predecessor, Wray, urged Merrick Garland, then the Attorney General, to approve an investigation into the Trump campaign’s role in trying to obstruct congressional certification of the 2020 Presidential vote—what Patel called “important documentation showing weaponization and politicization at the highest levels of government.” That same month, Patel touted the indictment of two Texas men who allegedly vandalized cars and shot fireworks as part of a July 4th attack on an ICE detention facility near Dallas. Patel said that the men, who were charged with supporting terrorism, were members of an Antifa cell. There had been no mention of Antifa in prosecutors’ original announcement of the charges, in July. But, on Fox Business, Patel said, “We are treating them as terrorists, just like we do Al Qaeda or ISIS.” On X, he announced the news with an added flourish: “Law and order is back.”
Elsewhere on social media, Patel’s support seemed fragile. Nearly a year into the President’s second term, users on X, Facebook, and Truth Social have been diligently cataloguing the anti-MAGA forces that have yet to be brought to justice. One meme tallied the “Number of Arrests” stemming from crimes Patel had promised to solve, including the “Russian Collusion Hoax”; the 2020 election; January 6th; the Covid-19 lab leak; the “Mar-a-Lago Raid”; and “Epstein Pedophile Arrests.” The final count on each, at least so far, is zero. ♦
