Kash Patel and the Future of the FBI
Trump's nominee for FBI director raises questions about whether his leadership will reform the agency or deepen its politicization.
As I announced late last year, I’ll be writing to you here every Tuesday — primarily about the Federal Bureau of Investigation and how federal agents and prosecutors are finding ways to curb First Amendment freedoms.
Much of my journalism has focused — and will continue to focus — on long-term investigative projects published with or distributed by media partners. I have a new series coming out on Audible in February, which you’ll hear more about in this space soon. I see this newsletter as a vehicle for sharing information about upcoming projects and for more timely writing that doesn’t fit neatly into those projects. So, dear readers, welcome to the first of my Tuesday emails.
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The K$H Nomination
It’s been a colorful couple of months since Donald Trump’s election. The once and future president’s nomination of Matt Gaetz to be attorney general was a wild ride: a sudden resignation from Congress; stories of sex parties, drugs, Venmo transactions, and a 17-year-old girl; and a “will they or won’t they?” drama involving the release of a House ethics report detailing those allegations. (They did release the report in the end.)
The Matt Gaetz Show (now airing encore performances on One America News) seemed to end rather well for the incoming Trump administration: Gaetz’s doomed nomination distracted the media for a time from other, equally unorthodox nominees, such as axe-hurling, settlement-wielding Fox News morning host Pete Hegseth (secretary of defense) and Democrat-turned-Fox News contributor Tulsi Gabbard (director of national intelligence). Trump’s nominations have been so unconventional that even some past resume-padding by John Ratcliffe, Trump’s CIA nominee, hardly seems to seems to raise a Matt Gaetz eyebrow these days.
True to form, Trump chose Kash Patel — who stylizes his first name as “K$H” — to be the next FBI director. Chris Wray, the current FBI director, announced his resignation almost immediately — hardly a surprise, given he led the bureau when federal agents raided Mar-a-Lago.
While Patel might not be a household name, he’s well-known in Washington, D.C., and within the MAGA movement. A former public defender and counsel to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where he worked for Republican Rep. Devin Nunes (now CEO of Trump’s Truth Social), Patel reportedly caught Trump’s eye when he authored the so-called “Nunes memo.” The memo alleged the FBI used politically motivated or questionable sources to obtain a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to monitor 2016 Trump campaign advisor Carter Page — and, to be clear, FISA abuses haven’t been limited to Trump (see here and here). In many ways, the so-called Nunes memo marked the beginning of the Republican Party’s all-out war against the FBI, placing Patel at the vanguard of that war.
Patel’s name gained some prominence toward the end of Trump’s first term. Trump moved him from Nunes’ team in the House to the National Security Council and later made him chief of staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller. Trump had reportedly wanted to place Patel at the CIA, but both Attorney General Bill Barr and CIA Director Gina Haspel blocked that move at the time.
After Trump’s loss in 2020, Patel spent the next few years solidifying his place in the MAGA movement — writing a children’s parable about Trump (The Plot Against the King) and another book for, well, more mature readers, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, which includes a list of Trump’s enemies, some of whom were Cabinet members in the first Trump administration. (Barr and Haspel, responsible for blocking Patel’s move to the CIA in 2020, made the list.) Patel also started a foundation, a clothing brand, and even a supplement aimed at helping people “detox” from COVID vaccines. His critics argue that these entrepreneurial ventures reveal how he’s just another grifter in Trumpworld.
Separate from Patel’s commercial ventures, his nomination to be FBI director strikes me as indicative of larger questions about the second Trump administration’s approach to American institution.
Kamala Harris’ campaign for president emphasized protecting American institutions as-is — an approach that, in hindsight, seems as misguided as doing duets with Liz Cheney. Recognizing that Americans’ trust in our institutions is waning, and that government agencies can’t seem to build things (subways, broadband) with any efficiency these days, Trump campaigned against institutions, vowing to make them more accountable, effective, and modern — with a little help from billionaire government contractor Elon Musk (here be dragons).
It’s hard to argue today that American institutions don’t need reform. And the FBI should be at the top of that list. An NBC News poll from 2023 found that only 37 percent of registered voters have a positive view of America’s premier law enforcement agency. And I get it. I’ve spent the past decade and a half documenting FBI abuse and malfeasance, most recently an Audible documentary series that explored how the FBI covered up its failures to prevent the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016.
But what would FBI reform under Patel look like? Some sort of true remaking of the agency? A wholesale dismantling of the agency? Or, worse, would Patel weaponize the bureau against Trump’s enemies?
Those worrying about Patel weaponizing the FBI aren’t conjuring nightmares for no reason. In addition to publishing a list of enemies in his book, Patel has made some alarming statements for someone who might be FBI director, including telling Steve Bannon on the War Room podcast: “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. … We’re going to come after you. Whether that’s criminally or civilly, we’re going to figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
Patel has also promoted the “fedsurrection” conspiracy theory, which claims the FBI orchestrated the January 6 Capitol riot — a ridiculous but remarkably durable conspiracy theory that, in part, originates from a Tucker Carlson monologue that cited my book, The Terror Factory.
Vox’s Zack Beauchamp listened to hours of Patel’s “War Room” appearances and reported that Patel and/or his interviewees on the show made a number of eyebrow-raising claims, including that China is sending “military-age males” to the U.S. for a preemptive strike and that President Barack Obama runs a “shadow network” whose mission is to persecute Trump.
In a nation where attention bestows power, it’s hard to tell whether Patel’s provocative statements reflect his true beliefs or are simply a means of gaining attention that can translate into power, which he’s about to achieve as FBI director.
In recent weeks, I’ve spoken with several former FBI agents aligned with Trump. They all support Patel’s nomination, though this is not to say a majority of former agents share this view. My sample was intentionally small and biased — I wanted to understand what Patel’s supporters, particularly those who know him, see in him and what kind of FBI director they think he’ll be.
One former agent told me that Patel’s experience as a federal public defender allowed him to see firsthand how abusive the FBI could be and that he would usher in much-needed reforms. (Early in his career, Patel worked as a public defender in Miami.) This former agent also believed Patel would likely put an end to the abusive types of terrorism stings I wrote about in The Terror Factory.
I find encouraging the prospect of a director with experience as a public defender. FBI directors have typically been former prosecutors. But Patel doesn’t sound like any public defenders I’ve known. Who would expect calls to prosecute journalists coming from a public defender?
Over the years, I’ve angered officials in the FBI and Justice Department. Last year, the Justice Department attacked me in a federal court filing for trying to report on a high-profile terrorism case in Michigan.
So, to me, the prospect of the FBI targeting journalists is not academic — it’s a real concern. In a conversation with another former FBI agent, a Patel supporter, I explained how unsettling I found it to hear an FBI director nominee calling for the investigation and prosecution of members of the media.
“There’s still a First Amendment,” the former agent told me. “None of us would stand for making journalism a crime. None of us would stand for them going after someone like you.”
I took some comfort in that assurance. But not enough to quell the alarm it raised — that I was even having that conversation.
If the Senate confirms Patel as the next FBI director — and early reporting suggests that’s likely — we’ll soon discover whether my sources are right about him.
There is a decent amount to unpack here. First, there have been rules for political operatives that have allowed some to lie, manipulate, shop judges and make up legal theories in a specific jurisdiction, and possibly inspire violence that they've known to be lies. There most certainly were agents in that crowd, and even though Horowitz says they came on their own, none of them have been prosecuted. This whole process of classifying political opposition supporters as domestic terrorists without one single violent action has to stop. More than that, at some point, some of these people DO need to face consequences. The public does deserve to know the whole truth about so many things. We can't begin to build back trust until everyone decides or is forced to come clean. Of course, no one will stand for going after journalists. However, it sure would have been nice if any journalists could have shown themselves to be honorable enough to fight back against the blacklisting of many conservative journalists. It has to matter all the time or never. It can't just matter for the "right" and "good" ones. There is a difference between holding someone accountable vs revenge for its own sake. The former is needed.