Kash Patel and Donald Trump Are Cut from the Same Cloth

US President Trump has officially signed the commission to confirm Kash Patel as the 9th FBI Director.

Donald Trump’s desire to appoint Patel has been hardly surprising. Patel has been one of his most trusted and loyal supporters for years harking back to his presidency between 2016 and 2020.

(Photo: AP/PTI)

In 2023, Kashyap 'Kash' Patel, whom US President Donald Trump has confirmed as the ninth Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director, published a book called Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy. In this book, quite predictably, he not only targeted the Democrats but also some Republicans, including former FBI director Christopher Wray.

Trump, of course, had made it abundantly clear that he was unhappy with Wray and wanted his resignation long before his normal, 10 year term ended, in order to replace him with Patel.

Trump’s desire to appoint Patel has been hardly surprising. Patel has been one of his most trusted and loyal supporters for years, harking back to his presidency between 2016 and 2020.

During Trump’s presidency, Patel had served as an aide to a Congressman from California, Devin Nunes, who resigned from Congress on 1 January 2022 after a two-decade stint. Following his resignation, he became the CEO of a Trump-owned media company.

Nunes, while serving as the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, had been a staunch Trump supporter and had frequently and vociferously questioned the charges about Trump’s alleged ties to the Kremlin. Patel, to no surprise, echoed those sentiments after he left Nunes’ office.

Who's Kash Patel?

The child of Indian immigrants to the United States, Patel grew up in Long Island, New York.

He has stated that though his family had wanted him to study medicine, he chose to pursue a career in law. His bachelor’s degree was in history and criminal justice from the University of Richmond in Virginia.

Later, he received a law degree from Pace University in New York after which he worked as a public defender in Florida before being hired by the US Department of Justice (DoJ). At the DoJ, he worked as a junior staffer on some terrorism cases. From there, he went to work for Congressman Nunes.

Even before Nunes left office, Patel joined the Trump administration in 2019, serving on the National Security Council (NSC). Subsequently, in November 2020, after Trump had fired his Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and replaced him with Christopher Miller, Patel had been made the latter’s chief of staff.

When Trump was out of office following his election loss to Joe Biden, Patel remained wholly loyal to Trump and was a key member of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) segment of the Republican Party.

As Trump planned a political comeback, Patel found several ways to promote the former President. One of them involved writing a trilogy of children’s books, entitled The Plot Against the King, a thinly veiled, conspiracy-laden account of a plot against Trump and his eventual triumphant return to office after vanquishing his political enemies.

Apart from these political ventures, Patel also hawked diet pills on the internet. These drugs, he claimed, could reverse the toxic effects of the Covid-19 vaccines. Since many of Trump’s supporters were also deeply skeptical about the Covid-19 vaccines, the drug that he was hawking, no doubt, further endeared him to them.

Trump and Patel

Patel, like Trump, had repeatedly made clear that if he became the FBI director, he would use the agency to harass Trump’s critics.

Furthermore, he has publicly stated that he wants to move the FBI headquarters from Washington, DC and even disperse its agents. He also intends, apparently, to hunt down “conspirators” within the federal government, whom he believes are disloyal to the President’s agenda.

Several Democratic Senators had made it abundantly clear that they deemed Patel utterly unsuited for the position given his extreme political views, not to mention his obvious hostility toward the organisation he would himself run if confirmed.

However, with a Republican-controlled Senate, it was only a matter of time that this unabashed Trump loyalist was confirmed as the FBI Director.

A small handful of Republican Senators had publicly expressed mild reservations about his suitability as well. However, none of them had even hinted that they would be opposed to his candidacy — such was their fear of Trump’s possible retribution.

Even Senator Susan Collins, a moderate Republican from Maine, who had previously expressed reservations about one of Trump’s nominees, former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, for the position of the Attorney-General of the United States, did not categorically come out against Patel.

“The FBI will serve the American people and refocus on its core mission: enforcing justice fairly and without bias,” the White House wrote on X, welcoming Patel's confirmation. Following his confirmation by the Senate on Thursday, 20 February, Patel thanked Trump — and and vowed to rebuild the agency into one that is “transparent, accountable, and committed to justice.”

(This article has been updated from The Quint's archives. It was originally published on 4 December 2024.)

(Sumit Ganguly is a Senior Fellow and directs the Huntington Program on Strengthening US-India Relations at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)