Waiting for K$H: Views of Kash Patel inside the FBI and from former colleagues
The CIA so distrusted Patel that he was excluded from interagency briefings on one of the most important operations of 2019, the raid on ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
As I tried to write about Kash Patel, the polarizing figure that President-elect Donald Trump has chosen to lead the FBI, I thought about Esquire’s article Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. It was 1966 and journalist Gay Talese was supposed to profile Sinatra but couldn’t get an interview with him. So Talese went to the people around him.
I’m not chasing an American icon, I’m writing for my own nascent entity, and this isn’t a piece of seminal journalism. But I texted Patel. I called. I emailed. I wrote back and forth with his model-pretty press person, Erica Knight. Nada.
Patel is on Truth Social, re-posting the endorsements he is getting from Republican lawmakers: Senator Ted Cruz calling him “a very strong nominee.” Senator Mike Lee saying, “There is not a good reason for ANY senator — Democrat or Republican — to oppose Kash Patel.” Senator Lindsey Graham asking, “If the FBI doesn’t need to be cleaned out, what does?”
So I moved onto the people who knew and worked with Patel during Trump’s first term. Over the years, plenty of them had spoken of him — sometimes in sort of hushed tones, like Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter, not to be confused with Patel’s children’s book, “The Plot Against the King,” with “King Donald” and “Hillary Queenton.” Collectively, these people described an opportunist who saw the way the chips were falling. A talkative man without much experience. Someone who could be incredibly fun and funny. A person who was ruthless, a familiar trait in Washington.
It has taken time to get anyone to discuss specifics on the record or even on background. So here we are.
A ‘Sopranos job’ at the National Security Council
Before Patel convinced Trump to fire Defense Secretary Mark Esper for not deploying troops to George Floyd protests, before he marketed “vaccine detoxification” pills and “K$H” apparel which he says “assists whistleblowers, America-First patriots, and veterans” through the Kash Foundation, he worked at the National Security Council in the White House.
“He literally wouldn't show up at his desk for days on end except maybe to drop his lunch in the fridge,” a person who worked with him told me on the condition of anonymity. “Essentially, Kash treated his job as if it was like a Sopranos no-show, no-work job. And his real job in his mind was to do cartwheels in front of the Oval Office, metaphorically speaking, to get Trump's attention. And he succeeded apparently… He was certainly not going to let interagency work on Hamas or Hezbollah or anything like that distract him.”
Patel appeared to acknowledge the accusation. In a November podcast interview, sitting in a gray K$H hoodie, he joked that “on Sunday nights, when I was in the administration, even the boss was like, ‘Where the hell is Kash?’” He went on to say that he told Trump, “Sunday nights are for beer, hockey, and God. I get 90 minutes. You know I'm gonna be on the sheet, playing in the beer league, having a PBR, and then I'll return your phone call. Obviously, I'm kidding, but it was funny.” He said Trump understood. “[Trump] would be like, ‘Okay, I know where he is. He's playing hockey.’ It was my one out.” He also displayed a self-deprecating humor, asserting that his grades “sucked” in his school years, that “I was like the only dumb Indian you'll ever meet.” Then Patel asked listeners to “buy some merch.”
People who worked with Patel told me that he greatly admired the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), but that he inflated his role and involvement in the Tier 1 community. On the podcast, he said, “I went over to become a civilian at JSOC, which is in their Special Operations Command, so SEAL Team Six and Delta, basically helping them kill bad guys. Pretty cool job.” According to an official Defense Department biography, he was a Justice Department liaison to JSOC.
Patel was so distrusted, I was told, that the CIA went out of its way to exclude him from briefings on one of the most important operations of 2019, and with JSOC’s blessing. It was an operation that Trump declared “impeccable:” The raid that killed ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria.
“He would have told somebody or he would have done deep background with the press and it would have fucked it up,” I was told. “And our allied partners who were involved would have gone, ‘What the fuck? There you guys go again, can't keep secrets.’”
The following year, Patel reportedly jeopardized a Navy SEAL Team Six hostage rescue mission in Nigeria, asserting that airspace permission had been secured. When the U.S. military aircraft approached Nigeria, it became clear that approval had not been given. U.S. officials had to divert the aircraft, flying in circles, until the State Department frantically obtained permission. Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper wrote that his team suspected Patel had fabricated the story of Nigeria’s approval, which Patel has denied.
Unlike Frank Sinatra, whose common cold sent an ecosystem of dependents into panic, Patel is part of Trump’s ecosystem. “He has always struck me as quintessential Washington, despite claiming to be an outsider and a MAGA disruptor,” the person said, before comparing Patel to remora, otherwise known as suckerfish or sharksuckers, “attached to whoever the big fish is.”
At the FBI, haters and believers
As much as Trump has denounced the FBI, there are bureau personnel who dislike the FBI’s leadership as much as Trump. They believe that personal and political preferences resulted in the investigation of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. To them, Patel could return the FBI to a position of trust at a time when trust for the FBI has diminished. “We have a culture of fear, timidity. The FBI is no longer seen as an apolitical, objective, investigative organization,” Christopher Piehota, former Executive Assistant Director for Science and Technology at the FBI, told me. “I think [Patel] is capable. But I also think that he faces an uphill battle.”
He said it is unclear what Patel’s specific objectives are. “Is he there to simply apply punitive measures to the organization and bring it to heel? Or is he there to actually try to rehabilitate, reset the culture, reset the leadership environment, and then examine the operational practices and make sure that they're as applicable and objective and skillful as they have to be?”
Another former senior official told me that the FBI is filled with more white Republican men than any other U.S. government agency, which I cannot confirm but is certainly a key demographic for Trump.
The official says that some FBI agents believe that Patel, a vocal critic of the FBI, will support them after he sees the work they’re doing. A retired agent confirmed, “There’s a possibility for him to come in and see that the ‘deep state’ doesn’t exist.” He went on to say, “You want to have hope.”
Another group inside the FBI is rattled by the prospect of an FBI Director Kash Patel. They are primarily intelligence analysts, a group that is more diverse by ideology, politics, gender, and ethnicity, according to the former FBI official. They fear Patel will try to politicize intelligence, the “easiest change” to make in the bureau.
If the past is prologue, there is precedent: In 2022, the former acting Under Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence unit told me that during Trump’s first term, top officials pressured him to suppress intelligence on Russia — a finding that DHS’ inspector general confirmed. “It got heated at times where [supervisor and then-acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf] would, in a number of instances, try to get me to do unethical things. And I refused,” said Brian Murphy, who is also a former senior FBI official. “So I knew that it was going to continue to be rough waters.”
In fact, there were numerous accusations that officials in the Trump administration politicized intelligence across domestic and overseas-focused agencies — but then again, so did other administrations before Trump.
At the FBI, the post-Sept. 11 intelligence program is fragile, the former FBI official told me. Some people on the inside want it dismantled or diminished, seeing it as a drain on resources and a distraction from the bureau’s traditional mission as the country’s premiere law enforcement agency.
In that context and with Patel on the horizon, some FBI personnel in intelligence programs are concerned that agents and analysts could get pulled off of their missions — from counterterrorism to counterintelligence — and potentially dispatched to quell or analyze protestors, like the George Floyd rallies in 2020.
Before Trump announced his selection of Patel to helm the FBI, the former prosecutor shared his vision for the bureau and its headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building. “Shut that place down,” Patel said. “Open it up the next day as a museum of the deep state, and allow every American to walk through the halls for free, move the 40 people that you actually need to run the FBI into some basement bunker in Washington that costs no money to operate in terms of rent. Then deploy the 7,000 agents and lawyers that are in that building to go be cops across America.” He went on to say, “I'm never going to be the one that says defund the FBI or get rid of it, but it needs a complete rehabilitation.”
Was that podcast entertainment or policy? Some days, it’s hard to know. But if Kash is confirmed by the Senate, his efficacy will depend on the leadership team around him. He will be the only official from the Trump administration at the FBI because the director position is the sole political appointee, two former officials tell me. The deputy director (currently Paul Abbate) and everyone else come up through the ranks, instead of being nominated by the president.
To build a team, Patel “can call back retired FBI people,” supporter Chris Piehota told me. “Or he can see who's there, who he can work with to effect change. But I think that's a fool's errand.”
To Patel’s critics, that brings a little comfort.