Kash Patel’s Political-Persecution Fantasies

On the day of President Donald Trump’s Inauguration, Kash Patel, who has been nominated to serve as the next F.B.I. director, appeared before a sea of MAGA hats in Washington, D.C.,’s Capital One Arena and paid his respects to law enforcement. “Our police officers, our sheriffs, our federal agents are some of the greatest warriors that God has ever created,” Patel said. “We will put them first because they have our backs and now we will have your backs.”

Hours later, from the Oval Office, Trump signed a stunning executive order that granted pardons to more than fifteen hundred individuals who had been convicted of crimes linked to the violent Capitol riot four years ago. At least six hundred of those who received pardons were convicted of assaulting or resisting police officers. Among them were individuals such as David Nicholas Dempsey, who, according to prosecutors, attacked officers with “his hands, feet, flag poles, crutches, pepper spray, broken pieces of furniture, and anything else he could get his hands on,” and who, until Trump’s pardon, was serving a prison sentence of twenty years.

The executive order was not entirely a surprise. Trump had repeatedly promised to pardon the January 6th rioters, whom he had been referring to as “hostages” for several years. But he had always been vague about what a potential pardon process would look like, or whether it would apply to the most violent offenders. What came as a shock, even to some of his Republican allies, was the sheer scale of the order.

Last week, Senator Dick Durbin, who serves as the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, met with Patel and asked him to explain how he squared Trump’s pardons with his plans to run America’s top law-enforcement agency. According to Durbin, Patel said that he’d have to run the question “up the chain of command” before he could say anything that would be in the public record. Later, speaking from the Senate floor, Durbin expressed “grave concerns” about Patel’s fitness to lead the F.B.I., calling him a “staunch political loyalist who has repeatedly peddled false conspiracy theories and threatened to retaliate against those who have slighted him personally and politically.”

In a different era, this would have been the sort of excoriating appraisal that a Cabinet nominee would spend a great deal of time trying to rebut. And, presumably, in his confirmation hearing on Thursday, Patel, the nominee whose responsibilities are the most closely aligned with Trump’s agenda, will deflect, downplay, and deny. But, for Patel, the qualities that Durbin lists—flamboyant obeisance, a fluency in fringe narratives, and a commitment to a form of politics that openly flaunts aggression—aren’t liabilities. They are his principal assets.

In Patel’s late thirties, after working as a public defender in Miami and then as a Department of Justice trial attorney, he landed a job as a Hill staffer in the office of Devin Nunes, who was then the top Republican representative on the House Intelligence Committee. Patel, in his new role, became instrumental in helping to craft the G.O.P. response that aimed to discredit the investigations into suspected collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. For Patel and his colleagues, the conspiracy theories coming out of the extremist right presented a tremendous opportunity. If Patel wed himself to a narrative fantasy that spun the investigation into Trump’s team as litigation of Trumpism itself, then he could get Trump’s ear—and craft a successful and lucrative public persona.

Indeed, he rose through the ranks quickly, landing a number of national-security roles. In the final months of the Trump Administration, he became chief of staff to the acting Defense Secretary, Christopher C. Miller. According to the Washington Post, he went to battle with the intelligence community, including the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, and, with Trump’s support, nearly wound up as the acting director of the C.I.A.

After Trump’s first, failed bid for a second term, and the events of January 6, 2021, when thousands of angry supporters, galvanized by election conspiracies, some of them armed with improvised weapons, overpowered law enforcement and stormed the Capitol, it seemed, to some, like the logical end point of the sort of soldierly fealty that Patel had come to represent—a case study in how right-wing personalities who harness the cultural power of conspiracy theories to secure personal power might, in the end, be consumed by the blaze turned bonfire of their own making. The riot had showed the violent underbelly of the MAGA movement, and was branded an insurrection. The former President left D.C. a pariah; he and his allies scrambled to distance themselves from the ugliness of what had happened. Trump called the riot a “heinous attack” and said that he was “outraged by the violence, lawlessness, and mayhem.” Meanwhile, as the January 6th arrests piled up, Patel faced an investigation by the Justice Department into whether he had mishandled classified information. (Patel described reporting about the investigation, which never resulted in criminal charges, as a “bald-faced lie.”)

Then, halfway through 2021, around the same time that the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol was formed, a narrative that sympathized with the January 6th rioters started making its way from the far-right fringes into right-wing media. At that point, many of the most serious pretrial offenders from the riot were sequestered in their own unit in the D.C. jail, which became known by some of its residents as the Patriot Wing.

I spent more than a year reporting on the Patriot Wing, and I watched it become an incubator for many of the same grievances that had brought the inmates to the Capitol in the first place. I saw how, with the help of activists, the men there were able to establish a media operation that enabled them to get their messaging out to sympathizers. What began as the inmates’ claims of poor treatment at the hands of jail officials soon morphed into a full-blown fantasy of political persecution that spread to the pro-Trump media, picking up momentum as Trump’s own legal problems mounted. The term “political prisoner” began to proliferate. Infowars ran headlines such as “AMERICAN GULAG: Political prisoners tortured in enemy-occupied DC jail.” A pro-Trump cartoonist published an image showing gaunt men wearing Trump merch, languishing in a jail cell together. These accounts helped animate a new movement of so-called January 6th activists, who wrote letters to the prisoners and raised money for their legal defenses. Trump’s most stalwart supporters in Congress at the time—Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, and Louie Gohmert—took up the narrative and got to work giving it legitimacy.

This new movement dovetailed precisely with Patel’s past work—and, to some extent, his own brush with the Justice Department—and he picked it up with relish. In September, he co-launched a new Web site, Fight with Kash; his own line of branded K$H apparel; and the Kash Patel Legal Offense Trust, which he described as a “fund designed to give those smeared by the fake news media and big tech a voice.” An archived “About” page touts Patel’s “distinguished career as a prosecutor, lawyer, and national security professional,” who took down “senior leaders” in ISIS and Al Qaeda and exposed “the deep state’s Russia collusion hoax against President Trump.” He promised that donations to the fund would “help send earth-shattering jolts through the Fake News media and Deep State.”

In the next few years, Patel flirted with another conspiracy theory linked to January 6th, which was in full swing by early 2022. “Jan. 6 [was] never an insurrection,” Patel wrote in a Truth Social post last year. “Cowards in uniform exposed, they broke the chain of command, and violated the law.” The “Fedsurrection” conspiracy stemmed from speculation that a man named Ray Epps—who was captured in video footage on January 6th seemingly encouraging rioters to enter the Capitol—was an undercover federal agent who embedded himself in the crowd with the goal of inciting violence. These stories about Epps were repeatedly debunked, including by Epps himself and by the January 6th select committee. But the idea that hordes of undercover agents instigated the Capitol riot gained traction and fuelled right-wing hostilities toward the Bureau. In August of 2022, after federal agents raided Mar-a-Lago as part of their investigation into potential mishandling of classified Presidential documents, a Trump supporter armed with a nail gun attempted to storm an F.B.I. office in Cincinnati, Ohio.

In his book, “Government Gangsters,” published in 2023, Patel paints the Justice Department and the F.B.I. as hotbeds of corruption. He writes that the Bureau has “gravely abused its power” and become fixated on conducting “ideological witch hunts” against “political opponents of the ruling class.” One of the book’s appendices features a list of sixty people whom Patel suspects to be members of the “Executive Branch Deep State.” Among them are almost a dozen current and former F.B.I. employees, including the outgoing director, Christopher Wray, who was originally appointed by Trump. Through the Kash Foundation, he has backed the now suspended F.B.I. special agents Stephen Friend and Garrett O’Boyle, who, according to a three-hundred-and-fifteen-page report by House Democrats, were part of a rogue group of F.B.I. agents who called themselves “The Suspendables” and touted themselves as “Whistleblowers” while trafficking in “alarming” conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and January 6th. (In an interview with Roger Stone last year, Patel called Friend a “brave warrior” and a “great F.B.I. agent,” and suggested that he ought to be installed at a senior leadership level within the F.B.I.)

By the time Trump launched his 2024 campaign, Patel’s involvement with the J6ers had become hands-on. He produced a track, “Justice for All,” which featured the J6 Prison Choir—including defendants who had assaulted police during the Capitol riot— singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and audio of Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. It was one of the songs that opened the first rally of Trump’s campaign, in Waco, Texas. Footage from the riot played on a screen behind him.

At this point, Patel had successfully built a personal brand for himself within the sprawling MAGA media ecosystem. He was given a seat on the board of Trump Media & Technology Group, the company that runs Truth Social. (Since the Web site’s inception, he has published more than ten thousand posts). He also partnered with Revere Payments, which describes itself as a “the top cancel culture proof” payment processing company, and Patriot Mobile, “America’s ONLY Christian conservative wireless provider.” He has advertised for a diet-supplement line called Warrior Essentials, and promised followers that its products will help “reverse the vaxx.” He also sold a children’s-book series, about a beleaguered monarch named Donald the Merchant who encounters nefarious schemes designed to usurp his power, including a dragon whose initials are D.O.J. His bids for attention extended to the QAnon movement: he’s defended its adherents, appeared several times on a high-profile QAnon podcast, and, as a board member for Truth Social, reportedly suggested incorporating QAnon imagery on the platform.

By November, 2024, the most militant arm of the MAGA movement may have appeared, to an outsider, to be defanged compared with what it was four years ago. The Proud Boys didn’t mobilize; fears about election intimidation never materialized. The Justice Department had secured more than a thousand convictions in connection to January 6th, and the myth of “Fedsurrection” had generated so much paranoia on the right that Trump supporters were generally steering clear of Washington, D.C., altogether.

But Trump’s victory marked a great triumph for the persecution narratives that his acolytes, Patel included, worked hard to construct since January 6th, which had been instrumental in resuscitating the flailing MAGA movement—and in boosting their own cultural profiles. The January 6th rioters’ grievances, which are tethered to an alternate reality of deep-state operatives and political persecution, are the same that have shaped Patel’s through-the-looking-glass version of events of the past ten years. That’s the perspective he wants to bring to the F.B.I.

If confirmed, Patel, who has never worked for the F.B.I. nor has any significant experience running a major government department (or even a company) would oversee the operations of one of America’s largest federal law-enforcement agencies. He would have a free hand in hiring and firing personnel, and the ability to restructure the Bureau as he sees necessary. Patel suggested that, as F.B.I. director, he’d move Bureau operations out of D.C., shutter the F.B.I.’s J. Edgar Hoover Building, and reopen it as a “museum of the deep state.” In “Government Gangsters,” he calls for the next President to clear house at the F.B.I. and fire everyone in the Bureau’s top ranks—anyone who, in Patel’s view, “abused their authority for political ends must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

So far, Patel has offered no assurances that he’d continue in the tradition of the F.B.I. chief operating independently from the President. Just as Patel has voiced, in veiled terms, few qualms about jailing his own political enemies, he’s made it clear that he sees himself and Trump as being united on their righteous campaign to destroy the very government they are meant to lead. “The Colosseum is built and Donald J. Trump is our champion,” Patel said, at a Trump rally in September. “He is our juggernaut of justice.” ♦