Kash Patel’s Enemies List

Meet Trump’s new pick for FBI Director.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

There is much I could tell you about Kash Patel, who President-elect Trump announced on Saturday as his pick to become FBI director in his second term. But instead, I’ll allow some of the people who worked with him in Trump’s first term to give you an introduction.

First, some background: Patel entered Trump’s orbit via Devin Nunes, who was then a Republican congressman and now leads Truth Social’s corporate parent. As a congressional aide, Patel was the author of the so-called “Nunes memo,” which sought to pick apart the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties with Russia.

He entered the White House in 2019 and quickly grew to wield “unique access” to the president, feeding information to him — including false claims about Ukraine that helped lead to Trump’s first impeachment. Over the next two years, Patel would quickly rise through the ranks of the administration, jumping from the National Security Council to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to the Department of Defense.

In the expansive library of books that have been written about Trump’s first administration, Patel is a frequent character. We’ll start with “A Sacred Oath,” the memoir by Trump-era Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who wrote that Patel’s hiring marked the emergence of “a darker, more aggressive evolution of the Trump White House.”

In Esper’s book, the main episode involving Patel is the 2020 military operation to rescue Philip Walton, an American who had been kidnapped and was being kept in Nigeria. According to Esper, the operation was in a holding pattern to ensure that the U.S. had received permission to enter the airspace of the countries it would need to fly over. Eventually, Patel — then at the NSC — told a Pentagon official that then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had received the necessary permissions. Armed with that information, Esper gave the operation his green light.

A few hours later, though, Esper learned some “disturbing news”: the U.S. apparently hadn’t received permission to enter the airspace of one country — and the military planes were now only fifteen miles away from that country’s border.

Esper called Pompeo to figure out what had happened. As it turned out, not only had Pompeo not told Patel — as Patel had claimed — that the permissions had gone through, but apparently the two had never even spoken. Esper’s staff, he wrote, suspected that Patel simply “made the approval story up.” Here’s Esper:

There would be time for the forensics of the faux permission later, though. Right now, we were in a bad place. The aircraft had been flying in circles for an hour awaiting permission to cross the border, and if we didn’t decide soon, they would have to return to their start point. We would have to reschedule the operation for another evening, which meant that the odds of mission exposure, and Walton being moved (or maybe even killed), would grow with each passing hour and day.

Eventually — at the last minute — the proper approvals were received. The operation proceeded, and Walton was rescued. But putting the rescue team “through that uncertainty and additional wait was unfair,” Esper wrote, “and it was a failure on our part in D.C. to get it right the first time.”

Esper did not explicitly assign blame for the failure — but Pompeo and Mark Milley, who was serving as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did, according to “The Divider,” a book by journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.

Pompeo, a State Department official told the two journalists, viewed Patel and other Trump loyalists as “wackadoodles, nuts, and dangerous.” Milley, who felt he had been personally lied to, would later summon Patel to his office towards the end of the Trump administration and offer this warning, according to Baker and Glasser:

“Life looks really shitty from behind bars. And, whether you want to realize it or not, there’s going to be a President at exactly 1200 hours on the twentieth and his name is Joe Biden. And, if you guys do anything that’s illegal, I don’t mind having you in prison.”

It was around this time that Trump began musing about installing Patel at the FBI, an incident recounted in “One Damn Thing After Another,” the memorably-named book by former Attorney General Bill Barr. Here’s Barr:

I categorically opposed making Patel deputy FBI director. I told [then-White House chief of staff] Mark Meadows it would happen “over my dead body.” In the first place, all leadership positions in the bureau, except the director, have always been FBI agents. They’ve all gone through the same agent training and have had broad experience in the field and at headquarters. Someone with no background as an agent would never be able to command the respect necessary to run the day-to-day operations of the bureau. Furthermore, Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency.

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It is a good illustration of the changes from Trump’s first to second term that, in his first term, he was easily blocked from naming Patel as the deputy FBI director. In his second term, he may succeed in appointing Patel to lead the bureau outright. There will no longer be a Bill Barr to stop him — Barr is on the outs with Trump, as are almost all of the aforementioned first-term officials.

Whether Patel will be allowed to “serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency,” as Barr put it, will be up to the Republican-led Senate. So far, reactions are mixed — several GOP senators have expressed approval of Patel; others have been more hesitant. The bureau’s current director, Chris Wray — who Trump would have to fire in the middle of his 10-year term in order to install Patel — is well-liked among most Republican lawmakers; his dismissal could ruffle some senatorial feathers, but so far most Republicans seem, at the very least, open to the swap.

For clues on what Patel might do as FBI director, there’s one more book to consult: his. In “Government Gangsters,” Patel is quite explicit about his vision for the bureau. “Most importantly,” he writes, “we need to get the FBI the hell out of Washington, D.C.” Once the FBI’s D.C. headquarters is emptied, Patel continues, agents can be spread out across the country, away from “the swamp.”

Patel also calls for the FBI’s authority to be “dramatically limited,” refocused on “real, physical threats” instead of “ideological witch hunts.” In interviews, though, he has called for a number of ideologically-tinged investigations, including against Trump critics in the government and media.

“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you,” Patel said last year. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

Towards the back of Patel’s book is “Appendix B,” in which he names the “members of the Executive Branch Deep State” — a list that includes several of the figures he has threatened to investigate.

Notably included on the list? Barr, Esper, and Milley — three of the key officials who recounted their clashes with Patel in Trump’s first term.

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More news to know

Associated Press: South Korea’s president has declared martial law amid a clash with the country’s opposition party.

New York Times: Some Democratic lawmakers are sharply criticizing President Biden pardoning his son, breaking with the president in his final weeks in office.

The New Yorker: Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth was forced out of previous roles leading veterans organizations due to allegations of financial mismanagement, sexist behavior, and being drunk on the job.

Fox News: Trump suggested to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week that if tariffs against Canada prove destructive to the country’s economy, then perhaps Canada should become the 51st U.S. state. The comment “caused the prime minister and others to laugh nervously,” according to Fox.

Washington Post: Trump government efficiency gurus Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want to end Daylight Saving Time.

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The day ahead

• President Biden is in Angola for his first trip to Africa as president. He will meet with Angolan president João Lourenço and deliver remarks on the “past and future of the Angolan-U.S. relationship” at the country’s National Museum of Slavery.

• VP Harris has nothing on her schedule.

• The Senate will hold confirmation votes on two district judge nominees.

• The House will vote on up to 20 pieces of legislation.

• The Supreme Court will hold oral arguments in Hungary v. Simon, a case stemming from the Hungarian government’s confiscation of property owned by Jewish families during the Holocaust.