Five Things to Know About Kash Patel, Trump’s Pick to Lead the F.B.I.
The New York Times
President-elect Donald J. Trump has long seen his bombastic national security operative as a political “enforcer.” But former colleagues question his fitness for the job.
Kash Patel, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice as director of the F.B.I., does not have the typical background for that position. A former federal prosecutor and public defender, he has little management or law enforcement experience. The president-elect cites as a key credential Mr. Patel’s unflagging efforts to discredit the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election in favor of Mr. Trump.
Here are five takeaways from a recent New York Times profile of Mr. Patel, who has denounced his critics as biased against Mr. Trump and has said he led efforts to expose F.B.I. “corruption.”
Mr. Trump said in his social media post announcing his choice for the F.B.I. that Mr. Patel had “tried over 60 jury trials.” Colleagues from Mr. Patel’s time as an entry-level public defender in Florida recall him as a middling performer with a deep animosity toward the Justice Department prosecutors he found himself up against. His former supervisor, Michael Caruso, a federal public defender who led the Southern District of Florida office at the time, said that Mr. Patel shied away from filing motions that he was likely to lose.
Mr. Patel spent about three years as a terrorism prosecutor at the Justice Department. He has repeatedly claimed he was the “lead prosecutor” in the government’s pursuit of the perpetrators of the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. In fact, Mr. Patel was a junior Justice Department staff member at the time, and he was not part of the trial team.
Mr. Trump ordered that Mr. Patel be given a job on the National Security Council staff after Mr. Patel, then a House Intelligence Committee staffer, impressed Mr. Trump as the primary author of what has come to be called the secret “Nunes memo.” The document was a key element in the effort of House Republicans to undermine the Justice Department’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Mr. Patel’s memo, which Mr. Trump declassified over the objections of the intelligence agencies and Democrats, fueled bogus claims by Mr. Trump, Republicans and conservative media that politics drove the Russia investigation and that the government had spied on the Trump campaign itself.
