Conspiracy Theorist FBI Pick With An Enemies List Of Trump Critics Goes Before Senate

WASHINGTON — A prolific conspiracy theorist who has embraced the QAnon cult and already has a 60-name enemies list of President Donald Trump’s critics goes before U.S. senators Thursday to determine whether he will take charge of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency.

Kash Patel, who has spread Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him and the debunked claim that the FBI instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, violent assault on the Capitol, will soon be running that agency — unless four Republican senators defy Trump and vote him down.

“What makes Patel dangerous is his willingness to harness and deploy government resources,” said Amanda Carpenter, a former Republican Senate aide and now a researcher with the Protect Democracy nonprofit. “When the government gets power like this, it rarely is only used for its publicly intended purpose.”

Patel, if confirmed, would represent a radical departure from the type of nominee presidents of both parties have sought to put in charge of the FBI since a Senate investigation in the 1970s found rampant abuses by J. Edgar Hoover, who had run the agency and its predecessor entity from 1924 until his death in 1972 as a personal fiefdom by investigating his critics for the purpose of holding leverage.

Trump, who has shown little interest in following good government norms since his election in 2016, has now twice cut short the 10-year term that was established for an FBI director specifically so the agency could not be beholden to a single president. In early 2017, Trump fired then-Director James Comey after he refused to pledge Trump his loyalty.

Trump’s choice to replace Comey was Christopher Wray, an “establishment” Republican who had previously served in the Justice Department with little fanfare. Trump soured on him, though, when the FBI investigated Trump’s coup attempt and refusal to turn over classified documents he took to his South Florida country club. After winning back the White House in November, Trump made clear he intended to fire Wray and replace him with Patel, whose biggest claim to fame has been as a die-hard Trump supporter who has vowed to go after Trump’s critics.

”We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said on Trump ally Steve Bannon’s podcast in 2023. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”

It is language like that that makes Patel the single most dangerous nominee Trump has put forward, said Norm Eisen, a former White House lawyer under President Barack Obama. He added that Patel would be even worse for the country than Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence despite her statements siding with dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Syria’s recently deposed Bashar Assad.

“Her position is more of a ceremonial one,” Eisen said. “He can do much more damage, particularly domestically, which is more dangerous than international. Don’t get me wrong. She’s bad, but he’s the worst.”

Trump’s White House did not respond to HuffPost queries about Patel. But Mike Davis, a former Senate lawyer and Trump ally who has been preparing Patel for his Thursday appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Patel would make it clear that his statements as an entertainer would not affect his actions once confirmed.

“There is a difference between podcaster Kash Patel and national security Kash Patel, and the American people will see it,” Davis said.

Discrediting The Russia Probe

Unlike many Trump acolytes who came up in Republican politics, Patel, 44, began his career as a public defender in state and federal courts in Miami before moving to the Justice Department during Obama’s tenure.

His rise in Trump’s circle began when he moved to work under Devin Nunes, a California congressman at the time who was the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Trump was obsessed with undermining the intelligence community’s assessment, shared by a separate investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, that Putin had helped Trump win the 2016 election.

Patel authored a report trying to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, winning great acclaim in pro-Trump media. It became the go-to document for those pushing Trump’s false claim that it was all a “hoax.”

From there, Patel went to work in Trump’s White House as a staffer for the National Security Council until the final months of that first term, when he became chief of staff in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and, ultimately, chief of staff for the acting secretary of defense. Trump tried to install Patel as deputy CIA director as part of his machinations to remain in power despite having lost reelection, but backed down when agency Director Gina Haspel said she would resign in protest.

Between the end of the first Trump term and the start of the second, Patel enthusiastically joined in the pro-Trump movement’s grift machine, cashing in on appearances and merchandise exploiting the seemingly limitless demand for all things Trump.

He produced a podcast for the conspiracy theory-promoting news site Epoch Times. He traveled the country for revival-style meetings of believers of QAnon, a fringe cult that sees Trump as a messianic figure destined to rid the government of those who secretly murder children to drink their blood.

(In a 2022 interview, Patel said of QAnon adherents: “I talk with the president all the time as well. And we’re just blown away at the amount of acumen some of these people have.”)

He marketed clothing and accessories with his “K$H” logo, peddling them at conservative gatherings. He published a series of children’s books featuring “King Donald” and casting himself as a wizard who foils plots against him by villains including “Hillary Queenton” and “Comma-la-la-la.”

He joined in the daily pile-ons against perceived Trump enemies, including those who are now great friends of Trump, such as the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. “You are a complete and total fake who cares only about $,” Patel wrote in a 2023 social media post. “Your cheap Titter posts and your Mickey Mouse clown droppings do not absolve you.”

He helped produce a recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner” made by inmates of the District of Columbia jail accused and, in some cases, already convicted of assaulting police officers on Jan. 6, which Trump then participated in and which was then sold commercially. Trump subsequently played the song at his rallies while he would stand at attention.

He even helped market pills that claim — with zero evidence of efficacy — to undo the effects of COVID-19 vaccines. “Spike the Vax, order this homerun kit to rid your body of the harms of the vax,” Patel wrote in a social media post, linking to “Warrior Essentials” website.

“A lot of it’s just crazy,” said John Bolton, a national security adviser in Trump’s first term and Patel’s boss for a time. He, like many first-term Trump appointees, opposes Patel’s nomination.

So Many Enemies

No FBI nominee in history has come to the job with such a comical assortment of statements and money-making schemes. Yet, If Patel’s nomination fails, it could well be because of the adult book he published in 2023, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy.”

Hoover famously sought out “subversives” and “communists” to target in his decades in power. Patel, in contrast, has based his dividing line between friend and foe much more simply: how an individual has treated Trump and, relatedly, Patel himself.

“Deep state” is a phrase popularized by Bannon to describe individuals in the federal government who are not personally loyal to Trump, and, in his book, Patel printed an appendix naming 60 of them.

“This list only includes current and former executive branch officials and is not exhaustive. It does not, for example, include other corrupt actors of the first order such as Congressmen Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, members of Fusion GPS or Perkins Coie, Christopher Steele, Paul Ryan, the entire fake news mafia press corps, etc.,” he wrote.

Some names are unsurprising — Democratic leaders who have criticized Trump over the years like former President Joe Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris. Prosecutors who investigated Trump’s actions leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021, and his subsequent retention of secret documents made the list, as did those who took part in the FBI’s earlier investigation into Trump’s acceptance of Russian assistance to help win the 2016 election.

Trump’s own attorney general, Bill Barr, is on the list, as is Alexander Vindman, the NSC whistleblower who revealed Trump’s attempt to coerce Ukraine into investigating then-candidate Biden. Wray, who resigned rather than force Trump to fire him, is on Patel’s list, as are Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, and Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch.

CIA Director Haspel, whose threatened resignation made Trump reconsider his attempt to make Patel her deputy, is now on Patel’s enemies list.

Also on the list, though, are Trump administration officials whose only offense appears to have been refusing to go along with his scheme to remain in power despite losing the 2020 election. Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy, Pat Philbin, are both included. They advised Trump against taking illegal actions in the final weeks of his first term and, prior to that, opposed Trump’s effort to install a pliant attorney general who was willing to help spread his lies about a stolen election.

White House communications staffers Alyssa Farah Griffin and Stephanie Grisham are on the list, too. They criticized Trump’s coup attempt immediately after it happened and became vocal critics thereafter, but it is unclear whether that is their only heresy.

“Because they didn’t tell Trump ‘yes’ to everything, they are enemies!” Protect Democracy’s Carpenter said. “They go after their own first and hardest. They have to stamp out any dissent in their own party before they can do it more broadly.”

Davis, the Trump ally who helped Patel prepare for Thursday’s hearing, said senators and Americans generally will see during his appearance a serious law enforcement professional, notwithstanding his previous inflammatory remarks. “There is a reason the Barack Obama Justice Department gave him a national security award,” he said.

Bolton, who like Eisen sees Patel as a “dangerous” nominee because of his avowed interest in seeking revenge, said Patel is undoubtedly undergoing some “confirmation conversion” to distance himself from his previous statements.

Nonetheless, he worried that unlike Democrats during President Ronald Reagan’s term who were able to effectively grill and in some cases defeat nominees, today’s cohort might not be up to the task. He cited Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s successful confirmation despite a paper-thin résumé for the job.

“The Democrats today don’t match up to the Democrats of the mid-1980s,” Bolton said. “So if they have another performance like their performance in the Armed Services Committee for Patel and Gabbard, both of them might get through.”