A QAnon Enthusiast Leading the FBI: What Could Go Wrong?

Kash Patel, more than any other Trump pick for his Cabinet, represents the very online version of MAGA politics that cares more about defeating and humiliating enemies than any kind of mission. It’s hard to know how he will fare with the Senate approval process, but should he make it through the nominating process to lead the FBI, Trump will finally have an intelligence agency he can trust to fight his battles.

The nomination itself is a major violation of norms; the point of FBI directors’ lengthy terms is to span administrations and keep the position above partisan matters. Christopher Wray—Trump’s pick to lead the administration back in his first term, after he fired James Comey—still has a few more years. But anyone who was listening to Trump during his presidential campaign should not be surprised that he chose not only a partisan but the most enthusiastic loyalist he could find for the spot. Patel, who made his name by acting as an outspoken critic of the Russia investigation of Trump’s first term, has made promises of the kind Wray could and would not.

But more than anything, Patel is eager to settle scores.

We know this because he has been extremely vocal about it on Truth Social, on conservative media, onstage at partisan events, on the Trump campaign trail, and even in the children’s books he has penned (about a plot against a King Donald staged by “Hillary Queenton”; Patel places himself in the books as a wizard who proves that the king has been falsely accused of cheating).

As a regular on Steve Bannon’s show, Patel has suggested defanging the intelligence agencies with “sweeping personnel changes” meant to eliminate anti-Trump “government gangsters implementing these corrupt, weaponized system of justice.” Bannon produced a film version of Patel’s 2023 book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, in which Patel writes that the FBI is an arm of the deep state, rotten at its core and “an existential threat to our republican form of government.” A nonexhaustive index in that book lists 60 members of the deep state he would target for investigation. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are on the list, naturally, along with Trump administration officials John Bolton, Bill Barr, and Wray.

Patel has been ubiquitous in right-wing media since he rose to prominence by accusing the Justice Department of politically persecuting Trump during the first Trump term. As a staffer for Rep. Devin Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee, Patel was the main author of the 2018 report known as the Nunes memo, which scrutinized the warrant used to surveil Trump adviser Carter Page. Republicans in Congress used that memo to argue that the investigation into whether Trump or his campaign had colluded with Russia was politically motivated. Patel eventually ascended to chief of staff at the Justice Department under Trump and was momentarily poised to become the FBI’s deputy director. (Barr, then the attorney general, later wrote in his memoir that he had told Trump’s chief of staff that Patel would get the position only “over my dead body.”)

Because those on the MAGA media circuit have long discussed Patel as a potential head of the CIA, he has had plenty of opportunities on various podcasts and shows to explain what he would do as a top government official. In an episode of Bannon’s show in 2023, he made clear that as a senior member of Trump’s administration, he would attempt to prosecute journalists in particular:

We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the 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. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.

After that clip went viral, a Patel spokeswoman told CNN that he had specifically been talking about journalists “who break the law.” (Bannon, in his lead-up to Patel’s answer, also had a message for cable news programs: “I want the Morning Joe producers that watch us, and all the producers to watch us—this is just not rhetoric. We are absolutely dead serious.”)

To understand why so many in the intelligence community are stressed about Patel’s nomination, it’s worth noting that his social media posts indicate more than just a thirst for vengeance and for using one of the most powerful intelligence agencies to punish anyone he views as sufficiently disloyal to Trump. Patel has also thrown in his lot with conspiracy theorists.

His regular presence on Bannon’s show, which promotes conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and about COVID-19, is indicative of his comfort with these baseless claims. As is his participation in Michael Flynn’s conspiracy-theory road show and appearance on a podcast hosted by white nationalist Stew Peters, who amplifies conspiracy theories about COVID, flat Earth, and the Uvalde and Sandy Hook mass shootings. Patel has also boosted conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6 insurrection, claiming that Trump tried to deploy 20,000 National Guard troops ahead of the riots and was blocked by Nancy Pelosi.

But it’s Patel’s pet belief about how the deep state is waging war on Trump and his allies that is most wildly disqualifying. It is the literal foundation of QAnon, a sinister and dangerous conspiracy theory that Patel has openly embraced.

QAnon, which emerged from far-right message boards in 2017, pulled on the threads from an earlier conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate, which promoted a false, sinister fantasy about Hillary Clinton and her associates trafficking children for satanic purposes and sexual abuse. QAnon developed an even larger and more convoluted mythos around a core idea that elites were abusing and trafficking children. The figure known as Q promised that Trump would one day unmask, arrest, and execute these villainous deep state actors.

Tens of millions of people came to buy in to conspiracy theories associated with QAnon, according to some estimates; some adherents were arrested for terrorism, plotting to assassinate Biden, attempted kidnapping, and a number of murders.

The current political moment has largely evolved beyond QAnon—there are now a lot more diffuse and widespread theories about the deep state and satanic sexual abuse of children, across the political spectrum. But when QAnon had more political power, Patel was happy to tap into it for relevance. He has said this explicitly. In a podcast appearance in 2022, when Patel was on the board of Truth Social, he said of QAnon: “We try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences [because] you can’t ignore that group of people that has such a strong, dominant following.”

To signal his support, he signed copies of his children’s book “WWG1WGA”—a QAnon slogan—and appeared on a major QAnon show while promoting Truth Social. He also said in one interview that he was “blown away by the amount of acumen” some QAnon supporters displayed.

That wasn’t all: As Media Matters for America’s Alex Kaplan pointed out, Patel has posted about meeting with a QAnon account on Truth Social calling itself simply @Q. It’s unclear who was behind that account, but enough QAnon followers were excited about the possibility of it being the real Q that when the @Q account posted a photo of Patel’s flannel-clad arm, it sparked a trend in the QAnon community: Flannel Fridays. Patel openly embraced the trend.

Whether Patel believes in QAnon is beside the point.

The through line of his behavior since the first Trump term is that he is always selling something. In order to fund his “fight” against the deep state, Patel’s shop hawks Christmas ornaments, hats, wine, water bottles, playing cards, and T-shirts that read “Grand Force MAGA” and “Trumpamania.” One shirt simply features an illustration of a reindeer head made out of firearms. He sells this merchandise through the Kash Foundation (previously Fight With Kash), a charity he set up to fund defamation suits and support whistleblowers who speak out against alleged corruption in governmental agencies.

At least twice in the past couple of years, Patel has promoted pills that would “reverse the vaxx”—referring to the COVID vaccine—with a “Mrna detox.” And Patel is also a producer for the song “And Justice for All,” in which Jan. 6 defendants were recorded singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” from prison. The proceeds from that song, Patel claims, go to the defendants and to the Kash Foundation.

But the more ridiculous elements of Patel’s activism can obfuscate the fact that he has already been accused of genuinely dangerous activity. When he served on the National Security Council, Patel was accused of passing along negative information about Ukraine to President Trump while misrepresenting himself as the NSC’s top Ukraine expert. (Patel has denied this.) This information went counter to what the NSC had actually hoped to convey to Trump and may have played a role in Trump’s threats to withhold aid to Ukraine.

Then there was the time Patel was accused of causing a crisis during a mission to rescue an American kidnapped in Nigeria. Patel, officials later said, had told the State and Defense departments that the Nigerian government had approved the rescue operation. The defense officials soon learned that this information was wrong and were forced to scramble to get approval while their aircraft circled over the target spot. Former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper later asserted that Patel “made the approval story up.” Also bafflingly, the New York Times reported that Patel has claimed he was the “main Justice lead prosecutor for Benghazi”—a pure fabrication.

If this person is confirmed to lead the FBI, he will undoubtedly pursue similar fraudulent schemes, perpetuate dangerous lies, and use the agency to harass and surveil those he has deemed enemies. But Trump’s personal resentment toward the agency—because of its criminal investigations into his conduct—means that the president-elect has little concern whether the agency is hampered in its work or discredited on the global stage. Trump, it seems, only wants someone to unquestioningly follow orders—or blow the whole thing up, if all else fails.