Kash Patel

Kash Patel was Trump’s senior advisor to the Acting Director of National Intelligence and chief of staff to Acting Secretary Christopher Miller. A key Trump loyalist, Patel worked with Richard Grenell to declassify transcripts of Russia probe interviews to try to discredit DOJ’s Trump-Russia investigation. Patel also argued that Secretary of Defense Mark Esper was disloyal for not deploying the National Guard during the 2020 George Floyd protests. On Bannon’s War Room, Patel stated, “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media.” Patel and his close ally, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, were referred to in some corners of the Pentagon as zampolit, a Soviet term for political enforcers embedded in certain positions to ensure loyalty to the Kremlin. Patel was a Senior Fellow for National Security and Intelligence at Russ Vought’s Center for Renewing America, a Project 2025 Advisory Board member.

In 2019, Patel joined the White House National Security Council as a deputy assistant, quickly gaining the position of Senior Director of Counterterrorism. In early 2020, Patel moved to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all 17 intelligence agencies. As the Principal Deputy to Acting Director Ric Grenell, Patel briefed Trump daily. Later that year, Trump named Patel Chief of Staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller. In that role, Miller said Patel had “very good access to [Trump],” describing Patel as “a wingman, a teammate with me that could protect my political flank.”

In that position, Patel was also front-and-center during the January 6^th insurrection, claiming to have had authority from Trump to call in whatever forces necessary to quell the violence: “We had all the authorizations… I was talking to [Trump’s chief of staff, Mark] Meadows, nonstop that day.” In his testimony in the Colorado 14th Amendment hearings over whether Trump could be removed from the 2024 presidential ballot, Patel contradicted Miller’s January 6th Committee testimony and a Pentagon statement that said, “Trump had authority and responsibility to direct deployment of the National Guard in the District of Columbia, but never gave any order to deploy the National Guard on January 6th or any other day.” Patel, like Miller, attempted to lay to blame for the delayed calls for the National Guard on D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.

During the transition prior to Inauguration, Patel was the controlling figure for the Biden team’s access, preventing career officials and experts from sharing important information concerning defense issues to the transition team, to handing over control to political appointees. One former official claimed Patel “told everybody we’re not going to cooperate with the transition team” and put “a lot of restrictions on it.”

In the final weeks of his presidency, Trump tried to install Patel as the Deputy Director of the CIA in an ill-conceived plan to force out then-Director Gina Haspel. The specter of “a political mercenary” without agency or military experience in such a position stunned national security officials, and it was reportedly thwarted by Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General William Barr, and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone.

Patel has repeatedly invoked the “Deep State” in his political rhetoric. In December 2023, on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Patel continued espousing the Big Lie, saying, “we will go out and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in media.” He continued, “yes, we are going to come after the people who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminal[ly] or civilly.”

In the same interview, Patel also said that Trump 2.0 would be different: “the one thing we learned in the… first go-around, is we got to put in all American patriots, top to bottom, and we got them for law enforcement. We got them for intel collection, we got them for offensive operations. We got them for [Department of Defense], CIA, everywhere.”

Patel has also been instrumental in fighting the investigations into Trump, including about his involvement with Russia. Similarly, in May 2022, Patel backed up Trump’s claim that Trump declassified some of the Mar-a-Lago documents in the last days of his term, asserting that he was present when Trump did so, even though there is no evidence that declassification procedures were followed. In November 2022, the New York Times reported that Patel received immunity from federal prosecutors in an attempt to force his testimony, which he was withholding by invoking the right against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment.

On March 21, 2024, Patel went on the Armstrong WIlliams Show to say that he doesn’t believe any of the 88 criminal charges that Trump is facing from his multiple indictments have any form of legitimacy. On May 20th, 2024, Patel joined the ever-growing gaggle of Trump sycophants to attend his New York trial on charges that Trump committed fraud in secretly paying hush money to Stormy Daniels to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Patel helped Trump skirt his gag order by telling the press: “after six weeks of [an] unconstitutional trial we have finally found a crime. Michael Cohen admitted [to] stealing Donald Trump’s money… We also have a victim… Donald J. Trump.” On May 30, 2024, the jury unanimously found Trump guilty on all 34 counts charged for the felony crimes alleged.

After Trump left the White House, Patel became a board member of Trump Media, although he was reportedly not a salaried employee. An SEC filing revealed Patel was paid $130,000 for consulting in 2022 but does not own shares. Patel has also been paid as a consultant for one of Trump’s political action committees, earning $15,000 a month in the role. He is currently a trusted lieutenant and campaign surrogate of Donald Trump.

After leaving the Trump administration, Patel formed the Kash Foundation, dubbed “Fight with Kash,” a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. In its first IRS filings it gave more than $50,000 in “grants” to people who wanted to assail the FBI and other agencies, but spent even more on “merchandise” - more than $66,000 on merch like a “government gangster” card deck he sells for $19.99, a pair of “K$H” socks with the Punisher logo for $25, and a tumbler for liberal tears for $30. In April 2024, his foundation claimed to have reached a “milestone” of having distributed more than $500,000 in grants. Patel’s merchandise is promoted and sold on a separate site.

The foundation describes its mission as giving grants to whistleblowers in order to support transparency. His paid “whistleblowers” include two who claimed to have evidence that the FBI was targeting Trump unfairly. However, a 316-page document compiled by House Democrats revealed that several of the so-called “whistleblowers” do not meet the definition and some appear to be disgruntled former FBI employees who promote far-right conspiracy theories.

Notably, two of the “whistleblowers” confirmed that Patel gave them financial support immediately upon their connection. Patel even helped promote one of their forthcoming books. The congressional report asserts that based on the evidence it reviewed, “there is a strong likelihood that Kash Patel is encouraging witnesses to continue pursuing their meritless claims, and it is in fact using them to help propel his vendetta against the F.B.I., Justice Department, and Biden administration on behalf of himself and President Trump.”

As well as promoting his merchandise, Patel promotes his illustrated children’s book depicting Trump as royalty, called “The Plot Against the King.” The book tells the story of a wizard named Kash who exposes a conspiracy against “King Donald” that was planned by the wicked “Hillary Queenton.” Trump said he wanted to see the book in every school in America. Patel hawks that book for $59.99 signed by him with the words “The MAGA King,” along with selling a second volume “The Plot Against the King: 2000 Mules,” a reference to the discredited stolen election claims of Dinesh D’Souza, who pleaded guilty to the felony of making illegal campaign contributions in other people’s names and whom Trump later pardoned. Patel sells his “Kash” merchandise across several websites, personally capitalizing on his MAGA fame.

Patel was also a Senior Fellow for National Security and Intelligence at The Center for Renewing America, an organization run by Russ Vought that aims to provide “ideological ammunition to sustain” the MAGA movement and is working to inject a Christian Nationalism agenda into the American government. CRA is a Project 2025 Advisory Board member. As a fellow in February 2023, Patel co-wrote a paper (under the Policy Issues’ subheading “Woke and Weaponized”) that doubles down on the Nunes Memo, indirectly dismisses the Mar-a-Lago classified documents charges against Trump, and demonizes mainstream media outlets. Patel repeatedly claims the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia was a hoax–despite the evidence found by Robert Mueller and the Intelligence Community regarding documented Russian interference in the 2016 election and multiple efforts by Trump insiders and Trump himself to solicit Putin’s aid. Patel has also urged “robust automatic declassification” of secret documents, granting non-career cabinet officials plenary authority to declassify documents, and giving default access to classified documents to other presidential appointees, such as the White House chief of staff and director of the OMB.

Before joining the Trump administration, Patel was the National Security Advisor and Senior Counsel for Chair Devin Nunes on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where he managed Nunes’ efforts to downplay and counter congressional examination of Russia’s active measures campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election. Patel is credited as the main author of the 2018 Nunes Memo released to the public through the House Intelligence Committee that alleged surveillance abuses by the FBI in their use of long-standing authorities to surveil foreign nationals and foreign governments under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The FBI, helmed by Trump-appointee Christopher Wray, issued a rare statement critical of congressional actions, stating that there were “grave concerns” about the accuracy of the Nunes Memo. Although other criticism of the Nunes Memo fell along party lines, many were concerned about how it politicized the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in a statement said, “That campaign has turned to a shady practice: selective declassification. It is possible to create a false narrative from a trove of classified information, either by selectively declassifying misleading tidbits of material or by suggesting misdeeds that can’t be disproved without revealing classified information. The shield of classification becomes a sword of deception.”