Despite promoting debunked far-right conspiracy theories popular with movements like QAnon — including the claim that the FBI incited the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — and a very public record of calling for so-called “deep state” operatives who oppose President Donald Trump to be punished, Kash Patel has been confirmed as director of the FBI.
The Senate Judiciary Committee confirmed Patel 51-49.
He will oversee more than 38,000 civil servants, of whom 13,000 are special agents, over a 10-year term.
Patel’s confirmation hearing in January before the Senate Judiciary Committee featured the president’s avowed ally working hard to repel concerns that he would weaponize the bureau and return it to an era of retribution and paranoia promulgated by the agency’s first-ever director, J. Edgar Hoover.
Patel deflected last month when grilled about a list of “deep state” enemies he published in the appendix of his book, “Government Gangsters.” Patel called it a “glossary” and told legislators that describing it as an enemies list was a “total mischaracterization,” even though the 60 names on the list are almost all known public critics of Trump.
Before Patel was confirmed, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) urged lawmakers to understand the gravity of their decision.
“For the ordinary nominee, any of the defects in character or experience or performance in past jobs would have been disqualifying. We live in a time that is not ordinary, and this nominee is not normal. I’ve never seen any nominee to a position of significant responsibility that has as many disqualifying factors in his or her background,” he said before invoking the words of Trump’s onetime national security adviser John Bolton.
Bolton, who recently had his Secret Service protection pulled by Trump, compared Patel to the notorious Soviet secret police chief Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, who advised Joseph Stalin and was known for telling the dictator, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”
“He calls it something different. He calls it ‘Government Gangsters’ and he says he is on a ‘manhunt’ for them.” That’s his word. He can use different words, but he is on a mission to use the powers of this office and Donald Trump’s name for political retribution against his enemies, Trump’s enemies, against MAGA’s opponents. To use these institutions for political retribution is the height of irresponsibility. … He doesn’t just hint it at. It’s a theme that runs through his public comments,” Blumenthal said.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) had similar concerns ahead of the vote Thursday.
Speaking at a press conference in front of the FBI building in Washington, Whitehouse said Patel will be the first senior law enforcement official ever confirmed who has pleaded the Fifth Amendment.
Patel has offered zero explanation as to why he invoked his right against self-incrimination when he was called to testify in 2022 before a grand jury investigating Trump’s alleged unlawful retention of classified documents.
“Kash Patel, mark my words, will cause evil in this building behind us,” Whitehouse said. “And the Republicans who work for him will rue that day.”
The Republicans who voted against Patel included Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, hailed the confirmation in a statement.
“Change is coming to the seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, and that is a good thing. Over the past several years, political infection has diminished the FBI’s credibility and distracted the Bureau from its core law enforcement responsibilities. As FBI Director, Kash Patel promises to restore the FBI’s primary focus on law and order, as well as national security, and do right by the brave FBI agents who work day in and day out to keep Americans safe. From a congressional oversight standpoint, you can bet I’ll be keeping a close watch to ensure Congress gets answers to our questions and transparency assured.”
Who Is Kash Patel?
Patel started his career as a public defender in Florida and then moved to the Justice Department to work as a prosecutor. He later served as a national security adviser and counsel to Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. He worked his way into the first Trump White House by becoming deputy assistant to the president for the National Security Council and later, he served as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense at the Department of Defense.
It was during this time that Patel worked to discredit the Mueller report. (He was the primary author of a report that accused federal investigators of political bias against Trump.)
In January, CNN reported exclusively that the CIA once referred Patel for criminal investigation during the end of Trump’s first administration. There was concern that Patel may have shared classified information in 2020 about Mueller’s probe with officials who were not permitted to see the records. Patel denied any wrongdoing and no charges were ever filed.
Questionable Influence
In 2023, Patel told Steve Bannon, once briefly Trump’s adviser at the White House, that as director of the FBI, he would “come after people in the media who lied about American citizens” and those who “helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” When the committee asked him about these comments, he responded by vowing that he wouldn’t tolerate politicization at the bureau. He also refused to say whether former President Joe Biden had won the 2020 election.
Patel’s political devotion to Trump runs deep. He even published a series of children’s books starting in 2022 — the last one was published in 2024 — where he cast himself as a wizard who aids “King Donald” in his pursuit to unravel a series of conspiracies to remove the leader from power.
Ahead of his confirmation, a financial disclosure form Patel provided to the committee revealed that he received $25,000 from the Los Angeles, California-based Global Tree Pictures, an entity managed by Igor Lopatonok, a Russian film producer with U.S citizenship.
According to an investigation undertaken by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project last spring, Lopatonok promotes pro-Russian propaganda and narratives for his films that are laudatory of strongmen like Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko or Turkish President Recep Erdogan. Lopatonok’s ventures have also received funding, as The Washington Post first reported, from groups created by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Patel received the money from Global Tree Pictures for his part in the documentary series “All the President’s Men: The Conspiracy Against Donald Trump,” a film that aired exclusively on the Tucker Carlson Network. In the series, Patel said he wanted to turn the FBI headquarters into a “museum of the ‘deep state’” after he shuttered it.
Durbin asked Grassley for a second open hearing to address this and other lingering questions he had about Patel before confirming him. That included questions about allegations Durbin said he received from whistleblowers at the FBI.
The whistleblowers allegedly told Durbin that Patel was secretly overseeing a slew of FBI firings even before his confirmation was complete. Durbin said his sources reported the firings were being coordinated with senior White House officials.
Patel brushed off the claims through his spokeswoman Erica Knight. She dubbed it mere “gossip” in a social media post. Grassley refused the request for a second hearing, saying it was unnecessary and an attempt by Democrats to “mischaracterize and malign” the nominee.
Acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove — once Trump’s personal lawyer — fired a half dozen FBI executives in January before demanding that the FBI’s acting director Brian Driscoll hand over a list of all bureau staff who worked on the Jan. 6 investigation or other Trump-related cases. Driscoll complied and since then, litigation has ensued against the Justice Department from FBI agents who say the administration is eager to retaliate against them for their work. (A judge has since ordered the Justice Department not to make the names public — or share it with any other officials including so-called special government employee Elon Musk — without first providing the court 48 hours notice.)
Neither the White House nor the Justice Department returned requests for comment to HuffPost.
Jan. 6 Denialism
Patel’s rise to the role of FBI director is a near-perfect fairytale ending for a Trump ally who has wantonly described his desire to tear down institutions that he claims are rife with misconduct.
According to an AP report published in January, Patel has zealously castigated the nation’s institutions, specifically the DOJ and FBI, hundreds of times in the last four years. Whether it was Trump’s alleged role in conspiring to subvert the 2020 election, illegally retaining classified documents or advancing fake elector slates, Patel has fiercely defended Trump and his claims of broad immunity and sweeping executive power. Patel has called the prosecutions “baseless” while making baseless claims himself, including that FBI informants fomented the attack on the Capitol. A Justice Department watchdog report found this was not true.
Patel, who has hawked supplements and Trump merch regularly, also boasted of producing a song by the “J6 Prison Choir.”
“We just took a flame thrower to the music industry,” Patel said in March 2023, heralding the release of the song “Justice for All” by a group of now-pardoned rioters who were detained at the jail in Washington, D.C.
Yet at his confirmation hearing when asked whether he knew that most of those singing in the choir were imprisoned for assaulting police, Patel drew a blank.
He told lawmakers he was “not aware of that” despite also taking credit for the song during an 2023 interview with Steve Bannon. (Patel told Bannon “we went to a studio and recorded it, mastered it, digitized it and put it out as a song.”)
Though he’s denied awareness of the choir’s individual membership, generally speaking Patel has broadly categorized Jan. 6 rioters exactly as Trump has: In a Truth Social post, while casting the events at the Capitol on Jan. 6 as a “protest for election integrity,” the now-FBI director referred to the choir members as “political prisoners.”
One of those choir members was the recently pardoned Julian Khater. Khater pleaded guilty to assaulting U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick with pepper spray. Sicknick died after suffering multiple strokes. Though medical examiners ruled Sicknick died of natural causes, they said the onslaught he faced at the Capitol played a direct role in his death.
Patel disturbingly evaded other questions during his confirmation hearing, too. He denied knowing far-right commentator and white nationalist Stew Peters “off the top” of his head. But Peters, who once had a Jan. 6 defendant on his show and discussed a need for retribution against those who prosecuted Jan. 6 crimes, said Patel was “lying” about not knowing him.
Patel “absolutely does know who I am,” Peters said after the hearing.
For a time, they texted “constantly” on personal cell phones, he added.
Patel appeared on Peters’ show at least eight times, according to Durbin.
A year ago, Patel said the world needed to be educated “on the weaponization of justice that occurred on Jan. 6” and that with Trump back in power, there would be an investigation of members of Congress he claimed destroyed and withheld evidence.
He’s also vowed to “come after” journalists.
“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 in 2023. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
