WASHINGTON (AP) – President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Kash Patel to be FBI director, a fierce ally to topple America’s premier law enforcement agency and rid the government of “conspirators.” It’s the latest bombshell Trump has dropped on the Washington establishment and a test of how far Senate Republicans will go to confirm his nominee.
The election aligns with Trump’s view that the government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies are in need of radical transformation and his desire to retaliate against perceived enemies. It shows how Trump, still fuming over the years of federal investigations that shadowed the first administration and then led to the impeachment, has moved to a place at the top of the FBI and the Department of Justice close allies who believe they will protect rather than examine people.
Patel “played a key role in exposing the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing up as an advocate for truth, accountability, and the Constitution,” Trump wrote Friday night in a social media post.
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Patel’s nomination sets up what could be an explosive confirmation battle in the Senate just days after Trump’s first pick to lead the Justice Department, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his nomination amid intense scrutiny over sex-trafficking allegations.
Patel is a lesser-known figure, but his nomination will still cause shock waves. He embraced Trump’s rhetoric about the “deep state,” called for a “comprehensive housecleaning” of government workers disloyal to Trump and called journalists traitors, promising to try to prosecute some journalists.
Trump’s nominee will have allies in what will be a Republican-controlled Senate next year, but his choice is not necessarily confirmed. With a slim majority, the Republicans could only lose a few defectors in the face of the expected Democratic opposition – although as vice president, JD Vance would be able to break the tie vote.
But the president-elect has also raised the prospect of pushing the selection through without Senate approval using a congressional loophole that allows people to make appointments when the Senate is not in session.
Patel will replace Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump in 2017 but quickly fell out of favor with the president and his allies. FBI directors have 10-year terms meant to inoculate them from political influence.
The removal was unexpected given Trump’s longstanding public criticism of him and the FBI, particularly after a federal investigation — and an FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago property for classified documents two years ago — led to indictments. which is now ready to evaporate.
In his final months in office, Trump unsuccessfully pushed the idea of ​​installing Patel as deputy director at the FBI or CIA in an effort to strengthen the president’s control over the intelligence community. William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, wrote in his memoirs that he told chief of staff Mark Meadows that the appointment of Patel as deputy director of the FBI would happen “over my dead body.”
“Patel has virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency,” Barr wrote.
Patel’s past proposals, if implemented, would cause convulsive changes for the agency tasked not only with investigating violations of federal law but also protecting the country from terrorist attacks, foreign espionage and other threats.
He was asked to dramatically reduce the agency’s footprint, a perspective that distinguished him from previous directors who had sought additional resources for the bureau, and suggested closing the bureau’s headquarters in Washington and “reopening the next day as a museum. Deep country” – Trump’s pejorative catch-all for the federal bureaucracy.
And even though the Justice Department in 2021 stopped the practice of secretly seizing journalists’ phone records during a leak investigation, Patel said he wants to aggressively hunt down government officials who leak information to reporters and change laws to make it easier to prosecute journalists.
During an interview with Steve Bannon last December, Patel said that he and others “are going to go out and find conspirators not just in government but in the media.”
“We’re going after people in the media who lied about American citizens helping Joe Biden rig the presidential election,” Patel said, referring to the 2020 presidential election in which Biden, the Democratic challenger, defeated Trump. you will follow you, criminally or civilly, we will know.
Trump also announced Saturday that he would nominate Sheriff Chad Chronister, the top law enforcement officer in Hillsborough County, Florida, to be the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Chronister is another Florida Republican named by the Trump administration. He has worked for the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office since 1992 and was Hillsborough County’s top law enforcement officer in 2017. He also worked with Trump’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi.
Patel, the son of Indian immigrants and a former public defender, spent several years as a Justice Department prosecutor before attracting the attention of the Trump administration as a staff member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
The chairman of the panel, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., is a staunch Trump ally who assigned Patel to lead the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Patel ended up helping author the so-called “Nunes Memo,” a four-page report detailing how the Justice Department had erred in obtaining a warrant to surveil former Trump campaign volunteers. The memo’s release faced fierce opposition from Wray and the Justice Department, which warned it would be reckless to reveal sensitive information.
A subsequent inspector general’s report identified significant problems with the FBI’s surveillance during the Russia investigation, but also found no evidence that the FBI had acted with partisan motives in conducting the probe and said there was a legal basis for the investigation.
The Russia investigation raised Patel’s suspicions about the FBI, the intelligence community and even the media, which he called “the most powerful enemy the United States has ever seen.” Seizing the failure of compliance in the FBI’s use of a spy program that officials say is important for national security, Patel has accused the FBI of having “weaponized” its surveillance powers against innocent Americans.
Patel took that job into an influential administration role at the National Security Council and later served as chief of staff for acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller.
He continues to be a loyal Trump lieutenant even after he leaves office, accompanying the president-elect in court during his criminal trial in New York and insisting to reporters that Trump is the victim of a “constitutional circus.”
Since leaving the administration, Patel has found himself embroiled in Trump’s legal troubles, appearing two years ago before a federal grand jury investigating Trump’s storage of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida — a matter for which Trump was later indicted.
Usually, though not always, the president keeps the director he inherited: President Joe Biden, for example, kept Wray even though the director was named by Trump, and former President Barack Obama even asked Robert Mueller to stay on for two extra years. even though Mueller was tapped by Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush.
Trump has openly flirted with firing Wray during his first term, taking issue with Wray’s emphasis on the threat of election interference from Russia at a time when Trump is focused on China. He also described antifa, an umbrella term for left-wing militants, as an ideology rather than an organization, contradicting Trump, who wants to designate it a terror group.
The low-profile Wray is set to bring stability to an institution plagued by turbulence following the May 2017 firing of James Comey by Trump amid an FBI investigation into potential ties between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016.
Wray sought to turn the page on some of the controversy surrounding Comey’s tenure. The FBI, for example, fired the lead agent from the Russia investigation who sent derogatory text messages about Trump during the investigation and removed the deputy director under Comey who was a key figure in the investigation. Wray also announced dozens of corrective actions to prevent some of the surveillance violations that undermined the Russia investigation.
The FBI has been working to protect Trump this year after multiple assassination attempts and foiled an Iranian assassination-for-hire plot targeting the president-elect that led to criminal charges unsealed in November.
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Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in New York and Fatima Hussein in West Palm Beach, Florida, contributed to this report.
