# Kash Patel

Kashyap Pramod Patel (born February 25, 1980) is an American lawyer and former federal prosecutor serving as the ninth director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) since 2025. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a National Security Council official, chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, and senior advisor to the acting director of national intelligence during Donald Trump's first presidency.
Patel was appointed senior counsel on counterterrorism for the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 and senior director of the Counterterrorism Directorate at the National Security Council in 2019. He worked as a senior aide to Congressman Devin Nunes during his tenure as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. While working with Nunes, Patel played a key role in helping Republicans discredit the investigations into Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election. Patel is the first person of color to lead the FBI.
Patel has promoted several conspiracy theories about the "deep state", 2020 election fraud, QAnon, COVID-19 vaccines, and the January 6 United States Capitol attack. He is president and a board member of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Kash Foundation, based in Alexandria, Virginia, and owns the consulting firm Trishul LLC, which he relinquished as part of his FBI directorship nomination.

## Early life and education (1980–2005)

Kashyap Pramod Patel was born on February 25, 1980, in Garden City, New York. He was the son of Pramod Patel, a Ugandan of Indian descent who was expelled by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in 1972. The Patels, a member of the Patidar community in Gujarat, were members of the Bhadran village in the Anand district. Chh Gam Patidar Mandal, an organization in Bhadran, has maintained a vanshavali, or family tree, of Patel's family for eighteen generations. They returned to India after being expelled before moving to Canada. Pramod was a chief financial officer for a global distributor of aircraft bearings. Patel's household included Pramod's eight brothers and sisters. He was raised Hindu. In his youth, Patel played hockey, later coaching a youth hockey league.
Patel attended Garden City High School; his senior year quote, "Racism is man’s gravest threat—the maximum of hatred for a minimum reason," was originally said by Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel. During summers, Patel worked as a caddie at the Garden City Country Club. He graduated from the University of Richmond in 2002 with a degree in criminal justice and history; according to his memoir, Government Gangsters (2023), though he was interested in medical school programs, Patel was inspired by defense lawyers who golfed at the Garden City Country Club. He earned a certificate in international law from the University College London and later graduated from the Pace University School of Law in 2005. As a student at Pace University, Patel joined the American Bar Association's Judicial Intern Opportunity Program, a diversity internship, in 2003, according to a questionnaire he sent to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

## Legal and governmental career (2006–2020)
### Public defender and federal prosecutor (2005–2017)

After graduating, Patel's parents purchased a condominium unit in Coral Gables, Florida, for him. He worked as a public defender in Miami-Dade County, Florida, representing violent criminals and drug traffickers, and later as a federal public defender for the Southern District of Florida. In 2012, Patel began working as a junior staff member at the Department of Justice routing arrest warrants. He later erroneously claimed that he was the lead prosecutor against the perpetrators of the 2012 Benghazi attack; though Patel temporarily served as a representative for the Criminal Division on the case, he was allegedly removed over disagreements he had with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, which was leading the case. Patel stated in his memoir, Government Gangsters (2023), that he had been offered to join the trial team against Ahmed Abu Khattala, a militia leader in the Libyan civil war. According to The New York Times, he was not offered a position. He served as a board member of the South Asian Bar Association of North America.
By 2013, he had been assigned to the National Security Division as a prosecutor. He concurrently served as a legal liaison for the Joint Special Operations Command. In January 2014, Patel took a junior position in the Counterterrorism Division. That month, he participated in a charity auction for Switchboard of Miami. At a trial for Omar Faraj Saeed al-Hardan, a Palestinian accused of providing material support to the Islamic State, Patel was repeatedly berated over his unprofessional attire by judge Lynn Hughes, who had him removed from the court chambers. Patel had flown from Tajikistan to the courtroom in Texas, though he was not required to be present. He left the Department of Justice in 2017, later stating that the impetus was the department's response to the 2016 presidential election.

### House committee aide (2017–2019)

In April 2017, Patel began working for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, led by California representative Devin Nunes at the time. As an aide to Nunes, Patel investigated the theory that Ukrainians were promulgating information about Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. The New York Times later reported that he was the primary author of the Nunes memo, which alleged that Federal Bureau of Investigation officials abused their authority in the FBI investigation into links between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials, seeking a warrant for Carter Page, an advisor to Donald Trump, and relying on claims made by Christopher Steele, a British intelligence officer who was alleged to have been paid by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. The veracity of the memo was highly questioned, though it bolstered Patel's standing among Trump allies. In April 2018, Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general overseeing the investigation, asked whether Patel had traveled to London the previous year to interview Steele; according to the Times, he did not provide a definitive answer. After the commencement of the 116th United States Congress, he served as senior counsel for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

### National Security Counsel aide and deputy director of national intelligence (2019–2020)

In February 2019, Patel joined the National Security Council, purportedly on Sean Hannity's recommendation. According to colleagues who spoke to The New York Times, Patel "took few notes in meetings" and was inexperienced for the position. He was considered a "must-hire, directed by the president" for the council; John Bolton, Trump's national security advisor, and his deputy, Charles Kupperman, named him to the International Organizations and Alliances, a directorate that advances the United States's positions within the United Nations. In April, amid an effort by Rudy Giuliani to discredit evidence against Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, Patel had shifted his work to Ukraine. According to the Times, Trump personally discussed documents involving Ukraine with Patel, though their communications were separate from those by Giuliani and the ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland. Phone records detailed in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's report on the impeachment inquiry in December revealed a 25-minute call between Giuliani and Patel in May. In an interview with CBS News, Patel said that the call was personal.
In July, Patel was appointed as senior director of the counterterrorism directorate of the National Security Council. Congressional testimony by Fiona Hill, a senior director for Europe and Ukraine at the National Security Council, purportedly revealed that Patel had directly provided negative information about Ukraine to Trump. Hill warned her staff to be "very careful" about communicating with him. Further testimony from Alexander Vindman, the director of European affairs, corroborated Hill's statements; Trump's advisors instructed Vindman not to debrief Trump following president Volodymyr Zelenskyy's inauguration after Patel misrepresented himself as an expert on Ukraine, believing that it would confuse Trump. Patel told Axios's Jonathan Swan that he had not discussed Ukraine with Trump. In February 2020, Politico reported that Patel had become a senior advisor to Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence. After Andrew P. Hallman's resignation, Patel became the principal deputy director of national intelligence. He was given a mandate to "clean house" and promptly reduced the staffing of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Patel was involved in reviewing the office's staff. He returned as senior director of the counterterrorism directorate of the National Security Council after John Ratcliffe was confirmed as director of National Intelligence in May.
In August 2020, Patel and Roger D. Carstens, the special envoy for hostage affairs, traveled to Damascus to meet with Ali Mamlouk, the director of Syria's National Security Bureau, and in October, Bloomberg News reported that he had met with an unnamed Syrian official to discuss releasing Austin Tice, an American journalist who was captured in 2012, and Majd Kamalmaz, a Syrian-American therapist who disappeared in 2017; in May 2024, U.S. national security officials told Kamalmaz's family that they had obtained intelligence indicating he had died in captivity. Patel was involved in the 2020 Nigeria hostage rescue, falsely informing the Department of Defense that secretary of state Mike Pompeo had gotten approval to enter Nigeria's airspace. The plane was close to landing when Mark Esper, the secretary of defense, had learned that the department had not gotten authorization, though SEAL Team Six was later given permission to land. The incident risked the death of the hostage, Philip Walton, or the deaths of several Navy SEALs.

### Chief of staff to the secretary of defense (2020–2021)

In November 2020, Trump dismissed Mark Esper, the secretary of defense, naming Christopher C. Miller as acting secretary. Patel was appointed as Miller's chief of staff; he previously worked for Miller at the National Security Council and was well-regarded by him, according to The Washington Post. A senior national security official who spoke to Vanity Fair's Adam Ciralsky described Miller as a "frontman", while Patel and Ezra Cohen, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, were "calling all the shots". Patel oversaw the Department of Defense's transition efforts during the presidential transition of Joe Biden; according to The New York Times, transition officials expressed distrust towards Patel, viewing him as a Trump loyalist. He faced allegations that he was intentionally blocking the transition. The Department of Defense denied those reports, stating that he had delegated his responsibility to another transition official. Patel supported an internal proposal to separate the National Security Agency from United States Cyber Command. Documents provided to the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack and accounts of officials allege that Patel discussed security at the Capitol prior to and during the January 6 Capitol attack, and that he had repeatedly contacted Mark Meadows, Trump's chief of staff, on the day of the attack. He was present in Miller's office during the attack.
In April, Trump devised a plan to oust Christopher A. Wray, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and appoint William Evanina to lead the bureau, while Patel would become deputy director. The plan was halted by attorney general William Barr, who threatened to resign. In January 2021, Axios reported that Trump sought to appoint Patel as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in December 2020. In response, Gina Haspel, the director of the CIA, threatened to resign. At the annual Army–Navy Game that month, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confronted Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, repeatedly and loudly asking if Patel was going to replace Wray or Haspel. In the final days of Trump's presidency, Mike Lindell, the founder and chief executive of My Pillow, went to the White House; Jabin Botsford, a photographer for The Washington Post, captured a document Lindell was holding stating, "Move Kash Patel to CIA Acting." Patel later told an audience in April 2022 that he had advised Trump to fire senior officials within the Department of Justice.

## Post-government career (2021–2024)
### Investigations into Donald Trump

In September 2021, Patel was subpoenaed by the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. In addition, the committee requested that Patel submit to questioning. Although a lawyer for Trump instructed Patel to defy the subpoena, he communicated with the committee. In its efforts to examine Trump's efforts to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law to overturn the 2020 election, the committee requested Patel's communicatons relating to "the establishment of martial law, requests to establish martial law, or legal analysis of martial law" and "all documents and communications relating to" the Insurrection Act. American Oversight, a watchdog group, sought Patel's texts in August.
In June 2022, Trump requested that the National Archives and Records Administration grant Patel and journalist John Solomon access to administration records; their designations were later revoked in October 2023. After the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Patel claimed that Trump had declassified the seized documents; his argument was the focus of investigators. As part of the FBI investigation into Trump's handling of government documents, federal prosecutors sought to have Patel testify before a grand jury. He appeared twice before a grand jury in October 2022, repeatedly pleading the Fifth Amendment in his first appearance. Prosecutors offered him immunity in November, securing his testimony. According to The Washington Post, prosecutors asked about his claim that Trump had declassified the documents, as well as Trump's motivation for taking the documents. Patel was represented by Stanley Woodward, who has frequently worked for associates of Trump.

### Business affairs

Since Trump left office in 2021, Patel has managed Trishul, a consulting company. He founded The Kash Foundation, a non-profit that participants of the January 6 United States Capitol attack in legal costs and sells merchandise branded as K$H. According to a Trump Media & Technology Group filing, Patel worked for Donald Trump as a paid national security advisor. Patel was listed as the director of Trump Media & Technology Group in April 2022. As director, he described promoting QAnon-adjacent accounts on Truth Social, Trump Media's social media service, as an intentional business decision to "capture audiences." In June 2022, Patel was paid US$130,000 to investigate claims that the company's two co-founders, Andy Dean and Wes Moss, had "fostered an unpredictable and toxic corporate culture". His report was later included in a legal dispute over Dean and Moss's shares in the company. Patel was also named to Russell Vought's Center for Renewing America. For nine months in 2024, Patel was a consultant for Elite Depot, a company based in the Cayman Islands that operates Shein, an e-commerce platform.

### Political activities

In March 2023, a report compiled by Democrats on the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government detailed the testimony of two former Federal Bureau of Investigation special agents, who stated that they had received financial support from Patel for promoting misinformation about the January 6 Capitol attack, finding one agent a position with the Center for Renewing America and promoting his book. Patel covered legal fees and paid witnesses who testified before the subcommittee, according to The New York Times. He co-produced "Justice for All", a charity record by Trump and a choir of men incarcerated in connection with the attack that was released that month.
NPR described Patel as a "fixture on right-wing talk shows and podcasts". Patel was the host of Kash's Corner (2021–2023), a show on EpochTV, a streaming service operated by the Falun Gong-affiliated newspaper The Epoch Times. He interviewed Trump on Kash's Corner in February 2022. After Steve Bannon, a former Trump advisor, surrendered to a federal prison in July 2024 for defying a subpoena from the Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, Patel served as a part-time guest host for Bannon's podcast War Room. In 2024, Patel was paid US$25,000 by Igor Lopatonok, a Russian filmmaker associated with the Russian government to appear on a six-part series, All the President's Men: The Conspiracy Against Trump, on the Tucker Carlson Network.

### Litigation

After The New York Times published an article in October 2019 about Fiona Hill's testimony in the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump, Patel filed a US$44 million defamation suit against the paper. The following month, he sued Politico for US$25 million in a defamation suit. Patel's lawyers moved to dismiss both lawsuits in 2021; according to the Times, Patel did not pursue his case against the paper, while Politico's lawyers argued that the judge was prepared to dismiss the case. Patel later sued CNN over defamation in December 2020 for US$50 million. The case was later dismissed and appealed to the Court of Appeals of Virginia. In June 2023, he sued Jim Stewartson, an online commentator. In May, he sued the Department of Defense over a review of his memoir, Government Gangsters (2023). Patel sued Christopher A. Wray, the FBI director, and other officials with the Department of Justice in September, arguing that a grand jury subpoena for his communication records in 2017 was retaliation for his work criticizing the FBI investigation into links between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials.

## Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (2025–present)
### Nomination and confirmation

In November 2024, Axios reported that U.S. president-elect Donald Trump intended to appoint Patel to a high-profile position in the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Department of Justice. The Wall Street Journal later reported that Trump intended to remove Christopher A. Wray as the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, interviewing several candidates to be nominated to the position, including Patel and former Michigan representative Mike Rogers. Patel was considered as a potential nominee for director of the Central Intelligence Agency, though he faced a narrower path in the Senate. According to The New York Times, Susie Wiles, Trump's campaign manager, believed that Patel would be a risky choice to lead the bureau, but Andrew Bailey, the Missouri attorney general, appeared too lackadaisical in meetings. On November 30, Trump announced that he would dismiss Wray, naming Patel as his nominee for the position. Wray agreed to resign in December. Prior to his confirmation hearing, Patel began conducting policy-focused interviews. According to CNN, he was targeted in an Iranian hacking operation that month. In January 2025, nearly two dozen Republican government officials sent a letter to senators urging them to reject Patel's nomination.
Patel appeared before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on January 30. He positioned himself as insulated from Trump, disagreeing with Trump's decision to pardon January 6 Capitol attack defendants. Patel was repeatedly questioned by senator Peter Welch on whether or not Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election; he said that the election was "certified", but did not explicitly say that Biden won. The Committee on the Judiciary voted to advance his nomination 12–10 along party lines on February 13. In February, Dick Durbin, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, sent a letter to the Department of Justice's inspector general accusing Patel of directing dismissals at the bureau based on "highly credible information from multiple sources". The allegations, if true, would implicate Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, as having conducted firings "solely at the behest of a private citizen". and would amount to potential perjury. Patel received further criticism for his shares in Shein's parent company, a stock award he received from Trump Media & Technology Group, and his work for Qatar through Trishul.
On January 24, Patel was confirmed by the Senate in a 51–49 vote. Every Republican senator, with the exception of Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, voted to confirm him, while every Democrat senator opposed his nomination. According to The New York Times, several colleagues of senator Mitch McConnell expected him to oppose Patel's nomination, a situation that would have required vice president JD Vance to cast a tie-breaking vote. Patel was sworn in on February 21, by attorney general Pam Bondi. He took the oath on the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scripture, held by his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins. Patel is the first person of color to serve as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

### Tenure

After being sworn in, Patel informed officials that he intended to send a thousand agents from Washington, D.C. to other field offices in cities with higher crime rates and reassign five hundred staff members to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. According to The Wall Street Journal, an official told Patel that the restructuring could cost US$100 million that the agency did not have; he was unperturbed. Patel removed civil service executives and replaced them with political allies, according to the Journal. That month, NBC News reported that Patel would be named as the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; he was sworn in on February 24. The New York Times obtained an internal email from Patel in March, directing the majority of the bureau's field offices—with the exception of those in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles—to report to branch directors rather than the deputy director. In a call in February with Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials, Patel proposed altering the bureau's physical fitness test and partnering with Ultimate Fighting Championship, while indicating that he would shift his operations to Nevada, where he lives, and the West Coast. He expressed interest in joining the bureau's hockey team; Patel skates with the Dons, a club team in Washington, D.C. Trump stated in a speech in March that Patel had plans to move the headquarters of the FBI to an "old Department of Commerce building", suggesting further reductions in staff.

## Views

Patel has been widely described as a loyalist of president Donald Trump.

### Intelligence agencies and investigations

   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.
Patel has conformed to Trump's view that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has become politicized. He has argued that the bureau should be distanced from Washington, D.C., citing James Comey's handling of the FBI investigation into the Hillary Clinton email controversy. In February 2022, he told Fox News that lawyers for Hillary Clinton had worked to "infiltrate" Trump Tower and White House servers; Patel's claim was used in a Fox News headline that was falsely attributed to a filing in the Durham special counsel investigation. In December 2023, Patel told Steve Bannon on War Room that he would "come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections"—echoing false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election. His memoir, Government Gangsters (2023), calls for weakening civil service job protections; Trump praised the book as a "roadmap to end the Deep State's reign". In September 2024, he vowed to close the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the headquarters of the FBI, "reopen it the next day as a museum of the 'deep state'," and "take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals."

### Conspiracy theories

Patel has promoted multiple conspiracy theories and has been called a conspiracy theorist. Conspiracy theories he has promoted include the deep state conspiracy theory, false claims about 2020 election fraud, QAnon, COVID-19 vaccines, and false claims that the FBI instigated the January 6 United States Capitol attack, claiming it was planned as long as a year in advance. He also claimed Democrats knew about the attack in advance. Patel promoted the conspiracy theory that Trump supporter and Oath Keeper Ray Epps was a paid undercover FBI agent who provoked rioters to enter the Capitol.
Patel has actively promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory. On Truth Social, he promoted an account with the handle @Q, which distributed messages related to the conspiratorial movement. According to Media Matters, Patel shared an image featuring a flaming Q on it and went on multiple QAnon shows to urge members to join Truth Social. In 2022 Patel said that Truth Social was trying to adopt QAnon "into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences" and that the figurehead of the QAnon movement "should get credit for all the things he has accomplished". Patel has appeared on multiple far-right podcasts, such as Stew Peters's, promoting conspiracy theories, and appeared over 50 times on at least a dozen podcasts that have promoted the QAnon movement.
Patel has signed ten copies of his children's book about "King Donald" with the QAnon motto "WWG1WGA" ("where we go one, we go all"). He has also promoted the #WWG1WGA hashtag on Truth Social. Also on Truth Social, Patel has promoted the use of pills that he said reversed the effects of COVID-19 vaccines.
He has appeared at the ReAwaken America Tour, a far-right event that promotes QAnon.

## Books

Patel has written three children's books, beginning with The Plot Against the King, a storybook about the Steele dossier, which was published by Brave Books in 2022. He later wrote The Plot Against the King: 2000 Mules (2022), and released The Plot Against the King 3: The Return of the King after the 2024 presidential election. In 2023, Patel wrote Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, a memoir that falsely describes the origins of the FBI investigation into Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and the authorization to wiretap Carter Page, a former advisor to Donald Trump. An appendix to Government Gangsters includes a list of sixty names, labeled as "Members of the Executive Branch Deep State". The list has been widely interpreted as an enemies list, though Patel rejected that term in his Senate confirmation hearing. The memoir was later adapted into a documentary produced by Steve Bannon, a former Trump advisor.