Trump says he will nominate Kash Patel to be FBI director

By Eric Tucker and Alan Suderman | Associated Press

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Kash Patel to be FBI director, calling on a fierce ally to overturn America’s top law enforcement agency and rid the government of perceived “conspirators.” It’s the latest bombshell Trump has dropped on the Washington establishment and a test of how far Senate Republicans will go in confirming their nominees.

“I am proud to announce that Kashyap ‘Kash’ Patel will be the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Trump posted Saturday night on Truth Social. “Kash is a brilliant attorney, investigator and career-long America First fighter exposing corruption, defending justice and protecting the American people.”

The selection is consistent with Trump’s view that the government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies require a radical transformation and his stated desire to retaliate against perceived adversaries. Looks like Trump, still boring for years federal investigations that overshadowed his first administration and later led to his impeachmenthe is moving to put close allies at the helm of the FBI and Justice Department that he believes will protect him rather than investigate him.

Patel “played a essential role in uncovering the hoax of Russia, Russia, and Russiabeing an advocate for truth, accountability and the Constitution,” Trump wrote Saturday night.

It remains unclear whether Patel could be confirmed, even by a Republican-led Senate, although Trump has also raised the prospect of using recess appointments to carry out his selections.

Patel would replace Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump in 2017 but quickly fell out of favor with the president and his allies. Although the position has a 10-year term, Wray’s ouster was not unexpected given Trump’s longstanding public criticism of him and the FBI, including after a search of his Florida property for classified documents and two investigations that led to his indictment.

Patel’s previous proposals, if carried out, would lead to convulsive changes for an agency tasked not only with investigating violations of federal law but also with protecting the country from terrorist attacks, foreign espionage and other threats.

He called for the dramatic reduction of the FBI’s footprint, a perspective that sets him apart dramatically from previous directors who sought additional resources for the bureau, and suggested closing the bureau’s Washington headquarters and “reopening the next day as a museum of the bureau. deep state” — Trump’s pejorative term for the federal bureaucracy.

And although in 2021 the Justice Department halted the practice of secretly seizing reporters’ phone records while investigating the leak, Patel said he plans to aggressively hunt down government officials who leak information to reporters and change the law to make it easier prosecuting journalists.

During an interview with Steve Bannon last December, Patel said he and others would “go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media.”

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden run the presidential election,” Patel said, referring to the 2020 presidential election in which Democratic challenger Biden defeated him on Trump. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminal or civil. We’ll figure it out. But yes, we are letting you all know.”

Trump also announced Saturday that he would nominate Sheriff Chad Chronister, the top law enforcement officer in Hillsborough County, Florida, to serve as administrator of the drug enforcement agency.

Chronister is another Florida Republican appointed to the Trump administration. He has worked for the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office since 1992 and became Hillsborough County’s top law enforcement officer in 2017. He also worked closely with Trump’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi.

Patel, a child of Indian immigrants and a former public defender, spent several years as a Justice Department prosecutor before coming to the attention of the Trump administration as a staffer on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The committee’s chairman at the time, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., was a strong ally of Trump, who tapped Patel to lead the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Patel ultimately helped author what became known as the “Nunes Memo,” a four-page report detailing how he said the Justice Department erred in obtaining the warrant surveillance of a former Trump campaign volunteer. The release of the memo faced fierce opposition from Wray and the Justice Department, who warned that it would be imprudent to reveal sensitive information.

A subsequent inspector general’s report identified significant problems with FBI oversight during the Russia investigation, but found no evidence that the FBI acted with partisan motives in conducting the probe and said there was a legitimate basis for opening the investigation.