WASHINGTON – WASHINGTON (AP) – Kash Patel, a national security advisor and participant in Donald Trump’s political orbit, is expected to assume an influential role in the federal government if the former president wins a second term.
An arrogant campaign surrogate who mythologizes the former president while promoting his own brand, Patel has a pedigree that sets him apart from many other Trump advisers. He often cites that experience — as a defense attorney, federal prosecutor, senior House staffer and national security official — when he promises to weed out those who are disloyal to Trump and attacks the very intelligence community he could one day oversee.
Here are some important things you should know about Patel:
After graduating from law school at Pace University, Patel was unable to get a job at the prestigious law firms he had hoped to join. Instead, he became a public defender and spent nearly nine years in local and federal courts in Miami before joining the Department of Justice.
Just over three years later, Patel was hired as a staffer on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, led by Rep. Devin Nunes, a staunch Trump ally.
Nunes gave Patel the role in charge of the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign.
Patel helped write what became known as the “Nunes Memo,” a four-page report that detailed how it said the Justice Department erred in obtaining a warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign volunteer. The release of the memo faced vehement opposition from the Justice Department. A subsequent report from the inspector general identified significant problems with FBI surveillance during the Russia investigation, but also found no evidence that the FBI acted with partisan motives in conducting the investigation.
The memo caught Trump’s attention and soon Patel was working on the National Security Council and would later play increasingly important roles. He was briefly the chief adviser to the then-acting director of national intelligence and was tapped in November 2020 to be acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller’s chief of staff.
Patel, 44, is on the board of Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, and had a consulting contract with the company that paid him $120,000 per year. And Trump’s leadership PAC has paid Patel more than $300,000 since early last year to serve as the former president’s national security adviser, according to campaign finance records and public documents from Truth Social.
Shortly after Trump left the White House in January 2021, Patel launched Fight with Kash, an organization that funds defamation lawsuits and sells a wide variety of merchandise, including branded socks and water bottles, hoodies and baseball caps, a deck of cards with Trump as the ace and a clumsy Joe Biden dressed as a jester as the king.
Since then, the organization has become The Kash Foundationa non-profit organization that aims to support whistleblowers, law enforcement and education in “areas that the mainstream media refuses to cover.”
Patel has said he will make no money from the foundation and has publicly promised to be transparent about where he directs his resources.
But the foundation has released few details about its finances, and Patel’s comments about his organization’s expenses don’t appear to line up with public records.
Patel said in early 2023 that his charity had distributed nearly $100,000 the previous year. Charitable-funded defamation lawsuits covered the costs of sending children to camps and provided holiday meals for those in need, Patel said. But the charity filed a report with the IRS a few months later showing that it donated only about $55,000 in 2022 to unnamed entities.
Patel has also been busy writing books. He published a memoir last year — “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy” — and is the author of two works of children’s fiction that pay homage to Trump. “The Conspiracy Against the King” presents a veiled Hillary. Clinton as the villain who goes after “King Donald,” while Kash, a wizard called the Distinguished Discoverer, exposes a nefarious conspiracy.
In his final months in office, Trump unsuccessfully promoted the idea of installing Patel as deputy director of the FBI or CIA in an effort to strengthen the president’s control over the intelligence community. “Patel had virtually no experience that qualified him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency,” Trump Attorney General Bill Barr wrote in his memoir. But such a role could be in Patel’s future if Trump wins a second term.
Patel has made clear he is in lockstep with the former president on most national security issues, including the purge of intelligence officials deemed disloyal. He has spoken publicly about his desire to prosecute Trump’s political enemies within the administration as well as members of the media.
During an interview with Steve Bannon in December, Patel said he and others “are going to go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media” during the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden. “We will go after the people in the media who lied about the American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig the presidential election,” he said. “We will come after you, whether criminally or civilly. We’ll figure it out. But yes, we are warning you all.”
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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org.
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An earlier version of this story said Patel has a consulting contract with Trump Media and Technology Group. That contract was terminated in March.
