Patel, a newcomer to the Nationwide Safety Council employees from the Home Intelligence Committee, had impressed the president as the first writer of the key “Nunes memo,” a key component within the effort of Home Republicans to undermine the Justice Division’s investigation of Russian meddling within the 2016 election. Now Trump was suggesting a further function for Patel.
“He needed to make Kash a political executioner, to root out and fireplace people on the White Home employees who weren’t being as loyal as he thought they need to be,” Kupperman mentioned in a current interview.
Alarmed, Kupperman pushed again, as did Pat Cipollone, the White Home counsel, and John Eisenberg, the Nationwide Safety Council’s authorized counsel, who have been each there that day. All three mentioned that loyalty assessments would create authorized and morale issues.
Ultimately Trump stood down. However Kupperman at present sees the incident as a warning of Trump’s intention to inventory a second administration with individuals like Patel: valued extra for subservience than experience, and wanting to pursue a vengeful president’s whims.
“Trump’s individuals are involved with having a really weak civil service who’re simply automatons, loyal to him,” he mentioned, referring to Trump’s pledge to reclassify tens of hundreds of government department staff in a method that will allow the president to fireplace them. “Kash would have carried out it in a heartbeat.”Reached whereas on a Trump marketing campaign bus tour final week, Patel declined to be interviewed. He responded to emailed questions through his publicist. Requested in regards to the Oval Workplace assembly with Kupperman, Patel answered, “You forgot to say that Mickey Mouse and the Easter Bunny have been additionally in attendance.”Requested about his {qualifications} for the roles he held and may be thought-about for in a second Trump time period, he responded that “I used to be proper” on a listing of points, together with “Russia gate,” and that “I led efforts to declassify” Division of Justice and FBI “corruption.”
“Stack that up in opposition to any of my so-called colleagues’ statements,” he added.
A bombastic former public defender identified for his antipathy towards the intelligence businesses, Patel rose to more and more highly effective nationwide safety jobs within the Trump administration. Ought to Trump win reelection, Patel has been talked about alongside many others as a possible CIA director, lawyer normal or, if he fails Senate affirmation, a high job on the Nationwide Safety Council.
On Saturday, Patel was a part of the warmup act for Trump throughout his rally in Coachella, California. “The 2-tier system of justice is the Deep State’s wrecking ball and operational arm of alternative, and we have to destroy it,” Patel mentioned.
Patel has lengthy made clear his intentions to assist purge the federal authorities and media of “conspirators.”
“Sure, we’re going to come back after the individuals within the media who lied about Americans, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come back after you,” he advised former Trump adviser Steve Bannon in an interview late final 12 months. “Whether or not it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll determine that out.”
A enterprise dubbed ‘Ok$H’
Since Trump misplaced the 2020 election, Patel has parlayed his affiliation with the previous president into enterprises he promotes underneath the logotype “Ok$H.”
He’s at present peddling the third in his youngsters’s guide sequence depicting himself as a robed wizard avenging the character King Donald, calling it “the right gag present for a liberal good friend or member of the family!” His memoir, “Authorities Gangsters,” led to a movie adaptation starring himself that was produced by Bannon earlier than his current imprisonment. The quilt of the memoir options Patel accessorized with darkish sun shades and a briefcase, striding away from the presidential helicopter like a personality in a political thriller.
Patel’s firm, Trishul, collects consulting charges, together with $130,000 final 12 months from Trump’s Fact Social web site. He additionally made $325,000 over two years for “technique consulting” for the pro-Trump Save America PAC and $145,000 in 2021 for “fundraising consulting” from Mates of Matt Gaetz, the marketing campaign committee for the blustering Home Republican from Florida. Patel has appeared on social media hawking picket plaques, “Warrior Necessities” anti-vaccine weight loss program dietary supplements and Trump-themed T-shirts.
Patel additionally operates the Kash Basis, a nonprofit that he has mentioned presents monetary assist to a spread of recipients, together with the households of individuals charged for his or her roles within the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. Tax filings for 2023 present the muse’s income surged from $182,000 in 2022 to $1.3 million final 12 months, most of it coming from donations. Its bills rose fivefold over 2022 to $674,000. Virtually half of that was spent on promotion and promoting, an expense that totaled greater than the muse gave away in contributions and grants final 12 months.
‘No one would rent me’
Patel, 44, is the son of Indian immigrants, whose father labored as a monetary officer for an aviation firm. Patel likes to say that he’s from Queens, New York, identical to Trump, however he hails from the prosperous village of Backyard Metropolis on Lengthy Island, the place his household’s sprawling family included his father’s eight brothers and sisters. In his memoir he remembers his prolonged household taking an annual pilgrimage to Disney World in a 15-car convoy.
Patel, who wrote that he was impressed by the protection attorneys whose golf luggage he hauled throughout summer season caddying jobs on the Backyard Metropolis Nation Membership, acquired a bachelor’s diploma in prison justice and historical past from the College of Richmond and graduated from Tempo College regulation faculty in 2005.
“Goals of the sky-high wage on the status regulation companies by no means materialized,” he wrote in his guide, as a result of “no person would rent me.” As an alternative he landed a job as an area public defender in Miami-Dade County, then as a federal public defender within the Southern District of Florida.
Patel’s former colleagues bear in mind him for providing himself as a prize in a charity public sale of eligible bachelors, for wildly patterned socks and for having his fits custom-made on visits to India. His former supervisor, Michael Caruso, a federal public defender who led the Southern District of Florida workplace on the time, mentioned Patel shied away from submitting motions that he was more likely to lose.
“My enduring picture of him is together with his sneakers off and his ft up on the desk, studying The Wall Road Journal,” Caruso mentioned in an interview.
Patel developed a deep animosity towards the Justice Division prosecutors he discovered himself up in opposition to. The division, he wrote in his guide, was a hotbed of “endemic corruption” and prosecutors who “lie, leak, cowl up or twist the reality to perform their mission.” He added, “That is precisely how I noticed the Deep State function in its try to take down President Trump.”
Regardless of his condemnation, by late 2013 Patel had landed what he known as a “dream job” — work as a terrorism prosecutor within the Justice Division’s Nationwide Safety Division in Washington. “My new job gave me the chance to save lots of lives by way of my prosecutions and make a reputation for myself,” he wrote.
He did, though maybe not in the best way he imagined.
In early 2016, Patel assisted two Justice Division attorneys within the prosecution of a Palestinian refugee who pleaded responsible to trying to offer help to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, often called ISIL. The choose within the case, Lynn N. Hughes, scheduled a standing convention on the case in his chambers in Houston whereas Patel was on project in Tajikistan. Patel’s fellow attorneys advised him there was no purpose to fly throughout the globe to look at a routine continuing, however he did anyway. He wrote in his memoir that he was ordered to go.
He turned up in rumpled khakis, boat sneakers and a too-small borrowed jacket earlier than Hughes, who excoriated him for his disrespectful costume. “If you wish to be a lawyer, costume like a lawyer,” the choose mentioned. He requested Patel repeatedly why he was there.
“You don’t add a little bit of worth, do you?” the choose mentioned. “This case is tough sufficient with out Washington simply sending pointless individuals down right here to look at what they do within the provinces.” He threw Patel out of his chambers, in accordance with the court docket transcript.
The accused terrorist was sentenced in 2017 to 16 years in jail, after Patel had left the Justice Division.
“He positively left a path of wreckage and humorous tales in Miami,” mentioned David Adler, the lawyer who represented the defendant and witnessed the contretemps with the choose.
In one other episode, Patel claimed a significant function within the authorities’s pursuit of the perpetrators of the 2012 assault on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed 4 People.
“I used to be the primary Justice lead prosecutor for Benghazi,” Patel advised a former Navy SEAL, Shawn Ryan, in an interview posted in August on Ryan’s YouTube channel.
Patel had no function on the Benghazi trial group. The pretrial investigation was dealt with by a group led by the FBI and the U.S. lawyer’s workplace in Washington. Patel was a junior Justice Division employees member on the time, who routed arrest warrants and the like up the chain for approval, in accordance with a number of individuals concerned within the Benghazi case.
From ‘London Calling’ to the White Home
After Trump took workplace in 2017, Patel left the Justice Division to turn out to be the Home Intelligence Committee’s lead investigator within the Republican effort to undercut the inquiry by Robert Mueller, the particular counsel, into Russian interference within the 2016 election. Rep. Devin Nunes, the California Republican who chaired the committee, employed him “to bust doorways down,” Nunes mentioned in “The Plot In opposition to the President,” a guide by conservative journalist Lee Smith.
In his investigation Patel seized on the FBI’s wiretapping of Carter Web page, a former Trump marketing campaign adviser and a longtime recruitment goal of Russian intelligence. In searching for authorization to watch Web page, the FBI had cited a Democratic-funded file on Trump compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer.
In the summertime of 2017, Patel and a colleague on the committee launched into a shambolic effort to doorstep Steele in London. They discovered him on the places of work of his lawyer, however have been turned away with out assembly him. The 2 then flew again to Washington empty-handed. Patel didn’t notify Democrats on the committee or the U.S. Embassy of his effort to see Steele, bucking protocol. Fellow employees members known as the journey “London Calling.”
In early 2018, Patel performed a lead function in writing what grew to become often called the “Nunes memo,” a part of the Republicans’ try to recast the Russia investigation as a politically motivated effort to sabotage Trump. Amongst different claims, Patel accused the FBI of improperly acquiring warrants to conduct wiretap surveillance of Web page. Though the Justice Division’s impartial inspector normal later uncovered severe issues within the Web page warrant purposes, the true issues it delivered to gentle have been largely totally different from the claims put ahead within the Nunes memo. The inspector normal additionally concluded that there had been a lawful foundation to open the general Russia investigation, and located no proof that officers had acted from political bias.
However Patel’s memo, which Trump declassified over the objections of the intelligence businesses and Democrats, fueled bogus claims by Trump, Republicans and conservative media that politics drove the Russia investigation and that the federal government had spied on the Trump marketing campaign itself.
Lower than a 12 months later, after Republicans misplaced management of the Home and Nunes misplaced his chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee, Patel was out of a job. Nunes turned to the White Home for assist.
“We didn’t need to rent him, and we resisted thrice when Devin Nunes known as,” mentioned Kupperman, then deputy to John R. Bolton, the nationwide safety adviser on the time. “Clearly he had mind, however he was untrustworthy, cancerous with employees and had his personal agenda.”
When Trump ordered that Patel be given a job, Kupperman mentioned he slotted him into an anodyne function within the Nationwide Safety Council’s worldwide organizations part. Patel was quickly embroiled in controversy.
In mid-2019, Fiona Hill, the senior director for Europe and Russia on the council on the time, was organizing a Ukraine briefing for Trump when a White Home employees member advised her the president needed to speak with “your Ukraine director,” Hill testified to Home impeachment investigators in October 2019. He meant Patel, who the staffer mentioned was offering Trump with Ukraine supplies.
Patel had no official accountability for Ukraine, and had fueled conspiracy theories that Kyiv, not Moscow, had meddled within the 2016 election.
“It alarmed everyone,” Hill testified to the investigators.
Requested whether or not he had briefed or supplied supplies on Ukraine to Trump on the time, Patel responded through electronic mail, “No, by no means, on all the above.”
It was across the identical time, mid-2019, that Trump backed off his plan to place Patel accountable for “political operations” on the White Home employees. However Trump quickly promoted him to senior director for counterterrorism on the Nationwide Safety Council, the place he and Richard Grenell, who was named appearing director of nationwide intelligence in February 2020, led a purge of intelligence company officers.
After Trump misplaced the 2020 election and employees members started an exodus from the White Home, Patel’s upward trajectory continued. Trump named him to one of the vital necessary jobs on the Pentagon: chief of employees to Christopher Miller, the appearing protection secretary.
Gen. Mark A. Milley, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Employees, was shocked when Patel offered him a doc signed in Sharpie by the outgoing Trump ordering a full withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by Jan. 15. Milley, the highest navy adviser to the president, had by no means even seen the order, and neither had a number of different senior advisers. It turned out it was drafted by Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel named as an adviser to the Pentagon after he impressed Trump together with his appearances on Fox Information, in accordance with an account in “The Divider,” a guide by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.
Trump backed away from the Afghanistan plan, however he quickly sought to once more elevate Patel by making him deputy director of both the CIA or the FBI. Solely after Gina Haspel, the CIA director, and William P. Barr, the lawyer normal, each threatened to give up — Barr vowed that Patel would turn out to be FBI deputy solely “over my lifeless physique”— did Trump abandon the thought.
Patel stayed on the Pentagon for 3 months, crediting himself in his guide with main “the most important transition” of the Protection Division “in U.S. historical past.”
Within the convention room aboard Air Pressure One through the waning days of his administration, Trump engaged his group in a favourite recreation: predicting who will play whom within the inevitable film about his presidency. Turning to Patel, he mentioned, “You’ll most likely play your self.”