WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump says he will nominate Kash Patel as FBI director, turning to a fierce ally to bring down America’s top law enforcement agency and rid the government of alleged “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 his nominees.
The selection is consistent with Trump’s view that the government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies require radical transformation and his expressed desire to retaliate against alleged adversaries. It shows how Trump, still reeling from years of federal investigations that overshadowed his first administration and later led to his indictment, is putting himself in charge of close allies in the FBI and Justice Department that he believes will protect him, not control him. .
Patel “played a key role in exposing deception by Russia, by Russia, and by Russia, standing up for truth, accountability and the Constitution,” Trump wrote in a social media post Saturday night.
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The announcement means current FBI Director Christopher Wray must either resign or be removed after Trump takes office on January 20. Wray was previously appointed by Trump and began a 10-year term — a length meant to insulate the agency from the political influence of administration changes — in 2017, after Trump fired his predecessor, James Comey.
The decision sets off what is likely to be an explosive Senate confirmation battle shortly after Trump’s first pick to head the Justice Department, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his nomination amid intense scrutiny over human trafficking allegations. Patel is a lesser-known figure, but his nomination was expected to cause shockwaves. He embraced Trump’s “deep state” rhetoric, called for a “comprehensive purge” of government workers disloyal to Trump and called journalists traitors, vowing to try to prosecute some journalists.
Trump’s nominees will have allies in the Republican-controlled Senate next year, but his picks are not certain of confirmation. With a slim majority, Republicans stand to lose only a few defections to an expected united Democratic opposition — although as vice president, JD Vance could break any ties.
But the president-elect has also indicated the possibility of pushing through his picks without Senate approval by using a loophole in Congress that allows him to make appointments when the Senate is not in session.
Wray fell out of favor with the president and his allies. His ouster is not unexpected given Trump’s long-standing public criticism of him and the FBI, especially after federal investigations — and an FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago estate two years ago for classified documents — that resulted in indictments that now ready to evaporate.
In his final months in office, Trump unsuccessfully pushed the idea of making Patel the deputy director of either the FBI or the 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 then chief of staff Mark Meadows that the appointment of Patel as deputy director of the FBI would happen “over my dead body.”
“Patel had virtually no experience to qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency,” Barr wrote.
Patel’s previous proposals, if implemented, would lead to searing 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 a dramatic reduction in the agency’s footprint, a perspective that sets him apart from past directors who have sought additional resources for the bureau, and proposed closing the bureau’s Washington headquarters and “reopening it the next day as a museum of the deep state” — Trump’s pejorative catchphrase for the federal bureaucracy. .
And although the Justice Department in 2021 halted the practice of secretly seizing journalists’ phone records during leak investigations, Patel said he intends to aggressively hunt down government officials who leak information to reporters and change the law to make it easier to sue journalists.
During an interview with Steve Bannon last December, Patel said he and others would “go out and find conspirators not just in government but in the media.”
“We’re going to go after people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig the presidential election,” Patel said, referring to the 2020 presidential election in which Biden, the Democratic challenger, defeated Trump. “We” will come after you, whether it’s criminal or civil, we’ll figure it out.
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. He worked closely with Trump’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi.
Patel, the child of Indian immigrants and a former public defender, spent several years as a Justice Department prosecutor before gaining the Trump administration’s attention 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 Trump ally who tapped Patel to lead the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Patel eventually helped write what became known as the “Nunes Memo,” a four-page report detailing how the Justice Department erred in obtaining a warrant to monitor a former Trump campaign volunteer. The release of the memo was fiercely opposed by Wray and the Department of Justice, who warned that it would be reckless to reveal sensitive information.
The inspector general’s subsequent report found significant problems with FBI oversight during the Russia investigation, but also found no evidence that the FBI acted with partisan motives in conducting the investigation and said there was a legitimate basis for opening the investigation.
The Russia investigation fueled Patel’s suspicions of the FBI, the intelligence community, and the media, which he called “the most powerful enemy the United States has ever seen.” Citing compliance failures in the FBI’s use of a spy program that officials say is vital to national security, Patel accused the FBI of “weaponizing” its surveillance powers against innocent Americans.
Patel parlayed that work into influential administration roles at the National Security Council and later as chief of staff to Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller.
He continued as a loyal Trump lieutenant even after he left office, accompanying the president-elect to court during his criminal trial in New York and claiming to reporters that Trump was the victim of a “constitutional circus.”
And he found himself embroiled in Trump’s legal troubles, appearing two years ago before a federal grand jury investigating Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Usually, though not always, presidents keep the director they inherited: Biden, for example, kept Wray in place even though the director was appointed by Trump, and former President Barack Obama asked Robert Mueller to stay on for an additional two years even though Mueller was wiretapping Obama predecessor, George W. Bush.
Trump openly flirted with firing Wray during his first term, questioning Wray’s emphasis on the threat of election interference from Russia at a time when Trump was focusing on China. Wray also described antifa, an umbrella term for left-wing militants, as an ideology rather than an organization, at odds with Trump, who wants to label it a terrorist group.
The low-key FBI director was determined to bring stability to an institution torn by turbulence after Trump fired Comey in May 2017 amid the FBI’s investigation into potential ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.
Wray tried to turn the page on some of the controversies of Comey’s tenure. The FBI, for example, fired the lead agent on the Russia probe who sent derogatory text messages about Trump during the investigation, and sidelined a deputy director under Comey who was a key figure in the investigation. Wray also announced dozens of corrective measures aimed at preventing some of the surveillance abuses that marred the Russia investigation.
The FBI this year worked to protect Trump after multiple assassination attempts and disrupted an Iranian assassination plot targeting the president-elect, resulting in 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.
