The Man Trump Wants Back: Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s Shadowy Fixer
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Kash Patel was dangerous. On this both Trump appointees and career officials could agree.
A 40-year-old lawyer with little government experience, he joined the administration in 2019 and rose rapidly. Each new title set off new alarms.
When Patel was installed as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense just after the 2020 election, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised him not to break the law in order to keep President Donald Trump in power. “Life looks really shitty from behind bars,” Milley reportedly told Patel. (Patel denies this.)
When Trump entertained naming Patel deputy director of the FBI, Attorney General Bill Barr confronted the White House chief of staff and said, “Over my dead body.”
When, in the final weeks of the administration, Trump planned to name Patel deputy director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, the agency’s head, threatened to resign. Trump relented only after an intervention by Vice President Mike Pence and others.
Who was this man, and why did so many top officials fear him?
It wasn’t a question of ideology. He wasn’t a zealot like Stephen Miller, trying to make the bureaucracy yield to his agenda. Rather, Patel appeared singularly focused on pleasing Trump. Even in an administration full of loyalists, Patel was exceptional in his devotion.
This was what seemed to disturb many of his colleagues the most: Patel was dangerous, several of them told me, not because of a certain plan he would be poised to carry out if given control of the CIA or FBI, but because he appeared to have no plan at all—his priorities today always subject to a mercurial president’s wishes tomorrow. (Patel disputes this characterization.)
What wouldn’t a person like that do, if asked?
Most Americans had no idea Patel existed, yet rarely a day passed when administration leaders weren’t reminded that he did. In a year and eight months, they had watched Patel leapfrog from the National Security Council, where he became senior counterterrorism director; to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where he was principal deputy to the acting director; to the Department of Defense, where his influence rivaled that of the acting secretary himself.
But in the officials’ warnings about the various catastrophic ways the rise of an inexperienced lackey to the highest levels of government might end, all Patel seemed to detect was the panic of a “deep state” about to be exposed. Such officials understood, as Patel later wrote, that he “wouldn’t sit quietly and accept their actions to stonewall direct orders from the president.”
Patel was ultimately denied a role at the pinnacle of the national-security establishment, but Trump has promised to learn from his mistakes. Should he return to the White House, there will be no Milleys, Haspels, or even Barrs to restrain him as he seeks revenge against his political enemies. Instead, there will be Patels—those whose true faith and allegiance belong not to a nation, but to one man.
“Get ready, Kash,” Trump said before a gala of young Republicans this past December. “Get ready.”
## The “Loyalist” – A Brand Built on Loyalty to Trump
A cursory appraisal of Patel’s activities since the Trump administration might suggest that his days as a senior official in the United States government are behind him—that Patel, like countless others on the right, has learned the art of commodifying his association with the former president.
There is, for example, merch: “the official K$h wine!” ($233.99 for six bottles) and the Fight With Kash Punisher Intarsia Reversible Scarf ($25), which Patel wore for his remarks at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. There are TAKE A LAP RHINO tank tops ($35), JUSTICE FOR ALL #J6PC tees (also $35), and Kash Krew Golf Polos ($50–$53).
There are the books. Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy is Patel’s account of his years fighting the “corrupt cabal” of federal officials trying to take down Trump. And in The Plot Against the King, a children’s book, Patel tells the story of a wizard named Kash who sets out to save King Donald from the sinister machinations of Hillary Queenton and a “shifty knight.” Head over to fightwithkash.com, and for a “special low offer” of $19.99, one can purchase playing cards (“the collector’s item of the century”) featuring the story’s characters; the king card belongs to “Kash, the distinguished wizard and corruption combatant.”
There is at least one song: Patel produced “Justice for All,” a version of the national anthem sung by jailed January 6 defendants and played by Trump at his first 2024 campaign rally. Patel professes to make no money from the song or the merch—he says proceeds go to January 6 defendants and their families, or to the Kash Foundation. Few details are available about the charity, but according to Patel, it has funded meals for needy families and defamation lawsuits on behalf of Ric Grenell, Patel’s friend and former boss at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Daniel Bostic, a “Stop the Steal” activist. (Just as this article was going to press, most of the merch was removed from Patel’s online shop.)
All the while, Patel churns out promotional content on Truth Social—for a conservative cellphone carrier (“Freedom in cell phones, switch today”) and a Christian payment processor (“Why not just give your money to the enemy, or switch now”)—and hawks pills that he says “reverse” the effects of COVID vaccines (“Mrna detox, reverse the vaxx n get healthy”).
He has also worked as a national security adviser to Trump (bringing in more than $300,000 over the past two years from the former president’s Save America PAC, according to campaign-finance records) and as a consultant for Trump Media & Technology Group, the owner of Truth Social ($130,000 last year, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing). In addition, Patel has spoken of work abroad, though public paper trails are hard to come by—he has claimed, for example, that he worked as a security consultant for Qatar during the 2022 FIFA World Cup, in Doha.
Nevertheless, Patel has at times vented that he deserves more, according to two people I spoke with. “He complains about money all the time—like, he doesn’t have any money, can’t make any money, nobody will hire him,” a longtime Trump adviser told me. “Anybody who was as big of a deal as he was in the past administration would come out and they’d be on the board of Raytheon and Boeing.” (This person, like many of the nearly 40 Patel associates I spoke with for this story, requested anonymity for fear of retribution. Patel, who declined to be interviewed, denied this through a spokesperson.)
From the time Patel left the administration, he appeared committed to finding opportunities to reinforce his loyalty to Trump. In spring 2022, after the FBI opened a criminal investigation into Trump’s handling of federal records at Mar-a-Lago, Patel insinuated himself into the story, telling Breitbart News that he witnessed Trump verbally declassify “whole sets of materials” before leaving the presidency. The claim ensured a starring role for Patel throughout the probe—ending with Patel testifying before a federal grand jury in exchange for a grant of limited immunity. More crucially, Patel’s assertion to Breitbart seemed to preview Trump’s own approach to the case: In August, shortly after federal investigators executed a search on Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s office claimed that, as president, he had a standing order that any materials moved from the Oval Office to Mar-a-Lago were considered declassified. It did not appear to bother Patel that numerous Trump officials flatly denied the existence of such an order.
That October, the far-right personality Benny Johnson asked Patel on his podcast how he would respond if Trump offered him the job of FBI director in a second term. Patel leaned back, laughed, and waved off the question, but a minute later he decided to chime in after all. “Yes, to answer your question, of course,” he said. “Who would turn that down?” Some in Trump’s orbit acknowledge that Senate confirmation is unlikely for Patel—that if he were to lead an agency, it would probably be in an acting capacity. On a podcast in November 2023, Donald Trump Jr. floated the idea of installing Patel as an “interim” attorney general at the outset “just to send that shot across the bow of the swamp.”
Such is the present dynamic of Kash Patel’s life: marketing “Orange Man Bad” Punisher-skull license plates and dubious supplements while fielding questions about which major national-security or law-enforcement agency he might soon like to run. “Kash, I know you’re probably going to be head of the CIA,” Steve Bannon said on his podcast, War Room, this past December. “But do you believe that you can deliver the goods on this in pretty short order, the first couple of months, so we can get rolling on prosecutions?”
Bannon was talking here about “receipts,” the supposedly incriminating documents and emails that a second Trump administration would use to bring cases against deep-state dwellers and members of the press. Patel expressed no doubt about his capacity to deliver the goods. “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” he said. “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.”
“A lot of people say he’s crazy,” Trump once said of Patel, according to the longtime adviser. “I think he’s kind of crazy. But sometimes you need a little crazy.”
## From Garden City to the White House: The Making of a Loyalist
It was only a matter of time before they found each other, is how Patel seemed to see it. Just a “couple of guys from Queens,” he has said, trying to synonymize his brand with Trump’s home borough, and the scrappy knuckle-crack caricature that comes with it. In Government Gangsters, Patel reminds readers of this piece of shared heritage four times.
Perhaps it makes sense, then, to go back to the beginning, to the affluent Nassau County village of Garden City, New York, where Kashyap Patel was actually born and raised. Just north of the Garden City Golf Club, one finds the charming corner-lot home to which he returned after school and football practice and hockey games and occasionally, yes, a father-son jaunt for butter chicken about an hour away in Queens. Just a guy from Garden City—it’s true; it doesn’t quite sing.
Patel, who is of Gujarati ancestry, has said that his parents both grew up in East Africa; in the 1970s, his father, Pramod, fled the despotic regime of Idi Amin in Uganda. The young couple immigrated to the United States and settled on Long Island. Children soon followed. Their first chapter in America began in close quarters, according to Patel, with his family and Pramod’s eight siblings all sharing the same home.
Before long, Patel writes in his book, his family gained access to the thrills of “milquetoast Americana”—New York Islanders hockey games, annual sojourns to Disney World. It was the Reagan era, and in 1988, Patel’s parents registered to vote for the first time in the U.S., as Republicans. But their conservatism, according to Patel, was “dispositional”—they valued hard work, fairness, personal responsibility. American opportunity, meanwhile, arrived just as advertised: Pramod ultimately became CFO at a global distributor of aircraft bearings.
Patel was raised Hindu, the family going to temple together and praying in their shrine room at home. It’s difficult to envision many neighbors joining them. Of the roughly 22,000 residents recorded in Garden City in the 1990 census, 96 percent were white. Four years later, when Patel began his freshman year at Garden City High School, he was one of only a handful of people of color in his class.
His senior-yearbook quote came from the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Racism is man’s gravest threat—the maximum of hatred for a minimum reason.”
## A Rise Through the Ranks, A History of “Quarrels”
In Garden City, Patel caddied for “very wealthy” and “important” New Yorkers at the local country club, some of them defense attorneys, he writes in Government Gangsters; as they played, he listened to their stories about the drama of court. “I could be a first-generation immigrant lawyer at a white shoe firm making a ton of money,” Patel thought. After he graduated from the University of Richmond and then Pace University’s law school, however, his dreams of Big Law and high retainers were complicated when, by his account, no firm would hire him.
On the advice of a friend, he sent an application to the Miami-Dade County public defender’s office in Florida, considered one of the best state defender’s offices in the country. Many of the people I spoke with for this story were quick to highlight his time as a public defender—how incongruous it seems in the context of the revenge-driven exploits that now appear to consume him. Public records show that Patel moved into a condo in a new building in Coral Gables, which his parents bought in the summer of 2005. “He just was a normal, good lawyer; did a good job, never stood out,” recalled Bennett Brummer, who was the Miami-Dade elected public defender for 32 years. Patel writes that, by this time, he was shifting “more and more to the right.” But even if he struck his colleagues as a little more conservative than the norm, as Todd Michaels, who was an attorney in the Miami-Dade office, put it to me, he was not overtly partisan.
State court was well suited to Patel’s strengths as an attorney, his former colleagues told me. He was personable and quick on his feet, and adept at “marketing” and “presenting” himself. After a few years, however, Patel moved to the federal public defender’s office in Miami. There, the work was more complex, more writing- and research-intensive. Despite some successes, he developed a reputation for “style over substance,” a former colleague said—one he seemed aware of but not terribly motivated to change. “He always was like, ‘Look, I’m really good at trial skill. But all of this reading and writing and arguing about, like, the intricacies of the law—I’m not really interested,’ ” a second former colleague recalled. (Patel disputed this characterization, referring to a complex drug-trafficking case he’d handled.)
“I’m not saying he wasn’t capable of it,” this person added. “But I think he always liked being the face.”
Transcripts from Patel’s cases reveal a lawyer comfortable before the bench, many of his presentations sharp and clever and peppered with flatteries for Your Honor. (“Judge, I think you hit it on the head last week.”) They were also embroidered with performative modesties: “On my best day, I’m an average defense attorney”; “I’m not a mathematician, but …”; “I’m not saying I’m a Spanish expert, Judge, but …”; “I know I’ve been doing this by far the shortest time of any lawyer sitting here.”
Many times, this worked. “There were certain judges that he kind of had magic in front of,” the second former colleague said.
This former colleague began to notice flashes of grievance in the young attorney, but they didn’t seem grounded in politics so much as insecurity. This person recalled that when Patel would ask for help on legal research, he would occasionally offer some version of Well, thank God I talked to someone who is book smart and went to all the right schools and checked all the right boxes. “He would always phrase it like a compliment, but there was an edge to it.”
It became clear that Patel “did kind of have a chip on his shoulder,” this former colleague said—that he seemed caught between a brewing resentment of elites and an abiding desire to be seen as one.
## From Public Defender to Trump’s Inner Circle: A Shifting Narrative of “The Deep State”
By early 2014, Patel had left Miami to become a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C. He’d landed a job in the counterterrorism section of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. Yet in Patel’s telling, what should have been a dream chapter in the career of a young lawyer fast became a study in the rot of bureaucracy—and the malicious repercussions for those who dared to challenge it.
This education began with Benghazi.
Patel was one of the attorneys from the main Justice Department office who assisted the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington in pursuing foreign militants for the September 11, 2012, attacks that killed four Americans. In his book, Patel writes that as the Justice Department moved to bring the Benghazi terrorists to court, “I was leading the prosecution’s efforts at Main Justice.” He claims that he proceeded to watch firsthand as senior DOJ leadership and other Obama officials—“political gangsters, frauds, and hypocrites” such as Attorney General Eric Holder and his successor, Loretta Lynch—chose to “go soft” on the terrorists by prosecuting only one perpetrator. It was for this reason, Patel writes—a lack of trust in the prosecution’s decisions—that when his supervisors asked him to join the trial team itself, he declined.
When I put this version of events to three people familiar with the prosecution, I was met with astonishment. One of these people said simply: “Good God.”
Although Patel was Main Justice’s representative on the case for a period, the U.S. Attorney’s Office led the prosecution, they said. The department prosecuted a single suspect, they added, because he was the only one the government had been able to capture. (DOJ later prosecuted a second suspect, and reportedly brought charges against multiple others.) Patel was tasked with coordinating approvals for warrants and indictments, among other responsibilities. Moreover, he did not decline an invitation to join the team working on the actual trial; according to two of his former DOJ colleagues, he was never asked. After clashing with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he was removed from the case altogether. (Patel denied this, saying he was simply reassigned to a different position.)
What all parties seem to agree on is that the young attorney had grown bitter toward the system that had employed him for the better part of his career. And an unexpected confrontation in Texas transformed the building friction into a personal declaration of war.
In January 2016, Patel traveled to Tajikistan to interview witnesses for an Islamic State–related case. While he was there, a federal judge in Houston scheduled a surprise hearing in another terrorism case Patel was involved in. He had less than 24 hours to make it to Texas, and having brought only slacks and a blazer on his trip, he contacted the local U.S. Attorney’s Office asking for a tie. But when Patel finally arrived at the courthouse, for reasons that remain in dispute, there was no tie.
Judge Lynn Nettleton Hughes lost it. “If you want to be a lawyer, dress like a lawyer,” Hughes snapped in chambers. “Act like a lawyer.” Hughes proceeded to berate Patel as “just one more nonessential employee from Washington.” “What is the utility to me and to the people of America to have you fly down here at their expense?” he said. “You don’t add a bit of value, do you?” The judge dismissed Patel from chambers.
Patel’s bosses were furious on his behalf. Hughes, then 74, had a history of eruptions in court, including disturbing remarks about race. Three years earlier, an Indian American plaintiff had tried but failed to have the judge removed from his discrimination case after Hughes held forth in a pretrial conference on “Adolf Hitler’s use of swastikas, the origin of Caucasians and the futility of diversity programs at universities,” the Texas Observer reported. DOJ officials’ attempts to get a transcript of the Patel exchange only enraged Hughes further; the judge issued an “Order on Ineptitude” castigating the “pretentious lawyers” at Main Justice.
The Washington
