How Kash Patel Came to Loathe the Media and Love Trump
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During his confirmation hearings, Kash Patel was asked about a rumored plan to purge officials from the FBI, the agency that he's poised to lead. Are you aware of any plans or discussions to punish in any way, including termination, FBI agents or personnel associated with Trump investigations? I'm not aware of that, Senator. Thank you.

Then, a day later... The Trump administration has conducted an unprecedented purge at the top levels of the FBI. Unprecedented. This purge has greatly weakened the FBI's ability to protect the country and made America less safe. That's Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois...

Last week, Durbin said he had evidence that indicated that Patel lied during those hearings. Senator Dick Durbin, claiming highly credible whistleblowers, told him, Patel is behind the recent mass firings at the FBI, even though he has yet to take the reins. Meanwhile, GOP senators standing largely united in their support of Patel. Senate Democrats have worked to delay the vote over concerns that Patel is a Trump loyalist.

who's ready to target the president's perceived enemies. Mark my words. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. This Patel guy will come back to haunt you. Elena Plot Calabro is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she profiled Kash Patel. In this conversation from late last year, she charted Patel's rise to power and prominence from his roots as an unknown civil servant.

He became a prosecutor with the Department of Justice. And then being in D.C. is essentially how he came to meet Devin Nunes, who, of course, was the congressman who led the counter investigation into Mueller's Russia investigation.

And from there, he essentially scales the ranks within a year and eight months, I think it is. He is becoming a deputy at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And then he ends his time in the administration as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, which, of course, is a quite senior role. And in your profile of Patel, you spoke to some 40 associates already.

met him during this very accelerated rise. What did you hear from people about what he was like to work with? So many people I talked to time and again, they would say, I don't recognize the Kash Patel I see today on my TV.

What I was told by several people who knew him was that this was a person who was a capable and competent attorney who was quite charming, good on his feet in front of judges. And same thing with his colleagues in Washington in the National Security Division of the Justice Department. And most intriguingly, he was not.

political, certainly not overtly political in any way. I spoke to several people who said, while they had a sense that he may have been generally conservative, he was a supporter of Jeb Bush, actually, while Kash Patel was living in Florida. But beyond that, there was absolutely nothing to suggest that he would take the path that he has ultimately taken. So then what exactly was the turning point where he became this mega pro-Trump guy? Yeah.

So there is an interesting thing that happens in Kash Patel's life in the year 2016 while he is a prosecutor with the Justice Department. He is in Tajikistan on a trip to interview witnesses for a terrorism case. He has only brought slacks and a shirt on that trip.

And he gets a call from his supervisor back in Washington that a federal judge in Houston has scheduled a kind of surprise hearing for one of the other terrorism cases he's working on. So as he's en route to Texas, he reaches out to the U.S. attorney's office there and says, hey, guys, I wasn't expecting this, obviously. Could you please bring a tie for me?

And for reasons that remain in dispute, and I did try quite hard to get to the bottom of this, there was no tie when Kash Patel arrives. Where was the tie? Some people say that he never, in fact, asked for the tie. Others insist that he did. But at any rate, he gets there. There's no tie. So he goes into the courtroom wearing, again, slacks and a button down. And the judge berates him.

pulls him into chambers and says, if you come into my court, you better be dressed properly. And it sort of snowballs from there into what value do you bring to this case anyway? And even U.S. attorneys who are watching it take place are quite taken aback by the whole thing. As Kash Patel gets back to Washington,

a reporter at the Washington Post picks up on what has happened and writes a relatively short-ish piece about the whole thing. This was in part prompted by the fact that Kash Patel's supervisors, wanting to learn more about what happened, they commissioned

rank and file staffer to try to get in touch with the court there to get a transcript of the back and forth. And the judge is so infuriated by this request that he issues an order of ineptitude against this Justice Department staffer. And the Washington Post does kind of a rundown of this in which Kash Patel really has rendered a sympathetic figure, just sort of the unwitting victim of this judge who was in maybe a very bad mood that day.

The piece also detailed the history of this judge making maybe similar outbursts, a history of questionable racist remarks. Right. In fact, there was an Indian American plaintiff in one of this judge's cases who sought to have him dismissed from the case because of a history of making potentially racist remarks.

So anyway, what Kash Patel is upset about, however, is that the reporter reaches out, obviously, to the Department of Justice for comment, and they decline, which is to say they do not defend Kash Patel on the record. Even though behind the scenes his bosses were disturbed by the way he had been treated. Exactly.

But the fact that they did not defend him on the record was what counted to him. And he just simply could not let the incident go. For the next several months, he was constantly cycling in and out of his supervisor's offices saying, what are you going to do about this? How essentially are you going to punish this U.S. attorney? And finally, one of his bosses says, I don't know what you want me to do. The U.S. attorney is a presidentially appointed position. I can't get this person fired.

And the understanding of people around him was this was sort of the catalyst for him looking for other jobs and also deciding that the system was rigged, basically, that you could devote your life to it. But if they needed to, they would hang you out to dry and not have your back.

Okay, so that's an illuminating story, but it's a little hard for you to believe that it would be, you know, the sole catalyst in a person's like complete political reinvention.

So I don't think that event alone was the catalyst for the cash patel we see today. But I think it certainly got him interested in the theme of the system is out to get me. It is sort of the impetus for him seeking out what he calls leaders who are not quote unquote cowards.

Congressman Devin Nunes, he adjudges, is not a coward. And as he starts working with him on this counter investigation of the Russia investigation, he finds his name coming up more and more in the press as he's identified as one of the key authors of the so-called Nunes memo that comes out. And as he is reading that coverage, he writes in his book that to him, it was the Houston incident all over again.

In your profile, you drew a lot on his 2023 book, Government Gangsters, The Deep State, The Truth, and The Battle for Our Democracy. But you'd found examples where his recounting of events differed from those of the people who worked around him. When you read the story of his life and his words, you realize that

However innocuous an event may seem, he has cast himself in it as either the ultimate hero or the ultimate victim. One recollection he has that is utterly unlike anybody else who was around for the actual event was his saying that he was the lead prosecutor for Maine Justice on the Benghazi case, leading the trial team. I spoke to several people who were involved in that case. It is

Absolutely not true. I remember putting it to one person who was, in fact, one of the lead prosecutors. And when I recounted this event, they just said, good God. So when does Donald Trump enter the picture? And what exactly do you think Trump came to see in Patel?

Part of his kind of deal with Devin Nunes when he came to work with him was, if I do this and complete my job, I would like you to promise that you'll recommend me for a job on the National Security Council in the White House. Devin Nunes stays true to that. He does recommend him. And...

essentially pedals to Trump this line that Kash Patel has now developed. I am the only thing standing between you and the deep state. I've uncovered their lies. I will continue to uncover their lies. Well, to Donald Trump, this sounds great. Actually, Kash Patel getting on the National Security Council was not that easy, though, because you had people like National Security Advisor John Bolton, who really did not want someone with as little experience as Kash Patel on his team.

So it did take a lot of push and pull before he was actually installed. But once he was in, I was told by colleagues of his on the National Security Council that he was really kind of phenomenal at angling to get in front of Trump, making sure he was crossing paths with him at all times and perpetuating this line that he was his guardian within the White House against the deep state. Fast forward to the nomination, which

which has led to unearthing many comments that Patel has made about the FBI and the media. Here he is talking with Steve Bannon on the War Room podcast last December.

We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. 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, whether it's criminally or civilly. We'll figure that out. What do you make of this very alarming threat that he's issued? I think Kash Patel is somebody who you have to take deadly seriously when it comes to statements like that.

A really instructive anecdote to keep in mind is that toward the end of the Trump administration, Kash Patel and his position as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense became really enthralled by the so-called Italy Gate conspiracy, which is related to Trump's election fraud conspiracy theory. This is like an extremely convoluted theory.

subplot of like the larger conspiracy theory that satellites and military technology were used to rig the election for Joe Biden in 2020? It's not for the casual election fraud conspiracy theorist. And in his position, he is able to get it up to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to say, we need to send

people to Europe to talk with these men and try to investigate the two men who were behind, theoretically, the Italy Gate conspiracy. The fact that he was able to get that far and was stopped only because some of his own colleagues in DOD and other agencies said, no, I don't think we should do this and I'm not going to do this,

So.

So what would it even mean to act on these threats of the FBI coming after members of the press? The end goal is always the same, that Kash Patel will use his power to collate all the supposedly incriminating documents, emails, memos that they are convinced will bury the deep state, essentially, and show to the American public just how corrupt they are.

I don't know on a procedural level how that works when you are director of the FBI, whether Kash Patel would see himself as basically an intelligence gatherer, an evidence gatherer, and then present them to the attorney general, Pam Bondi, and ask her to initiate a case.

You found through speaking to people who know him and had worked with him that he had a lot of trouble finding work after the first Trump administration. This might explain why he's leaned so hard in the intervening years into commodifying his association with Trump.

Can you tell us a little bit about his side hustles and sort of what he's been doing with his time? Sure. He starts cobbling together various other income streams in large part through the selling of cash branded merchandise. A lot of the proceeds of which he says goes to a foundation he started called the Cash Foundation, the mission of which is really vague and details of which are very hard to come by even in filings with the IRS.

And the merch, I should say, really runs the gamut. You have your Cash Crew polo tees. You have your cash scarves, rhino tanks, basically anything that can be branded with K-A-H. There's cash wine. That felt very Trumpian to me. Yes. Six bottles of official cash wine for $233.99. As of this recording, I believe it's sold out. There was a market for it, it would seem. Yeah.

Another thing he does is he writes books. Two of them are children's books, actually. The first one, The Plot Against the King, is a really vividly illustrated rendition of the Russiagate conspiracy, wherein you have King Donald for Donald Trump. You have Cash the Wizard. And you have Duke Devin, Devin Nunez, and the shifty knight, Adam Schiff.

And don't forget Hillary Quinton. I could not forget Hillary Quinton. Never. It's quite a wild ride. And again, Cash, the distinguished discoverer, the wizard, is in the end the hero. He is the one that uncovers just all that the Shifty Knight and others have done to try to ensure that Hillary Quinton is chosen on choosing day and not King Donald. I've seen many people recently quoting...

from his book, Government Gangsters, the one that you studied so closely for your piece. There's this like grudge list at the end of the book, I believe, where he kind of lists off all the quote unquote corrupt people that that are in his crosshairs. It includes Anthony Fauci. It includes former Trump attorney general Bill Barr. It's a fairly broad tent of people that have wronged him or upset him in one way or another.

What names on there stood out to you? Names actually like Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder stood out to me because I think they go to show how deep his grievances run from his time in the Obama administration, working as a prosecutor at DOJ. You know, he frames his book in that way to say that that was his first major exposure to the deep state, the corruption of high-level bureaucrats in the federal government. And so I think sort of names...

Names from a past administration or people who never worked directly in contact with Donald Trump just show again how deeply he has kept these resentments, how long he has nursed them. And when he does have power, the deep well that he has to pull from in terms of grievances.

Elena, thank you very much. Thank you. Elena Plot Calabro is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Her profile about Kash Patel is titled The Man Who Will Do Anything for Trump. Thanks for listening to the Midweek Podcast. Tune into The Big Show this weekend to hear about the right-wing roots of Silicon Valley. In the meantime, you can keep up with the show by following OTM on Blue Sky, Instagram, and our subreddit, rslashonthemedia.

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