Kash Patel
Based on Wikipedia: Kash Patel
From Caddie to FBI Director: The Unlikely Rise of Kash Patel
In the summer heat of Long Island, a teenage Kash Patel hauled golf bags across the manicured greens of the Garden City Country Club. He listened to defense lawyers swap war stories between holes. Something clicked. The kid who had been eyeing medical school found himself drawn to a different kind of operating theater—the courtroom.
Decades later, that caddie became the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the most powerful law enforcement agency in the world. It's a trajectory that even Hollywood might reject as too improbable.
But Patel's story isn't really about improbability. It's about timing, loyalty, and the particular gravitational pull of Donald Trump's political universe. Understanding Kash Patel means understanding how a mid-level Justice Department staffer transformed himself into one of the most consequential—and controversial—figures in American national security.
Roots in Exile
The Patel family's journey to America began with tragedy. In 1972, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin expelled the country's Asian population in a brutal act of ethnic cleansing. Among those forced to flee were families of Gujarati Indian descent who had built lives in East Africa over generations.
Kash's father, Pramod Patel, was one of them.
The family's roots trace back to Bhadran, a village in the Anand district of Gujarat, India. There, an organization called Chh Gam Patidar Mandal maintains a vanshavali—a family tree—documenting the Patel lineage across eighteen generations. When Amin's soldiers came, all that history counted for nothing.
The Patels fled to India while seeking asylum elsewhere. Canada accepted them first, and they settled there before eventually moving to the United States. Pramod built a successful career as a chief financial officer for a global aircraft bearings distributor. The household was large and close-knit—Pramod's eight siblings lived together, raising their children in a Hindu household.
Kashyap Pramod Patel was born in Garden City, New York, on February 25, 1980. His senior yearbook quote came from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: "Racism is man's gravest threat—the maximum of hatred for a minimum reason." For a family that had experienced ethnic persecution firsthand, the words carried weight beyond teenage philosophizing.
Building Credentials
Patel's path through higher education was thorough if unremarkable. He graduated from the University of Richmond in 2002 with degrees in criminal justice and history. He picked up a certificate in international law from University College London. In 2005, he completed his law degree at Pace University.
At Pace, he participated in the American Bar Association's Judicial Intern Opportunity Program, a diversity initiative designed to give underrepresented law students exposure to the judiciary. It was one of several programs meant to diversify the legal profession—programs that would become politically charged topics in later years.
His early career in Miami-Dade County offered an unusual foundation for someone who would later become associated with tough-on-crime politics. Patel worked as a public defender, representing defendants accused of violent crimes and drug trafficking. Then he served as a federal public defender for the Southern District of Florida.
This matters. Public defenders occupy a particular place in the American legal system. They represent people who cannot afford attorneys, often in cases where the government's resources dwarf their own. It's work that requires believing everyone deserves a defense, regardless of what they're accused of doing.
Inside the Justice Department
In 2012, Patel joined the Department of Justice as a junior staff member. His work was procedural at first—coordinating with judges to obtain arrest warrants. He served on the board of the South Asian Bar Association of North America, building connections within the legal community.
Then came Benghazi.
In September 2012, attackers overran the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, killing Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. The attack became one of the most politically charged events of the Obama era, spawning multiple congressional investigations and endless partisan warfare.
Patel served temporarily as a representative for the Criminal Division on the case against the perpetrators. But the assignment ended badly. He was removed over disagreements with the office leading the prosecution—the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia.
Here's where the story gets complicated. Patel later claimed he had been the case's lead prosecutor. According to The New York Times, this wasn't true. In his memoir, he wrote that he had been asked to join the trial team against Ahmed Abu Khattala, a militia leader in the Libyan civil war. The Times reported he was never actually offered that position.
This pattern—Patel making claims about his experience that don't quite match the documentary record—would recur throughout his career.
A Courtroom Humiliation
By 2013, Patel had moved to the National Security Division as a prosecutor, while also serving as a legal liaison for the Joint Special Operations Command. These are impressive credentials on paper. The reality was messier.
In January 2014, Patel took a junior position in the Counterterrorism Division. At a chambers meeting for the trial of Omar Faraj Saeed al-Hardan—a Palestinian born in Iraq charged with providing material support to the Islamic State—something went wrong.
Judge Lynn Hughes berated Patel for his unprofessional attire. Then he dismissed him from the chambers entirely.
Patel had flown from Tajikistan to Texas for the meeting. The judge called the trip unnecessary. It was the kind of public humiliation that can end a career in the tight-knit world of federal prosecution.
Patel left the Department of Justice in 2017. He later said the impetus was the department's response to the 2016 presidential election—a reference to investigations into Russian interference and potential ties to the Trump campaign. But his departure also came after years of friction with colleagues and supervisors.
The Nunes Connection
In April 2017, everything changed.
Patel began working for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, led by Representative Devin Nunes of California. The committee oversees America's intelligence agencies—the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the FBI's counterintelligence operations.
Nunes was a fierce defender of Donald Trump. He believed the intelligence community had been weaponized against the president. Patel became his instrument.
As an aide to Nunes, Patel investigated a theory that Ukrainians—not Russians—were behind efforts to influence the 2016 election. This contradicted the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community, which had assessed with high confidence that Russia conducted a sophisticated interference campaign to help Trump win.
Then came the memo.
Four Pages That Changed Everything
In early 2018, the New York Times reported that Patel was the primary author of what became known as the Nunes memo. The four-page document alleged that FBI officials had abused their authority in investigating links between Trump associates and Russian officials.
The memo focused on Carter Page, a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign. The FBI had obtained a warrant to surveil Page from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—a secretive body that reviews government requests to monitor suspected foreign agents. The Nunes memo argued this warrant was obtained improperly, partly because it relied on claims from the Steele dossier.
The Steele dossier, compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, contained salacious allegations about Trump's connections to Russia. Many of its specific claims were never verified; some were later discredited. But it was compiled as opposition research during the 2016 campaign, first funded by Republican opponents of Trump and later by Democratic interests.
Critics said the Nunes memo was misleading—that it cherry-picked information to create a false impression of FBI wrongdoing. The FBI itself took the extraordinary step of publicly objecting to the memo's release, citing "material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy."
None of that mattered to Trump's allies. The memo told a story they wanted told: the FBI was corrupt, the Russia investigation was a witch hunt, and the deep state was out to destroy an elected president.
Patel's standing in Trump's orbit soared.
Into the White House
In February 2019, Patel joined the National Security Council. His arrival was unusual. Colleagues questioned what exactly his role was supposed to be. But the answer was simple: he was, according to officials, a "must-hire, directed by the president."
Trump's national security advisor John Bolton and his deputy Charles Kupperman assigned Patel to the International Organizations and Alliances directorate—the office that coordinates American positions at the United Nations. It wasn't glamorous, but it was inside the building.
Within months, Patel shifted his focus to Ukraine.
This was April 2019. The Mueller report on Russian interference had just been released. Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney, was working to discredit evidence against Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman who had been convicted of financial crimes related to his work for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine.
According to the Times, Trump personally discussed documents involving Ukraine with Patel. Telephone records later revealed a 25-minute call between Giuliani and Patel in May 2019. Patel said the call was personal.
In July, Patel was promoted to senior director of the counterterrorism directorate—a position of real authority on the National Security Council.
The Ukraine Problem
Fiona Hill noticed something wrong.
Hill served as senior director for Europe and Ukraine on the National Security Council. She was a career Russia expert, a scholar who had written extensively about Vladimir Putin. In congressional testimony during Trump's first impeachment, she described Patel as a problem.
According to Hill, Patel had directly given Trump information about Ukraine that shaped the president's negative view of the country. She warned her staff to be cautious about communicating with him.
Alexander Vindman, the director of European affairs, corroborated Hill's account. He testified that Patel had misrepresented himself as an expert on Ukraine. This created a practical problem: after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's inauguration, Trump's advisors instructed Vindman not to debrief the president. They worried that a proper briefing would confuse Trump, who was receiving contradictory information from Patel.
Patel denied discussing Ukraine with Trump.
But the telephone records and testimony suggested otherwise. And the question of what Trump knew about Ukraine, and who told him, became central to his first impeachment—the one centered on a phone call with Zelenskyy in which Trump asked for investigations into Joe Biden and his son.
The Intelligence Shakeup
In February 2020, Patel's rise accelerated further. He became an advisor to Richard Grenell, who had been named acting director of national intelligence. When Andrew P. Hallman resigned, Patel became the principal deputy director—the number two position in the office that oversees all seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies.
He arrived with a mandate: "clean house."
Patel promptly reduced the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's staffing. He reviewed personnel files. The message was clear—loyalty to the president mattered more than career credentials.
When John Ratcliffe was confirmed as permanent director in May, Patel returned to the NSC as senior director for counterterrorism. But his reputation as Trump's enforcer in the intelligence world was cemented.
The Damascus Meeting
In August 2020, Patel did something extraordinary. He traveled to Damascus, Syria, with Roger D. Carstens, the special envoy for hostage affairs. Their meeting: Ali Mamlouk, the director of Syria's National Security Bureau.
Syria was an international pariah. Its dictator, Bashar al-Assad, had used chemical weapons against his own people during the country's brutal civil war. The United States had no diplomatic relations with Assad's government. And yet here were American officials, meeting with Assad's intelligence chief.
The purpose was hostage negotiations. Austin Tice, an American journalist, had been captured in Syria in 2012. Majd Kamalmaz, a Syrian-American therapist, disappeared in 2017. Getting them home required talking to people the United States officially refused to talk to.
In May 2024, U.S. officials told Kamalmaz's family that intelligence indicated he had died in captivity. As of this writing, Tice's fate remains unknown.
The Nigeria Incident
Patel's willingness to act first and seek permission later nearly caused a disaster in Nigeria.
He was involved in a military operation to rescue Philip Walton, an American held hostage. According to reports, Patel falsely told the Department of Defense that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had obtained approval to enter Nigerian airspace.
The plane carrying SEAL Team Six—the elite unit that killed Osama bin Laden—was close to landing when Secretary of Defense Mark Esper learned that no authorization had actually been obtained. The SEALs eventually got permission to land and successfully rescued Walton.
But the incident highlighted a terrifying risk. Without proper authorization, the operation could have resulted in Walton's death, or the deaths of American special operators. It could have created an international incident with Nigeria. Patel's shortcut worked out, but only by luck.
Chief of Staff to the Pentagon
In November 2020, Donald Trump lost the presidential election to Joe Biden. Trump refused to accept the result. And he started reshaping the Defense Department.
Mark Esper, the secretary of defense, was fired. Christopher C. Miller, a relatively unknown counterterrorism official, became acting secretary. And Kash Patel became Miller's chief of staff.
A senior national security official later described the arrangement bluntly: Miller was the "frontman." Patel and Ezra Cohen, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, were "calling all the shots."
This was the Pentagon during the most fraught presidential transition in modern American history. Trump was claiming the election had been stolen. His supporters were organizing protests. And the people running the Defense Department were his loyalists.
Patel oversaw the department's transition efforts. According to the Times, Biden's transition officials distrusted him, viewing him as a Trump loyalist who might obstruct the handoff of power. The Washington Post reported that he was intentionally blocking the transition—a charge the Pentagon denied.
January 6
Documents provided to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack tell a troubling story.
According to officials' accounts, Patel discussed security at the Capitol before and during the attack. He repeatedly contacted Mark Meadows, Trump's chief of staff, on the day a mob stormed the building to stop the certification of Biden's election.
The committee later subpoenaed Patel. They requested his communications relating to "the establishment of martial law, requests to establish martial law, or legal analysis of martial law." They also asked for documents about the Insurrection Act of 1807—an antebellum law that allows the president to deploy military forces domestically.
One of Trump's attorneys instructed Patel to defy the subpoena. He declined that advice and chose to communicate with the committee instead.
The Blocked Appointments
Throughout 2020, Trump repeatedly tried to install Patel at the highest levels of the intelligence community. Each time, someone blocked him.
In April 2020, Trump devised a plan to fire FBI director Christopher Wray and replace him with William Evanina, with Patel as deputy director. Attorney General William Barr halted the plan by threatening to resign.
In December 2020, Trump wanted to make Patel the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. CIA director Gina Haspel threatened to resign.
At the Army-Navy football game that December, General Mark Milley—chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—confronted White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Repeatedly and loudly, Milley demanded to know: was Patel going to replace Wray or Haspel?
In the final days of Trump's presidency, a Washington Post photographer captured Mike Lindell—the My Pillow founder and election conspiracy theorist—entering the White House. Lindell was holding a document. It read: "Move Kash Patel to CIA Acting."
Trump ran out of time before he could make it happen.
The Wilderness Years
When Biden took office in January 2021, Patel found himself outside government for the first time in nearly a decade. He adapted quickly.
He founded Trishul, a consulting company. He launched The Kash Foundation, a nonprofit that helps participants in the January 6 Capitol attack pay their legal costs. The foundation also sells merchandise branded with a dollar sign: K$H.
Patel made recurring appearances on podcasts, cultivating a media presence in the pro-Trump ecosystem. In April 2022, he was named to the board of Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social.
He wrote a children's book about the Steele dossier—an unusual choice for a picture book audience.
And he continued promoting conspiracy theories: claims about the "deep state," false assertions that the 2020 election was stolen, and narratives sympathetic to QAnon, the sprawling conspiracy movement that believes a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles controls the government.
The Mar-a-Lago Documents
In June 2022, Trump requested that the National Archives grant Patel and journalist John Solomon access to presidential records. After the FBI searched Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence and found classified documents, Patel became central to the investigation.
He claimed Trump had declassified the seized documents. This became a key argument in Trump's defense—and investigators wanted to know if it was true.
Federal prosecutors sought Patel's testimony before a grand jury. He appeared twice in October 2022. In his first appearance, he repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment, refusing to answer on grounds that his testimony might incriminate him.
Prosecutors offered him immunity in November, compelling his testimony. According to The Washington Post, they asked about his declassification claim and Trump's motivation for taking government documents to his private residence.
FBI Director
On December 11, 2024, Christopher Wray announced he would resign as FBI director at the end of Biden's presidency. The way was finally clear.
Patel appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in January 2025. His confirmation hearing was contentious. Senators questioned his promotion of conspiracy theories, his role in the Nunes memo, his statements about targeting political enemies.
The Senate confirmed him in February 2025.
Kash Patel became the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—the first person of South Asian descent to hold the position. Briefly, he also served as acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, though he was replaced in that role by April.
What It Means
The FBI director serves a ten-year term, designed to insulate the position from political pressure. The bureau investigates terrorism, organized crime, public corruption, and civil rights violations. It operates in every state and more than sixty countries.
Its director commands enormous power. The FBI can surveil American citizens, execute search warrants, make arrests, and recommend prosecutions. A partisan director could weaponize those powers against political enemies. An incompetent one could compromise national security investigations.
Critics see Patel's appointment as exactly what they feared: the installation of a Trump loyalist who has promised to pursue the president's enemies and who has repeatedly shown himself willing to bend rules and misrepresent facts.
Supporters see something else: a disruptor willing to challenge an intelligence community they believe has become a law unto itself, unaccountable to elected officials or the public.
The caddie from Garden City has reached the top of American law enforcement. What he does with that power will shape the FBI—and the country—for years to come.