Kash Patel Is Trump’s Scariest Cabinet Appointment Yet

Time and again during Donald Trump’s first administration, tired studies of corruption and the late decline of empire warned that “there is no bottom.” They were certainly right, and we are about to experience an accelerated descent into authoritarian chaos that makes the whole notion of a bottom seem quaint. Still, with all these caveats, it’s also safe to say that Cash Patel, who was hastily plucked over Thanksgiving weekend from President-elect Truth Social’s account as the new FBI director, is a significant pointer toward a deeper chasm. the bottom In many ways, he is the equivalent of Renfield, the ambitious, dangerous but infinitely petty assistant to the Dark Lord Count Dracula.

Patel first gained widespread public attention during the frenzied run-up to the Jan. 6 coup attempt, when an aggrieved Trump, frustrated by the failure of top law enforcement officials to play up the grand myth of a stolen election, began a last-ditch campaign to elevate slackers to center stage. He sought to appoint Patel, a former staff member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence with very little administrative experience — and even less direct exposure to law enforcement — as deputy director of the FBI or CIA to place a proven MAGA ring in the upper reaches of the “deep state.” Attorney General Bill Barr, who resigned shortly after the false fabrications that led to Jan. 6, vetoed the proposal, curtly replying, “Over my dead body.” (Gina Haspel, Trump’s CIA director, also threatened to resign rather than make Patel her No. 2.) In his later memoir, Barr said that the proposed promotion of Patel, who served as deputy chief of staff at the Pentagon, represented a “shocking detachment from reality.” .

But here, on the eve of Trump’s second term, shocking detachment from reality is a job qualification — and there’s no denying Patel is wielding it in spades. Over the past four years, he has parlayed his supporting role in the 2021 coup attempt into a crude marketing brand, following the model of his predatory benefactor in the Oval Office. He launched a line of “K$H”-branded right-wing merch, from a wine line to T-shirts promoting the Jan. 6 indictees and the “Fight With Kash Punisher Intarsia Reversible Scarf” he wore from the stand. at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

Patel also duly weathered his battles for control of the deep state in the book, State thugswho derides the agency he is now tasked with running as “one of the most cunning and powerful branches of the deep state,” where rampant corruption has become “an existential threat to our republican form of government.” He also promisedif he is tasked with overseeing the agency, he will close the Hoover Building headquarters in Washington on the first day and turn it into a “museum of the deep state.” (Readers who prefer the red meat of MAGA in a small format may encounter the same rambling fable of strength in Patel’s children’s book, A conspiracy against the kingin which a resourceful magician named Cash rescues King Donald from “Hillary Quinton” and a senior member of the Democratic Intelligence Committee, Sen.-elect Adam Schiff, rendered here as “the swashbuckling knight” — Petel’s clumsy appropriation of Trump’s mocking nickname for his former impeachment adversary. )

To be sure, there are a number of strong reasons to condemn the investigative actions of the FBI, which has long bolstered right-wing secret surveillance orders and has never had a non-Republican director in its history. But Patel is not having a civil-libertarian quarrel with the agency; in fact, his complaint is that it’s overrun with rabid liberals defending themselves — another complaint based entirely on Trump’s persecution fantasy. Patel’s own history with the agency began with his visit to the House Intelligence Committee, where he reportedly wrote the “Nunes Memo” criticizing FBI officials for approving a warrantless FISA warrant for surveillance of former Trump campaign staffer Carter Page. That caught the eye of Trump, who appointed Patel to the National Security Council after the Republican Party lost its majority in the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections and then tapped him to serve as senior director of the NSA’s counterterrorism office. As one of his former colleagues retold to Atlantiche achieved his rapid ascent in the heyday of pure Renfieldism — he was hell-bent on reciting to Trump a line his colleagues knew by heart: “Mr. President, the Deep State is out to get you, and I will save you from it.”

Patel soon landed at the Department of Defense, where he immediately fell into disfavor for nearly compromising the security of a SEAL team’s mission to Nigeria to rescue an American hostage by prematurely and mistakenly announcing that the operation had secured air rights for the rescue. No such permission was granted, and Patel’s boss, former Defense Secretary Mike Esper, wrote that Patel had simply fabricated the statement. (The mission was later authorized and successful, but under then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who said he never had contact with Patel.) After an outraged colleague asked the reasonable question, “What the hell were you thinking?” with an explanatory caveat: “You could have killed them,” Patel replied, “If nobody got hurt, who cares?”

Patel denies saying that, or making up the story about the release or deviating from the chain of command in any way, but defense officials have been “confused” by the whole episode because, they say, there is no simple, non-corrupt explanation for Patel’s antics Atlantic writer Elaine Plott Calabria: “If Patel really did just make up the story, as Esper’s team concluded, then why? Was it because the election was four days away and Patel was simply impatient to give an eventual potential victory to Trump, regardless of the risk — or was it just as darkly cynical? Did his lack of experience mean he simply had no idea of ​​the consequences?’

Everything about Patel’s subsequent career suggests that the answer to all of the above is yes. Petel’s fierce identification of his personal ambitions with the illusion of Trump is clearly the driving force behind his utterly inexplicable and rapid ascent through the ranks of the federal bureaucracy. And as with Trump himself, the conspiratorial logic of Patel’s promotion turned into additional shocking and dangerous breaks with reality. Patel is a champion The QAnon cult and the conspiracy theory tied to Trumpannouncing in his 2022 podcast appearance that the mythical figure at the center of Q “must get credit for everything she’s accomplished.” He also joined Mike Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, to promote Q ReAwaken US Tour. Acting as the all-purpose MAGA con artist, Patel touted a dietary supplement that purported to reverse the damage caused by the Covid vaccine, calling it a “home starter kit to rid your body of the damage of the vax.”

Patel’s conspiracy-mongering often finds an outlet in his rants against the press — a particularly troubling tendency for the leader of an agency like the FBI that stands staunchly for basic civil liberties. “We’re going to include All-American Patriots from top to bottom,” Patel announced in the 2023 appearance on Steve Bannon War room podcast “We will go out and find conspirators not only in the government, but also in the media. Yes, we are going to go after people in the media who lied about American citizens helping Joe Biden rig the presidential election. We’re going to come to you, whether it’s criminal or civil — we’re going to deal with it.” Bannon was clearly delighted by McCarthy Patel’s outburst. “I want Morning Joe The producers watching us and all the producers watching us is not rhetoric,” he replied. “We are absolutely serious.”

No doubt. Patel’s resume of failed attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz seems unlikely to be an epiphany a philosopher by comparison, would earn him confirmation in the Senate. But after Trump-appointed FBI Director Christopher Wray either resigns or is fired, Patel could take over the FBI for 200 days as an emergency appointment. It would be an extraordinarily insane tour of the top of the law enforcement bureaucracy, even by the debauched standards of the FBI. But it would also be a blaze of glory that even Renfield dared not dream of.