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President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Kash Patel to serve as FBI director, turning to a fierce ally to upend America’s premier law enforcement agency and rid the government of perceived “conspirators.” It’s the latest bombshell Trump has thrown at the Washington establishment and a test for how far Senate Republicans will go in confirming his nominees.
The selection is in keeping with Trump's view that the government's law enforcement and intelligence agencies require a radical transformation and his stated desire for retribution against supposed adversaries. It shows how Trump, still fuming over years of federal investigations that shadowed his first administration and later led to his indictment, is moving to place atop the FBI and Justice Department close allies he believes will protect rather than scrutinize him.
Patel “played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability, and the Constitution,” Trump wrote Saturday night in a social media post.
Patel’s nomination sets up what’s likely to be an explosive confirmation battle in the Senate just days after Trump’s first pick to lead the Justice Department, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his nomination amid intense scrutiny over sex trafficking allegations.
Patel is a lesser-known figure, but his nomination was still expected to cause shockwaves. He's embraced Trump’s rhetoric about a “deep state,” called for a “comprehensive housecleaning” of government workers who are disloyal to Trump and has referred to journalists as traitors, promising to try to prosecute some reporters.
Trump’s nominees will have allies in what will be a Republican-controlled Senate next year, but his picks are not certain of confirmation. With a slim majority, Republicans can only lose a few defectors in the face of expected Democratic opposition — though as vice president, JD Vance would be able to break any tie votes.
But the president-elect had also raised the prospect of pushing his selections through without Senate approval using a congressional loophole that allows him to make appointments when the Senate is not in session.
Patel would replace Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump in 2017 but quickly fell out of favor with the president and his allies. FBI directors have 10-year terms that are meant to inoculate them from political influence.
His removal isn’t unexpected given Trump’s long-running public criticism of him and the FBI, particularly in the aftermath of federal investigations — and an FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents two years ago — that resulted in indictments that are now poised to evaporate.
In his final months in office, Trump unsuccessfully pushed the idea of installing Patel as the deputy director at either the FBI or CIA in an effort to strengthen the president’s control of the intelligence community. William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, wrote in his memoir that he told then-chief of staff Mark Meadows that an appointment to Patel as deputy FBI director would happen “over my dead body.”
“Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency,” Barr wrote.
Patel’s past proposals, if carried out, would lead to convulsive change for an agency tasked not only with investigating violations of federal law but also protecting the country from terrorist attacks, foreign espionage and other threats.
He's called for dramatically reducing the agency's footprint, a perspective that dramatically sets him apart from earlier directors who have sought additional resources for the bureau, and has suggested closing down the bureau's headquarters in Washington and “reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state” — Trump's pejorative catch-all for the federal bureaucracy.
And though the Justice Department in 2021 halted the practice of secretly seizing reporters' phone records during leak investigation, Patel has 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 “will go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media.”
"We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said, referring to the 2020 presidential election in which Biden, the Democratic challenger, defeated Trump. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
Trump also announced Saturday that he would nominate Sheriff Chad Chronister, the top law enforcement officer in Hillsborough County, Florida, to serve as the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Chronister is another Florida Republican named to Trump’s administration. He has worked for the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office since 1992 and became the top law enforcement officer in Hillsborough County 2017. He also worked closely with Trump's choice 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 catching the Trump administration's attention as a staffer for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
The panel’s then-chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., was a strong Trump ally who tasked Patel with running the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Patel ultimately helped author what became known as the “Nunes Memo,” a four-page report that detailed how it said the Justice Department had erred in obtaining a warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign volunteer. The memo’s release faced vehement opposition from Wray and the Justice Department, who warned that it would be reckless to disclose sensitive information.
A subsequent inspector general report identified significant problems with FBI surveillance during the Russia investigation, but also found no evidence that the FBI had acted with partisan motives in conducting the probe and said there had been a legitimate basis to open the inquiry.
The Russia investigation fueled Patel's suspicions of the FBI, the intelligence community and also the media, which he has called “the most powerful enemy the United States has ever seen.” Seizing on compliance errors in the FBI’s use of a spy program that officials say is vital for national security, Patel has accused the FBI of having “weaponized” its surveillance powers against innocent Americans.
Patel parlayed that work into influential administration roles on 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 into court during his criminal trial in New York and asserting to reporters that Trump was the victim of a “constitutional circus.”
Since leaving government, Patel has found himself entangled in Trump’s legal woes, appearing two years ago before a federal grand jury that investigated Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida — a matter for which Trump was subsequently indicted.
Typically though not always, presidents retain the director they’ve inherited: President Joe Biden, for instance, kept Wray in place even though the director was named by Trump, and former President Barack Obama even asked Robert Mueller to stay on an extra two years even though Mueller was tapped by Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush.
Trump had openly flirted with firing Wray during his first term, taking issue with Wray’s emphasis on the election interference threat from Russia at a time when Trump was focusing on China. He also described antifa, an umbrella term for leftist militants, as an ideology rather than an organization, contradicting Trump, who wants to designate it as a terror group.
The low-key Wray had been determined to bring stability to an institution riven by turbulence following the May 2017 firing of James Comey by Trump amid an FBI investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Wray sought to turn the page on some of the controversies of Comey’s tenure. The FBI, for instance, fired a lead agent from the Russia investigation who sent derogatory text messages about Trump during the course of the inquiry and sidelined a deputy director under Comey who was a key figure in the probe. Wray also announced dozens of corrective actions meant to prevent some of the surveillance abuses that tainted the Russia investigation.
The FBI has worked to protect Trump this year following multiple assassination attempts and disrupted an Iranian murder-for-hire plot targeting the president-elect that resulted in criminal charges unsealed in November.
Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in New York and Fatima Hussein in West Palm Beach, Florida, contributed to this report.
© Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
48 Comments
bass4funk
Excellent news!
Blacklabel
that is acceptable. Very much so.
bass4funk
Wray and Myorkas were just absolute disasters, I’m just happy that we won’t see their pathetic faces anymore, they did enough damage.
jib
A very very good choice !
yakyak
Perfect
Legrande
Blatantly biased headline.
plasticmonkey
That didn't happen. Trump just wants revenge, like all crooks who get away with their misdeeds.
You know who wants to politicize and weaponize the FBI? Trump and Patel and the other loonies.
wallace
It was the FBI based on evidence that raided Trump's Mar-a-Lago and not the people where top secret nuclear files were discovered in a bathroom. It should have consequences.
Blacklabel
The story is that there is panic and the start of a mass exodus/fleeing of leadership at the FBI.
why would that be if it wasn’t a hyper partisan organization there with things to escape and hide from?
oh the truths that will now be uncovered, can’t wait!
some ex FBI employees always smack taking on cable news still need to be held accountable as well.
otherworldly
It's about time we have a President acting for the people instead of against them.
plasticmonkey
A fascistic nut job.
Now watch our MAGA friends paint Barr as a deep state RINO globalist.
plasticmonkey
The FBI is an extremely conservative organization overall. They take law enforcement very seriously, regardless of who the perpetrators are.
Trump hates the FBI because of that.
It lack fealty to Lord Emperor Donald J. Trump, Con Man Extraordinaire.
onedragon
The Dems overwhelmingly lost the election. Trump can do as he wishes. Let's wait and see how it all turns out.
Blacklabel
speaking of “things that never happened” lol
bass4funk
It did happen.
If he was a crook, they could and would have jailed him, but since after almost 10 years not being able to do that nor find anything, I would say, the idea of Trump being a criminal is just the sad state of liberal bitterness obsession that never materialized and never will. Time for a new hobby.
To go after the swamp and to make sure the establishment is bounced out of our lives forever, and the Department does what’s is supposed to do and that’s work for the people, please go for it.
According to the left…
dagon
Do not get how anyone buys Trump being victim of the media, deep state, or two-tier justice system.
Himself and the people he pardons like the new ambassador to France Kushner are rather the beneficiary of two-tier justice system favoring the ultra-wealthy. Facts.
Trump should be thanking the FBI. The FBI has shown if it really wants to take out someone like they did to leftists and civil rights activists, they can do it.
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/assault-left-fbi-and-sixties-antiwar-movement
https://sites.google.com/site/cointelprodocs/the-fbi-s-covert-action-program-to-destroy-the-black-panther-party
wallace
Trump remains a felon and was found liable for sexual abuse. There is no way back to a clean sheet. A police mugshot remains on file.
wallace
Blacklabel
Are you suggesting the FBI planted many boxes of files in the bathroom?
wallace
Trump nominates. Congress selects.
plasticmonkey
They're not "my guys".
Again with this zero-sum team sports metaphor.
Dems didn't overwhelmingly lose the election, and Trump is not emperor, except in his own demented imagination and that of his cult followers.
Let's see how many GOP Senators have a moral backbone and reject this lunatic.
Blacklabel
They planted blank classification cover sheets and placed documents into locations other than where they were found to take pictures. You think those documents were just laying scattered on the floor?
and no there were not any “top secret nuclear documents” found in “the bathroom”.
wallace
FBI "transparency" didn't happen during Trump's first term. Why was that?
bass4funk
Ok, we don’t need to re-litigate that BS political lie, they tried everything to take this guy out and lost, over 79% people think the FBI is compromised and we should have new leadership. So it’s good that Wray is out.
plasticmonkey
"I'd shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state."
--Kash Patel, September 2024
Shall we hold this loon to his word, or is he just speaking in "euphenisms"?
bass4funk
Not sure what you’re talking about, this administration had none whatsoever.
No one cares anymore, no one, that statement is falling on deaf ears
Yes, and proud of it. I have a T-shirt of that. lol
bass4funk
Loon? Hardly
or is he just speaking in "euphenisms"?
Go for it. Anyway, I’m happy.
Blacklabel
James Comey. Andrew McCabe. Strzok/Page. Wray. Bill Barr fear of his impeachment. everything done as part of an active FBI “resistance”.
now we get to see/know EVERYTHING.
plasticmonkey
Heads will roll!
Blacklabel
how do you already know this?
maybe They carefully deleted and shredded it all? Like wiped it with a cloth and hammered the phones?
you better hope so.
plasticmonkey
Because I'm a leftist who's in on the grand conspiracy to thwart buff conservative superhero Donald J. Trump!
And because MAGA's track record of proving partisan malfeasance at the FBI and other "deep state" institutions is as flimsy as your superhero's mental acuity.
Five Families
Its clear to me when the Democratic wing has absoulte control of the FBI it and has for somwtime weponized all the agencies ablites and assets to go after its rivals and those rivals supporters who noe have the power.
Just the minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo.
-J. Edgar Hoover
I would hope President Trump and his cabinet show by example. A rule of righteousness, justice and fundamentals for which the FBI was established on, and to not repeat the same mistakes the Democrats made by weaponizing the agency against Democrats and seek out serious offenders and those that committed crimes against the constitution and as actors violated people’s constitutional rights.
In other words. Let's do and be better as Republicans.
Blacklabel
Because this is the first time we have access to the documents with “our” people.
the first time that “we” get to decide if a prosecution happens or not.
thats why the left is so scared. If nothing illegal was done, no reason to be so scared.
FizzBit
Wow!
you better watch out
you better not cry
The evil deep state warmongers are out and it’s big goodbye
Kash Patel is coming to the FBI
bass4funk
Trying so hard, aren’t you Plastic. ROFL
Oh, but it does.
So he should just keep the previous people in charge that tried to take him out? Lib logic at its funniest.
plasticmonkey
Trump's enemies can have their careers ruined and their lives put in danger regardless.
Intimidation is the point.
Trump and his people want to create a political ecosystem in which Trump can do what he wants without the usual restraints and guardrails. He's already got most of the Legislative Branch and SCOTUS on board. He and his friends will be richly rewarded.
Hello corrupt, authoritarian oligarchy.
mrtinjp
a test for how far Senate Republicans will go in confirming his nominees.
Nice try.. they will be all confirmed..
dagon
Said the self-hating crossdresser who tried to frame and defame MLK and other civil rights leaders.
Love the constant MAGA misreading of history.
And then you end up with all these MAGA true believers on display and followers like 'Kash'.
Blacklabel
Oh? Like what happened to Trump and anyone with any connections to him under the last 4 years of politicization of the Biden DOJ and FBI?
Five Families
Democrats worries are lilliputian when compared with those of Republicans who now will be confirmed into offices.
With Trump winning his second term, it is worth noting that there was not any accountability by the Democratic Party. None whatsoever.
Donald Trump has caused the Democratic party to do some major inward reflection on their own failures of policy and political strategy.
This time we must hold the Democratic Party Elite responsible for the catastrophe they have left the FBI and other three letter agencies.
There will be hell to pay. Thats coming for sure. And if you know anything about Kash Patel.
He is an axe.
Democrats need to shape up or ship out.
bass4funk
After what they did to him and anyone supporting him, I shall shed a tear
Hurts when the shoe is on the other foot.
When this administration did what it wanted, you didn’t complain, why now?
Yes, that’s right.
No, time to restore and rebuild these agencies and make them work for the people and not against them.
dagon
Like FBI director and Trump apointee Wray retained by Biden?
You need to be this clueless to be MAGA
plasticmonkey
No.
bass4funk
Wrong again, Plastic. Remember, the internet and documents live on forever
Blacklabel
yeah Biden was super comfy with keeping Wray.
Why is that?
Wray even raided Trump’s home to interfere in the election for Biden.
plasticmonkey
Yep, and your man will forever be remembered as a con man and the worst president in American history.
Blacklabel
The left is forced to descend into complaining about user names and where people “live”.
when you lose the election as you did, you get to decide nothing.
Christopher Wray and all his cronies need to get to packing up their stuff, Kash is on the way.
get your allegations created.
plasticmonkey
Your view of American government is simply wrong.
Blacklabel
ouch. How disrespectful to a site that lets you get out all your election losing related stress free of charge.