Who is Kashyap ‘Kash’ Patel, Donald Trump loyalist, likely to be next CIA chief?

With Donald Trump returning to power, the United States will likely get an Indian-origin Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief. Kash Patel, a close ally of Donald Trump, is being considered for the role.

Even before the US media called the election declaring Trump the winner, the Republican candidate had prepared a list of potential names who would be part of his new administration. While the first administration was, to a large extent, staffed by many establishment Republicans, Trump 2.0 is expected to look nothing like that.

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However, Trump seems likely to go with true believers on the second go-around. Prime among those is Kashyap ‘Kash’ Patel – described as the man who would ‘do anything for Trump.

Patel is expected to play a critical role in his administration – perhaps as the CIA chief.

But who is Patel? What do we know about him?

Let’s take a closer look:

Early years of Kash Patel

Patel, who has Gujarati ancestry, was born in New York’s Garden City in 1980.

As per The Atlantic, Patel has said his parents grew up in East Africa. His father Pramod left Uganda in the 1970s when Idi Amin was dictator. His parents moved to Long Island and settled down.

Patel said the family shared their home with eight of his father’s siblings.

Growing up, he was raised Hindu. The family made frequent visits to temples.

Patel completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Richmond. He got the idea of becoming a lawyer after caddying for some rich and powerful New Yorkers.

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“I could be a first-generation immigrant lawyer at a white shoe firm making a ton of money,” he wrote in his biography.

He later returned to New York – where he got his law degree from Pace University, as per The Atlantic.

He also earned a Certificate in International Law from University College London Faculty of Laws in the United Kingdom.

However, Patel found no takers at white shoe law firms. “Dreams of the sky-high salary at the prestige law firms never materialised,” he wrote in his book as per The New York Times. “Nobody would hire me.”

Patel instead began his career as a public defender in Florida where he tried murder, narco-trafficking,  and financial crime cases in state and federal courts.

He spent nearly nine years before joining the Justice Department.

In 2014, Patel left Florida for Washington DC.

Here, he landed a job in the counterterrorism department of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

By 2017, Patel, by now thoroughly disgruntled by the bureaucracy in DC, went to work for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chaired by Republican Devin Nunes – a fierce Trump ally.

Trump had come to power after defeating Hillary Clinton in a stunning upset the previous year.

But now he was being investigated by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller III over Russian election interference.

Patel, who served as the lead investigator of the committee, was hired to “to bust doors down,” Nunes said in the book The Plot Against the President, as per The New York Times.

Patel also took the lead role in penning the infamous ‘Nunes memo’ – which claimed the Russia investigation was nothing but a political operation to sabotage the Trump presidency.

The 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 the Justice Department.

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.

Patel also leaked intelligence committee emails about then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to Fox News.

By 2018, Patel’s boss Nunes was out of a job. A backlash against the Trump presidency saw the Republicans being swept out of power in the mid-terms.

Nunes now approached the White House for a job for Patel.

“We didn’t want to hire him, and we resisted three times when Devin Nunes called,” Charles Kupperman, deputy to then NSA John Bolton told the newspaper. “Clearly he had intellect, but he was untrustworthy, cancerous with staff and had his own agenda.”

Patel was only hired at Trump’s insistence – at a low-level role in the National Security Council.

Ascendancy in Trump administration

However, Patel would later serve in increasingly influential roles including briefly as principal deputy to the then-acting director of national intelligence, senior director for Counterterrorism (CT) and deputy assistant to the President.

In November 2020, Patel was tapped to be chief of staff to acting defence secretary Christopher Miller.

In his final months in office, Trump 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.

Trump dropped those plans after CIA Director Gina Haspel threatened to resign and Attorney General Bill Barr argued against such a move.

“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 in his memoir.

“Over my dead body,” Barr told the then White House chief of staff, as per The Atlantic.

Life after Trump’s first term

Patel has been busy since Trump left office.

The 44-year-old is on the board of Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, and had a consulting contract with the company that paid him $120,000 a year. And Trump’s leadership PAC has paid Patel more than $300,000 since the start of last year to serve as a national security adviser to the former president, according to campaign finance records and Truth Social’s public filings.

Shortly after Trump left the White House in January 2021, Patel launched Fight with Kash, an organisation that funds defamation lawsuits and sells a wide variety of merchandise, including branded socks and water bottles, sweatshirts and baseball hats, a deck of playing cards with Trump as the ace and a bumbling Joe Biden in a jester costume as the king.

The organization has since become The Kash Foundation, a nonprofit that purports to support whistleblowers, law enforcement and education in “areas the mainstream media refuses to cover.”

Patel has said he won’t make money from the foundation and has publicly promised to be transparent about where it directs its resources.

Patel has also been busy writing books. He published a memoir last year — “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy” — and has authored two works of children’s fiction that lionise Trump. “The Plot Against the King” features a thinly veiled Hillary Clinton as the villain going after “King Donald” while Kash, a wizard called the Distinguished Discoverer, exposes a nefarious plot.

Patel was interviewed as part of an investigation into the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and said the former president “pre-emptively authorised” 10,000 to 20,000 troops to deploy days before the attack. But a Colorado court later found that Patel was “not a credible witness” on the topic.

In November 2022, Patel appeared before a grand jury investigating Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after being granted immunity for his testimony.

The line between his charitable work and money-making activities isn’t clear. Patel promotes “K$H” branded clothing lines for his nonprofit as well as for a company run by a close associate.

He’s also a pitchman for a variety of goods marketed to Trump supporters. One dietary supplement he’s promoting claims to be a COVID vaccine “detoxification system” made by a company whose co-founder was a defendant in a class-action lawsuit filed by people who say they were overcharged for Keto diet pills.

“Order this homerun kit to rid your body of the harms of the vax,” Patel said in a recent Truth Social post promoting the supplements.

Records show that Patel has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from his own business dealings with Trump-related entities.

He’s on the board of Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, and had a consulting contract with the company that paid him $120,000 a year.

The income from his books, clothing and endorsements is unknown, but his social media feeds show a well-traveled Patel attending high-end sporting events like the Super Bowl, Game 7 of the Stanley Cup and a UFC fight, in addition to stumping for Trump around the country.

Patel said in a 2022 podcast appearance that Truth Social was trying to incorporate QAnon, a set of conspiracy theories borne out of the idea that the government is run by a cabal of child predators, “into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences.”

“He should get credit for all the things he has accomplished,” Patel said of the anonymous figurehead of the QAnon movement.

Patel has been a featured guest at rallies organised by Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn, who has been building a political movement mixing conspiracy theory with Christian nationalist ideas.

He’s also joined Trump in defending those who were charged with crimes in connection with the Jan. 6 riot and is listed as a producer of “And Justice For All,” a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner sung by a group of defendants. In a social media post, Patel likened the song, which was briefly #1 on iTunes, to “We Are the World,” a single written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie in 1985 to benefit Africa.

Patel’s plans for the future

Patel has been open about what kind of changes he’d pursue if given the chance. His various proposals include reducing the FBI’s footprint in Washington and “dramatically” limiting its authority.

He hopes to curb the power of the Justice Department’s Civil Division and jettison a Pentagon office that produces classified assessments of long-term trends and risks, arguing it is just a tool of the “deep state.”

Patel has said he also 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 in 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’s leadership PAC has paid Patel more than $300,000 since the start of last year to serve as a national security adviser to the former president, according to campaign finance records and Truth Social’s public filings.

The campaign of Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican close to Trump, paid Patel $145,000 for “fundraising consulting” in 2021, campaign finance records show.

Trump’s leadership PAC has paid Patel more than $300,000 since the start of last year to serve as a national security adviser to the former president, according to campaign finance records and Truth Social’s public filings. The campaign of Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican close to Trump, paid Patel $145,000 for “fundraising consulting” in 2021, campaign finance records show.

Being loyal to Trump

Experts say the financial benefits of Patel’s loyalty could present a potential conflict in a second Trump administration.

Douglas London, a retired CIA officer who briefly overlapped with Patel while working at the White House, expressed doubt that Patel would be willing to deliver hard truths about the consequences of certain policy decisions.

“Trump wants an echo chamber and he’ll get that in Kash Patel,” he said. “I do not see Kash Patel saying, ‘Mr President, if you do this, this bad thing’s going to happen.’”

Trump himself has left little doubt as to his thoughts on Patel.

“A lot of people say he’s crazy,” Trump once said about him, as per The Atlantic. “But sometimes you need a little crazy.”

During his CPAC appearance, Patel left no doubt about the depth of his loyalty to Trump.

“We’re blessed by God to have Donald Trump be our juggernaut of justice, to be our leader, to be our continued warrior in the arena,” Patel said.

After 10 minutes of praising the former president and blasting the media, intelligence community and Democrats, Patel left the stage and traded his blazer for a Revere Payments hoodie. He went to Bannon’s booth for a live episode of “War Room” to discuss the Christian merchant services platform he’s marketing.

The notoriously unkempt Bannon, a former Trump adviser who is influential in right-wing politics, joked about Patel’s informal attire.

“I’ve got to, you know, get my stuff out there,” Patel replied.

After the interview, Patel hustled to the vendor floor, where he whipped off the hoodie and his handlers scrambled to remove flecks of fuzz before putting his blazer back on. Then he was ready — to pose for pictures with fans in front of a booth for a cellphone service he’s promoting.

With inputs from agencies

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