Kash Patel

Kashyap Pramod Patel (born February 25, 1980) is an American lawyer serving since 2025 as the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Patel also served as acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from February to April 2025.

Patel studied criminal justice and history at the University of Richmond and graduated from the Pace University School of Law. In 2005, he began working as a public defender in Miami-Dade County, Florida, and later as a federal public defender for the Southern District of Florida. Patel worked as a staff member at the Department of Justice from 2012 to 2017; he then left the department and became a senior aide to Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Patel was the primary author of the Nunes memo, alleging that Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials abused their authority in the FBI investigation into links between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials.

In February 2019, Patel joined the National Security Council's International Organizations and Alliances directorate. In 2020, he became the principal deputy director of national intelligence until May, when he returned to the National Security Council. In November, after President Donald Trump dismissed Mark Esper as secretary of defense, Patel was named as the chief of staff to acting secretary of defense Christopher C. Miller.

After Trump left office in January 2021, Patel leveraged his association with Trump to promote several business ventures and made recurring appearances on several podcasts. In April 2022, he was named to the board of Trump Media & Technology Group. Also that year, he published a children's book about the Steele dossier and, with John Solomon, was appointed to represent Trump before the National Archives and Records Administration; the FBI questioned Patel about his involvement in Trump's records. He founded The Kash Foundation, a charity to help participants in the January 6 United States Capitol attack pay legal costs. He has promoted conspiracy theories about the deep state, the 2020 presidential election, and the January 6 Capitol attack. Democrats have accused Patel of QAnon affiliation.

Patel has been widely described as a Trump loyalist. He shares Trump's view that the FBI has been weaponized against conservatives. He has called for "major, major reform", citing the bureau's misuse of its surveillance authority under the FISA and James Comey's handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

On December 11, 2024, Christopher Wray announced that he would resign at the end of Joe Biden's presidency on January 20, 2025. Patel appeared before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary in January 2025. He was confirmed by the Senate in February. Shortly thereafter, he was named as the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, but by April he was replaced. Patel is the first person of South Asian descent to serve as FBI director. His tenure at the FBI has elicited several controversies related to his professional conduct and use of federal resources for personal leisure.

Early life and education

Kashyap Pramod Patel was born on February 25, 1980, in Garden City, New York. He is the son of Pramod Rameshchandra Patel, a Ugandan of Gujarati Indian descent who was among those who faced ethnic persecution and were expelled by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in 1972. The Patels were originally from the village of Bhadran in the Anand district of Gujarat, India. Chh Gam Patidar Mandal, an organization in Bhadran, has maintained a vanshavali, or family tree of the Patel family for 18 generations. They briefly returned to India while seeking asylum in the United States, the UK, and Canada. They moved to Canada once their applications were accepted. Subsequently, they moved to the US and Pramod started working as a chief financial officer for a global distributor of aircraft bearings. Patel's household included Pramod's eight brothers and sisters. He was raised Hindu.

Patel attended Garden City High School and his senior-year quote was "Racism is man's gravest threat—the maximum of hatred for a minimum reason", by Jewish theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. During summers, Patel worked as a caddie at the Garden City Country Club. According to his memoir, Government Gangsters (2023), although he was interested in medical school programs, he was inspired by defense lawyers who golfed at the club. Patel graduated from the University of Richmond in 2002 with a degree in criminal justice and history. He earned a certificate in international law from University College London and graduated from the Pace University School of Law in 2005. According to a questionnaire he sent to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Patel participated in the American Bar Association's "Judicial Intern Opportunity Program", a diversity initiative, as a Pace student in 2003.

Career

Public defender and federal prosecutor (2005–2017)

Patel's professional career began in the Miami-Dade area. He worked as a public defender in Miami-Dade County, Florida, handling violent crime and drug trafficking cases, and later as a federal public defender for the Southern District of Florida. In 2012, he began working as a junior staff member at the Department of Justice. He coordinated with judges to get approvals for arrest warrants. Patel served as a board member of the South Asian Bar Association of North America.

Patel served temporarily as a representative for the Criminal Division on the case against the perpetrators of the 2012 Benghazi attack, but he was removed over disagreements he had with the office leading the case, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia. Later, he claimed he had been the case's lead prosecutor. According to The Atlantic, former colleagues said the U.S. Attorney's Office led the prosecution, not Patel.

In his memoir, Patel wrote that he had been asked to join the trial team against Ahmed Abu Khattala, a militia leader in the Libyan civil war. According to The New York Times, he was not offered that position.

By 2013, Patel had been assigned to the National Security Division as a prosecutor. He concurrently served as a legal liaison for the Joint Special Operations Command. In January 2014, Patel took a junior position in the Counterterrorism Division. At a chambers meeting about the trial of Omar Faraj Saeed al-Hardan, a Palestinian born in Iraq charged with providing material support to the Islamic State, Judge Lynn Hughes berated Patel for his unprofessional attire and dismissed him from the chambers. Patel had flown from Tajikistan to Texas for the meeting, which Hughes called unnecessary. He left the Department of Justice in 2017, later saying that the department's response to the 2016 presidential election was the impetus for his departure.

House committee aide (2017–2019)

In April 2017, Patel began working for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, then led by Representative Devin Nunes. The New York Times reported that Patel was the primary author of the Nunes memo, released in February 2018, which primarily alleged procedural failures in the FBI's FISA warrant application for Trump campaign advisor Carter Page during the FBI's Russia investigation, including reliance on the Steele dossier.

The memo's veracity was questioned, but after Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz's December 2019 report identified 17 "significant errors or omissions" in the FBI's FISA applications, Lawfare assessed that the memo "turns out to have been correct on important points" regarding FISA errors, while noting that its underlying implication of political bias was not substantiated. The memo boosted Patel's standing among Trump allies.

As an aide to Nunes, Patel also investigated the theory that Ukrainians were promulgating information about Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.

After the commencement of the 116th United States Congress, Patel served as senior counsel for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

National Security Council aide and deputy director of national intelligence (2019–2020)

In February 2019, Patel joined the National Security Council. Trump's national security advisor John Bolton and his deputy Charles Kupperman assigned Patel to the International Organizations and Alliances directorate, which handles United Nations policy; according to The Divider, Patel was a "must-hire, directed by the president."

In April 2019, Patel shifted his work to Ukraine. According to the Times, Trump personally discussed documents involving Ukraine with Patel, although their communications were separate from those of Rudy Giuliani and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. Telephone records detailed in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's December report on the impeachment inquiry revealed a 25-minute call between Giuliani and Patel in May. In an interview with CBS News, Patel denied being part of any Ukraine back channel, saying the call with Giuliani was personal.