Kash Patel

Kash Patel
Official portrait, 2020
Personal details
Born	Kashyap Pramod Patel (1980-02-25) February 25, 1980 Garden City, New York, U.S.
Political party	Republican
Education	University of Richmond (BA) Pace University (JD)

Kashyap Pramod "Kash" Patel (born February 25, 1980) is an American attorney and former government official. He served as a U.S. National Security Council official, senior advisor to the acting Director of National Intelligence, and chief of staff to the acting United States secretary of defense during the Trump presidency. A member of the Republican Party, Patel previously worked as a senior aide to congressman Devin Nunes when he chaired the House Intelligence Committee. He was previously a federal public defender, a federal prosecutor working on national security cases, and a legal liaison to the United States Armed Forces.

" As an aide to Congressman Devin Nunes, Patel played a key role in helping Republican attempts to fight the investigations into Donald Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Early life and education

Kashyap "Kash" Patel was born in 1980 in Garden City, New York to Gujarati Indian parents who had immigrated to the United States from East Africa, via Canada. His father worked for an aviation firm as a financial officer. Patel graduated from Garden City High School on Long Island.

Patel received a degree in criminal justice and history from the University of Richmond in 2002. He received a certificate in international law from University College London in 2004, and earned a Juris Doctor from Pace University School of Law in 2005.

Career

Early career

After graduating from law school in 2005, Patel worked as a public defender in Florida for eight years, first in the Miami-Dade County public defender's office and later as a federal public defender. As a public defender he represented clients charged with felonies including international drug trafficking, murder, firearms violations, and bulk cash smuggling.

In 2014, Patel was hired as a trial attorney in the United States Department of Justice National Security Division, where he simultaneously served as a legal liaison to the Joint Special Operations Command. In 2017, Patel was appointed senior counsel on counterterrorism at the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

Aide to Devin Nunes

In April 2017, Patel became the senior committee aide to House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes. Patel played a prominent role in the Republican opposition to the investigations into Donald Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election.

According to The New York Times, Patel was the primary author of the 2018 Nunes memo, alleging FBI misconduct in its application for a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for electronic surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

That claim was disputed by the committee's staff director, by a spokesman for Nunes, and by unattributed sources interviewed by India Abroad. Patel did not offer a public comment on the matter. The New York Times opined that the memo was widely dismissed as "biased" containing "cherry-picked facts", but "it galvanized President Trump's allies and made Mr. Patel a hero among them".

After Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in January 2019, Patel worked for about a month as a senior counsel at the House Reform and Oversight Committee.

Executive branch

Positions

Patel was hired in February 2019 as a staffer for President Trump's National Security Council (NSC), working in the International Organizations and Alliances directorate, and in July 2019 became Senior Director of the Counterterrorism Directorate, a new position created for him. According to The Wall Street Journal, Patel led a secret mission to Damascus in early 2020 to negotiate the release of Majd Kamalmaz and journalist Austin Tice, both of whom were being held by the Syrian government.

In February 2020, Patel moved to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), becoming a Principal Deputy to Acting Director Richard Grenell. Later that month, Patel was part of Trump's entourage during the state visit of the United States to the Republic of India and was noted in press reports as one of two Americans of Indian descent to accompany the president.

Patel has widely been described as a "Trump loyalist".

Trump-Ukraine scandal

Further information: Trump-Ukraine scandal

Within months of Patel's appointment to the NSC, it was suspected that Patel had assumed the role of an additional independent back channel for the President, which was seen as potentially detrimental to American policy in Ukraine. It was noticed that during NSC meetings Patel took few notes and was underqualified for his portfolio, the United Nations.

Red flags were raised when Trump referred to Patel as "one of his top Ukraine policy specialists" and as such wished "to discuss related documents with him". Patel's actual assignment was counter-terrorism issues, rather than Ukraine. He was thought to have operated independently of Giuliani's irregular, informal channel. Impeachment inquiry witnesses were asked what they knew about Patel. Fiona Hill told investigators that it seems "Patel was improperly becoming involved in Ukraine policy and was sending information to Mr. Trump." Gordon Sondland and Kent testified they did not come across Patel in the course of their work.

On December 3, 2019, the House Intelligence Committee's report included phone records, acquired via subpoenas to AT&T and/or Verizon, including a 25-minute phone call between Patel and Giuliani on May 10, 2019. The call occurred after Giuliani and Patel attempted to call each other for several hours, and less than an hour after a call between Giuliani and Kurt Volker. Five minutes after the 25-minute call between Giuliani and Patel, an unidentified phone number called Giuliani for over 17 minutes, after which Giuliani called his associate Lev Parnas for approximately 12 minutes.

In a statement to CBS News on December 4, 2019, Patel denied being part of Giuliani's Ukraine back-channel, saying he was "never a back channel to President Trump on Ukraine matters, at all, ever", and that his call with Giuliani was "personal".

In an October 2019 story, Politico, citing an anonymous source it reported had formerly worked at the White House, wrote that Patel had "unique access" to Donald Trump and had provided "out of scope" advice to him on the United States' Ukraine policy. Patel denied the claims and, the following month, sued Politico for defamation, seeking $25 million in damages.

Reported move to lead CIA

In January 2021, Axios reported that Trump had considered Patel for appointment as Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency to replace Gina Haspel. According to Axios, Patel was to be appointed Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency immediately before a planned dismissal of Haspel, allowing him to head the agency in an acting capacity. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Ezra Cohen-Watnick confirmed parts of the Axios report. Patel declined to comment.

U.S. Department of Defense

Patel traveling with Acting Secretary Miller on January 14, 2021

In November 2020, Trump named Patel chief of staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller, a move that followed Trump's firing of Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. Patel reportedly argued that Esper was disloyal to Trump by refusing to deploy military troops to Washington to quell the George Floyd protests. Patel remained at the Pentagon for three months.

Foreign Policy magazine connected the move to Trump's "refusal to accept the election results". Based on interviews with defense experts, Alex Ward of Vox suggested that Patel's appointment was "not sinister", would "not change much", and may have served an effort to accelerate the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. According to an unnamed source quoted by Vanity Fair, Miller was a "front man" during his time as Acting Secretary of Defense while Patel and Cohen-Watnick were "calling the shots" at the Department of Defense. Another source told the magazine that Patel was the most influential person in the U.S. government on matters of national security.

After the November 2020 election, Patel reportedly blocked some Department of Defense officials from helping the Biden administration transition, according to NBC. As chief of staff, Patel was designated to lead the Department of Defense's coordination with the presidential transition of Joe Biden, and also supported a departmental initiative to separate the National Security Agency from the U.S. Cyber Command.

Involvement in Trump documents investigation

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) found in 2021 that Trump had taken a trove of presidential documents with him to his home in Florida after leaving office. After Trump returned some documents, NARA found others were still missing, including some that were highly classified. NARA referred the matter to the FBI, and after requests and a subpoena to return the documents went unheeded, the FBI entered Trump's home under a search warrant to retrieve them. Patel publicly asserted that Trump had declassified broad sets of sensitive documents before leaving the White House. In October 2022, Patel was summoned to testify before a federal grand jury investigating the matter, but he declined to answer questions by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Patel was represented in the matter by lawyer Stanley Woodward. The Justice Department sought but failed to persuade a federal judge to compel Patel's testimony, whereupon he was granted immunity to testify, which he did on November 4, 2022.

Post-government career

Since 2020, Patel has invoked his association with Donald Trump into "enterprises he promotes under the logotype 'K$H'." In April 2022, Patel became a member of the board of directors for the Trump Media & Technology Group, owner of the Truth Social media platform.

Patel is the author of a children's picture book, titled The Plot Against the King, that claims that the Steele dossier was used as evidence to initiate the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Illustrated by Laura Vincent, the book was published in May 2022 by Brave Books.

On June 19, 2022, Trump sent a letter to the National Archives naming Patel and John Solomon as "representatives for access to Presidential records of my administration".

In 2022, Patel created Fight With Kash, a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity, to raise donations for "helping other people" in need, though more specifically to bring "America First patriots" together and "helping fight the Deep State." Patel said he "funded whistleblowers campaigns," which Democrats on the Republican-controlled House Judiciary weaponization subcommittee said included former FBI employees the FBI claimed endorse "an alarming series of conspiracy theories related to the January 6 Capitol attack ... and the validity of the 2020 election."

During a December 2023 appearance on the Steve Bannon "War Room" podcast, Patel concurred with Bannon's assertions that Donald Trump is "dead serious" about his intent to seek revenge against his political enemies should he be elected in 2024. Patel stated:

"We 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 ... 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, and Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we're tyrannical. This is why we're dictators ... Because we're actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.

Patel's remarks came during concurrent reporting in The New York Times about "a series of plans by Mr. Trump and his allies that would upend core elements of American governance, democracy, foreign policy and the rule of law if he regained the White House." Axios reported days later that Patel was being considered for a top national security position in a second Trump administration.

Personal life

Patel resides in the District of Columbia. He plays ice hockey. In 2014, he agreed to participate in a bachelor auction of what Above the Law described as "very handsome lawyers" to benefit Switchboard of Miami, but he withdrew from the auction after a blogger noted his Florida law license had expired.