His Master’s Voice: Kash Patel Said to Leave No Stone Unturned To Appease Trump And Prove His Loyalty

A second Trump term could propel Indian American Kash Patel as one of the most influential and powerful people in the former president’s orbit, and would likely serve in a national security capacity in a second Trump administration. The 44-year-old is “exactly the type of loyalist” Trump would choose for his second administration, Elaina Plott Calabro writes in an Aug. 26 article in The Atlantic. She describes Patel as “the man who will do anything for Trump.”

Patel, who served as former adviser on the National Security Council, and chief of staff to the acting secretary of Defense, is currently a fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank that is working closely with the Trump campaign on preparations for a second-term agenda.

In the detailed piece, she lays out some reasons why Patel’s critics, “including those on the right,” find the prospect of Patel’s rise so concerning. Kash Patel was dangerous,” she writes, and that is “something both Trump appointees and career officials could agree.” 

Patel joined the first Trump administration in 2019 with little government experience but swiftly rose through the ranks from chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense just after the 2020 election.  “He rose rapidly, and each new title set off new alarms,” Calabro writes. 

When Patel was installed as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense Christopher C. Miller, just after the 2020 election, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised him not to break the law to keep President Donald Trump in power,” according to Calabro. 

Later, when Trump entertained naming Patel deputy director of the FBI, Attorney General Bill Barr confronted the White House chief of staff and said, “Over my dead body.” During the final weeks of the administration, when Trump planned to name Patel deputy director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, the agency’s head, threatened to resign. “Trump relented only after an intervention by Vice President Mike Pence and others.

Patel’s critics, according to Calabro, “appeared singularly focused on pleasing Trump.”

Unconstitutional Circus

Patel has continued to support Trump even after he left the White House. During Trump’s criminal trial in New York, Patel was part of a small group of supporters that included Republican lawmakers and Trump family members and accompanied him into court. He addressed reporters outside the courthouse, “arguing Trump was the victim of an unconstitutional circus,” the Associated Press reported at the time. 

Last year, Patel said on a podcast hosted by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon that his former boss would target media either “criminally” or “civilly,” if he is elected again. “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. “Yes, 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.” He said the Trump administration will “use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have. 

Patel has also been “open about what kind of changes he’d pursue if given the chance,” according to the AP. “His various proposals include reducing the FBI’s footprint in Washington and dramatically limiting its authority,” the news agency added. He also “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.”

In addition to his 2023 memoir, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy,” Patel has published two children’s books that lionize 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.

Calabro told MSNBC and CNN that “whatever it is that Kash Patel wants to do hinges almost entirely on what it is that Trump wants to do.” She said his role in “trying to keep Trump in power despite losing the 2020 election, showed how far he was willing to go to prove his loyalty.” She told the news outlets that the former administration officials she interviewed told her that “Patel was dangerous because his priorities revolved around the mercurial Trump’s whims, and they feared there was nothing he would not do to please the former president.”

Calabro told MSNBC that “most Americans had no idea Patel existed, yet rarely a day passed when administration leaders weren’t reminded that he did.” His potential rise and Trump’s dependence on him during his second term worries her. “Should he [Trump] return to the White House, there will be no Milleys, Haspels, or even Barrs to restrain him as he seeks revenge against his political enemies,” she said. “Instead, there will be Patels — those whose true faith and allegiance belong not to a nation, but to one man.”

Public Defender

Patel grew up in Queens, New York, and graduated from law school at Pace University. But he failed to get a job at the prestigious law firms he’d hoped to join. Instead, he became a public defender and spent nearly nine years in local and federal courts in Miami before joining the Justice Department. After working there for about three years, he was hired as a staffer for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence led by Rep. Devin Nunes, a fierce Trump ally.

Nunes gave Patel a job running the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. He ultimately helped author what became known as the “Nunes Memo,” described by the AP as “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 caught Trump’s attention, and soon Patel was working on the National Security Council. He was briefly the top adviser to the then-acting director of national intelligence and was tapped in November 2020 to be chief of staff to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller.

Patel was interviewed as part of an investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, during which he said “the former president preemptively authorized 10,000 to 20,000 troops to deploy days before the attack,” the AP report said. But a Colorado court later found that Patel was “not a credible witness” on the topic, the report added. 

In November 2022, he 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 report added.