Trump Loyalist Kash Patel Files a Defamation Suit Against CNN for $50 Million

Indian American conservative and fierce Trump loyalist Kashyap “Kash” Patel has filed a $50 million lawsuit against CNN and several of its reporters for allegedly defaming him. Patel is currently the chief-of-staff to Defense Secretary Christopher Miller. 

In his lawsuit, Patel alleged that between Nov. 24 and Dec. 4, CNN  published a series of articles that “contain a series of false and defamatory statements” about him, describing him as “a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist,” according to the complaint reported by Fox News. The lawsuit, filed in a Virginia court last week, named CNN reporters Barbara Starr, Zachary Cohen, Ryan Browne, Alex, Marquardt and Nicole Gauette, the Fox New report said.

“..Publication of the defamatory statements is part of a general pattern of retaliation and discrimination against Kash… a larger conspiracy undertaken between 2018 and the present to discredit Kash through the publication of false statements and the promotion of unfounded left-wing political narratives,” Patel’s attorney Steven S. Biss wrote in the lawsuit, as per the Fox News report. He added that his client “uncovered many inconvenient facts undermining the fake political narrative about collusion between members of the Trump campaign and Russians when he was counsel for Nunes, then-chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.” 

Patel is a former prosecutor in the national security division of the Department of Justice and former staff member on the House Intelligence Committee. In that post, he was a top aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., leading the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. As a top staffer for Rep. Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee, Patel was the lead author of a report questioning the conduct of FBI and DOJ officials investigating Russia’s election interference.

In June 2019, Patel was appointed as senior director of Counter-terrorism Directorate of the National Security Council (NSC) in the White House. In that position, Patel was among the small group of aides who traveled with the President extensively during the final stretch of the campaign, the Washington Post reported.

Last year, Patel sued the New York Times, claiming the newspaper falsely accused him of being a White House back channel to Ukraine. Patel is seeking for $44.9 million in damages, in the defamation suit filed in November in state court in Fairfax, Virginia.  “On October 23, 2019, in an article published online and tweeted to millions, (Adam) Goldman (the reporter) and the Times, directly and by implication, falsely accused Kash Patel of lying, deceit, federal crimes, and illegal, conniving and unethical conduct,” the suit claimed.

Patel, was born and raised in Garden City, New York to parents with Gurajati roots who immigrated from East Africa — who came to the U.S. by way of Canada in 1970. He is an alumnus of the University of Richmond (Class of 2002), and earned a certificate in international law from the University College London Faculty of Laws. He graduated from Pace University’s law school in 2005, and then spent  part of his career in the Miami area as a federal public defender in Florida before taking a job at the Justice Department in 2014.

After his schooling in New York and college in Richmond, Virginia, and law school in New York, Kash Patel went to Florida where he was a state public defender for four years and then federal public defender for another four years. From Florida, he moved to Washington, D.C. as a terrorism prosecutor at the Department of Justice. Here he was an international terrorism prosecutor for about three and a half years, and worked on cases all over the world, in America in East Africa as well as in Uganda and Kenya. While still employed by the Department of Justice, he went as a civilian to join Special Operations Command at the Department of Defense. At the Pentagon, he sat as the Department of Justice’s lawyer with Special Forces people and worked inter-agency collaborative targeting operations around the world.