The Senate approved, by 51 votes to 49, the nomination of Kash Patel as FBI director. Republican Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski voted against the nomination, along with all 47 Democratic senators. “This is the worst choice Trump has made,” said Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, minority leader on the House Judiciary Committee. “He is unreliable, inconsistent, dangerous. He does not have the moral rectitude, the character to do this job. He only executes Trump’s orders. We know that, our Republican colleagues know that,” commented Democratic Senator Adam Schiff.
“I am proud that Kash Patel has been named director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Kash is a brilliant lawyer, investigator, and America First fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending justice, and protecting the American people. He has played a key role in exposing the lies about Russiagate, standing up for truth, accountability, and the Constitution,” Trump wrote in a post.
I am honored to be confirmed as the ninth Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Thank you to President Trump and Attorney General Bondi for your unwavering confidence and support.
The FBI has a storied legacy—from the “G-Men” to safeguarding our nation in the wake of…
— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) February 20, 2025
Thus Patel replaced Christopher Wray, the FBI director who resigned in late January and whom Trump appointed in 2017 after torpedoing his predecessor James Comey.
This choice was also highly controversial because Patel is a harsh critic of the FBI, believing and defending QAnon’s theories about the rambling dark plots that secretly manipulate the country’s politics and finances. He had called for closing its FBI headquarters in Washington, firing its leadership, and putting the country’s law enforcement agencies “under control.”
Patel has been closely aligned with Trump’s false narrative that much of the country’s law enforcement and national security establishment are maneuvered by shadowy forces, which the newly elected FBI director calls “government gangsters.” Therefore, they must be purged of bias and held accountable for the investigations they deem unwarranted against Trump and his allies.
A lawyer, the son of Indian parents who fled in the 1970s from Uganda, when Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of the Indian minority, he took refuge first in Canada and then in New York, as an obscure aide to Republican Congressman Devin Nunes. He then came into Trump’s good graces for his fervor in “hunting down” the president’s opponents. Crucial to his political rise was the assignment he was given in 2018 by Devin Nunes, who was then head of the House Intelligence Committee, which tried without much success to launch an investigation in an attempt to discredit allegations of collusion launched by British intelligence that with Paul Manafort allegedly linked Trump to Putin.
Patel came to prominence as the author of the memo in which he argued that the FBI had abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to put the then-Republican candidate’s advisers under scrutiny, thus concluding that the entire investigation was invalid. Then, after Trump’s election defeat in 2020, he was one of the staunchest defenders of the former president’s lies about rigged elections.
Patel himself detailed his agenda in his book titled Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy in which he called for “a broad crackdown” within the Justice Department, on which the FBI depends, that has allegedly unfairly targeted Trump in recent years.
In his book, he drew up a veritable proscription list of Department of Justice officials, federal prosecutors, investigators, and FBI agents to be removed. Between 2021 and 2023, Patel also had his own show, “Kash’s Corner,” on Epoch Times, a far-right international news site known for spreading conspiracy theories, founded in 2000 by John Tang and linked to the Falun Gong religious movement. Trump repaid him by appointing him as a director on the board of Trump Media Technology Group, the company that controls Truth Social, Trump’s social media.
He was then called to work in the administration in 2019, becoming chief of staff at the Pentagon and then director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council and again deputy chief of National Intelligence. At the end of his term, Trump wanted to make him deputy director of the FBI, but he was blocked by William Barr, then Secretary of Justice, who, with extreme candor, told the then-president that he would never appoint him to a senior role at the FBI.
