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As President Donald J. Trump battled public outrage in the summer of 2019 over his effort to enlist Ukraine in digging up dirt on former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., he summoned a small group of top advisers to the Oval Office. Among them was Charles Kupperman, the deputy national security adviser, who was surprised to see a relatively low-level staff member in one of the four chairs arrayed before the president’s desk: Kashyap “Kash” Patel.
Mr. Patel, a newcomer to the National Security Council staff from the House Intelligence Committee, had impressed the president as the primary author of the secret “Nunes memo,” a key element in the effort of House Republicans to undermine the Justice Department’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Now Mr. Trump was suggesting an additional role for Mr. Patel.
“He wanted to make Kash a political executioner, to root out and fire individuals on the White House staff who weren’t being as loyal as he thought they should be,” Mr. Kupperman said in a recent interview.
Alarmed, Mr. Kupperman pushed back, as did Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, and John Eisenberg, the National Security Council’s legal counsel, who were both there that day. All three said that loyalty tests would create legal and morale problems.
Eventually Mr. Trump stood down. But Mr. Kupperman today sees the incident as a warning of Mr. Trump’s intention to stock a second administration with people like Mr. Patel: valued more for subservience than expertise, and eager to pursue a vengeful president’s whims.
“Trump’s people are concerned with having a very weak civil service who are just automatons, loyal to him,” he said, referring to Mr. Trump’s pledge to reclassify tens of thousands of executive branch employees in a way that would enable the president to fire them. “Kash would have done it in a heartbeat.”
Reached while on a Trump campaign bus tour last week, Mr. Patel declined to be interviewed. He responded to emailed questions via his publicist. Asked about the Oval Office meeting with Mr. Kupperman, Mr. Patel answered, “You forgot to mention that Mickey Mouse and the Easter Bunny were also in attendance.”
Asked about his qualifications for the roles he held and might be considered for in a second Trump term, he responded that “I was right” on a list of issues, including “Russia gate,” and that “I led efforts to declassify” Department of Justice and F.B.I. “corruption.”
“Stack that up against any of my so-called colleagues’ statements,” he added
A bombastic former public defender known for his antipathy toward the intelligence agencies, Mr. Patel rose to increasingly powerful national security jobs in the Trump administration. Should Mr. Trump win re-election, Mr. Patel has been mentioned alongside many others as a potential C.I.A. director, attorney general or, if he fails Senate confirmation, a top job on the National Security Council.
On Saturday Mr. Patel was part of the warm-up act for Mr. Trump during his rally in Coachella, Calif. “The two-tier system of justice is the Deep State’s wrecking ball and operational arm of choice, and we need to destroy it,’’ Mr. Patel said.
Mr. Patel has long made clear his intentions to help purge the federal government and media of “conspirators.”
“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 told the former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon in an interview late last year. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
A business dubbed ‘K$H’
Since Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election, Mr. Patel has parlayed his association with the former president into enterprises he promotes under the logotype “K$H.”
He is currently peddling the third in his children’s book series depicting himself as a robed wizard avenging the character King Donald, calling it “the perfect gag gift for a liberal friend or family member!” His memoir, “Government Gangsters,” led to a film adaptation starring himself that was produced by Mr. Bannon before his recent imprisonment. The cover of the memoir features Mr. Patel accessorized with dark sunglasses and a briefcase, striding away from the presidential helicopter like a character in a political thriller.
Mr. Patel’s company, Trishul, collects consulting fees, including $130,000 last year from Mr. Trump’s Truth Social site. He also made $325,000 over two years for “strategy consulting” for the pro-Trump Save America PAC and $145,000 in 2021 for “fund-raising consulting” from Friends of Matt Gaetz, the campaign committee for the blustering House Republican from Florida. Mr. Patel has appeared on social media hawking wooden plaques, “Warrior Essentials” anti-vaccine diet supplements and Trump-themed T-shirts.
Mr. Patel also operates the Kash Foundation, a nonprofit that he has said offers financial help to a range of recipients, including the families of people charged for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Tax filings for 2023 show the foundation’s revenue surged from $182,000 in 2022 to $1.3 million last year, most of it coming from donations. Its expenses rose fivefold over 2022 to $674,000. Almost half of that was spent on promotion and advertising, an expense that totaled more than the foundation gave away in contributions and grants last year.
‘Nobody would hire me’
Mr. Patel, 44, is the son of Indian immigrants, whose father worked as a financial officer for an aviation company. Mr. Patel likes to say that he is from Queens, just like Mr. Trump, but he hails from the affluent village of Garden City on Long Island, where his family’s sprawling household included his father’s eight brothers and sisters. In his memoir he recalls his extended family taking an annual pilgrimage to Disney World in a 15-car convoy.
Mr. Patel, who wrote that he was inspired by the defense lawyers whose golf bags he hauled during summer caddying jobs at the Garden City Country Club, received a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and history from the University of Richmond and graduated from Pace University law school in 2005.
“Dreams of the sky-high salary at the prestige law firms never materialized,” he wrote in his book, because “nobody would hire me.” Instead he landed a job as a local public defender in Miami-Dade County, then as a federal public defender in the Southern District of Florida.
Mr. Patel’s former colleagues remember him for offering himself as a prize in a charity auction of eligible bachelors, for wildly patterned socks and for having his suits custom-made on visits to India. His former supervisor, Michael Caruso, a federal public defender who led the Southern District of Florida office at the time, said Mr. Patel shied away from filing motions that he was likely to lose.
“My enduring image of him is with his shoes off and his feet up on the desk, reading The Wall Street Journal,” Mr. Caruso said in an interview.
Mr. Patel developed a deep animosity toward the Justice Department prosecutors he found himself up against. The department, he wrote in his book, was a hotbed of “endemic corruption” and prosecutors who “lie, leak, cover up or twist the truth to accomplish their mission.” He added, “This is exactly how I saw the Deep State operate in its attempt to take down President Trump.”
Despite his condemnation, by late 2013 Mr. Patel had landed what he called a “dream job” — work as a terrorism prosecutor in the Justice Department’s National Security Division in Washington. “My new job gave me the opportunity to save lives through my prosecutions and make a name for myself,” he wrote.
He did, although perhaps not in the way he imagined.
In early 2016 Mr. Patel assisted two Justice Department lawyers in the prosecution of a Palestinian refugee who pleaded guilty to attempting to provide support to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as ISIL. The judge in the case, Lynn N. Hughes, scheduled a status conference on the case in his chambers in Houston while Mr. Patel was on assignment in Tajikistan. Mr. Patel’s fellow lawyers told him there was no reason to fly across the globe to appear at a routine proceeding, but he did anyway. He wrote in his memoir that he was ordered to go.
He turned up in rumpled khakis, boat shoes and a too-small borrowed jacket before Judge Hughes, who excoriated him for his disrespectful dress. “If you want to be a lawyer, dress like a lawyer,” the judge said. He asked Mr. Patel repeatedly why he was there.
“You don’t add a bit of value, do you?” the judge said. “This case is difficult enough without Washington just sending unnecessary people down here to watch what they do in the provinces.” He threw Mr. Patel out of his chambers, according to the court transcript.
The accused terrorist was sentenced in 2017 to 16 years in prison, after Mr. Patel had left the Justice Department.
“He definitely left a trail of wreckage and funny stories in Miami,” said David Adler, the lawyer who represented the defendant and witnessed the contretemps with the judge.
In another episode, Mr. Patel claimed a major role in the government’s pursuit of the perpetrators of the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans.
“I was the main Justice lead prosecutor for Benghazi,” Mr. Patel told a former Navy SEAL, Shawn Ryan, in an interview posted in August on Mr. Ryan’s YouTube channel.
Mr. Patel had no role on the Benghazi trial team. The pretrial investigation was handled by a team led by the F.B.I. and the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. Mr. Patel was a junior Justice Department staff member at the time, who routed arrest warrants and the like up the chain for approval, according to multiple people involved in the Benghazi case.
From ‘London Calling’ to the White House
After Mr. Trump took office in 2017, Mr. Patel left the Justice Department to become the House Intelligence Committee’s lead investigator in the Republican effort to undercut the inquiry by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Representative Devin Nunes, the California Republican who chaired the committee, hired him “to bust doors down,” Mr. Nunes said in “The Plot Against the President,” a book by the conservative journalist Lee Smith.
In his investigation Mr. Patel seized on the F.B.I.’s wiretapping of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser and a longtime recruitment target of Russian intelligence. In seeking authorization to monitor Mr. Page, the F.B.I. had cited a Democratic-funded dossier on Mr. Trump compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer.
In the summer of 2017 Mr. Patel and a colleague on the committee embarked on a shambolic effort to doorstep Mr. Steele in London. They found him at the offices of his lawyer, but were turned away without meeting him. The two then flew back to Washington empty-handed. Mr. Patel did not notify Democrats on the committee or the American embassy of his effort to see Mr. Steele, bucking protocol. Fellow staff members called the trip “London Calling.”
In early 2018, Mr. Patel played a lead role in writing what became known as the “Nunes memo,” part of the Republicans’ attempt to recast the Russia investigation as a politically motivated effort to sabotage Mr. Trump. Among other claims, Mr. Patel accused the F.B.I. of improperly obtaining warrants to conduct wiretap surveillance of Mr. Page. Although the Justice Department’s independent inspector general later uncovered serious problems in the Page warrant applications, the real problems it brought to light were largely different from the claims put forward in the Nunes memo. The inspector general also concluded that there had been a lawful basis to open the overall Russia investigation, and found no evidence that officials had acted from political bias.
But Mr. Patel’s memo, which Mr. Trump declassified over the objections of the intelligence agencies and Democrats, fueled bogus claims by Mr. Trump, Republicans and conservative media that politics drove the Russia investigation and that the government had spied on the Trump campaign itself.
Less than a year later, after Republicans lost control of the House and Mr. Nunes lost his chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee, Mr. Patel was out of a job. Mr. Nunes turned to the White House for help.
“We didn’t want to hire him, and we resisted three times when Devin Nunes called,” said Mr. Kupperman, then deputy to John R. Bolton, the national security adviser at the time. “Clearly he had intellect, but he was untrustworthy, cancerous with staff and had his own agenda.”
When Mr. Trump ordered that Mr. Patel be given a job, Mr. Kupperman said he slotted him into an anodyne role in the National Security Council’s international organizations section. Mr. Patel was soon embroiled in controversy.
In mid-2019 Fiona Hill, the senior director for Europe and Russia on the council at the time, was organizing a Ukraine briefing for Mr. Trump when a White House staff member told her the president wanted to talk with “your Ukraine director,” Ms. Hill testified to House impeachment investigators in October 2019. He meant Mr. Patel, who the staffer said was providing Mr. Trump with Ukraine materials.
Mr. Patel had no official responsibility for Ukraine, and had fueled conspiracy theories that Kyiv, not Moscow, had meddled in the 2016 election.
“It alarmed everybody,” Ms. Hill testified to the investigators.
Asked whether he had briefed or provided materials on Ukraine to Mr. Trump at the time, Mr. Patel responded via email, “No, never, on all of the above.”
It was around the same time, mid-2019, that Mr. Trump backed off his plan to put Mr. Patel in charge of “political operations” on the White House staff. But Mr. Trump soon promoted him to senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, where he and Richard Grenell, who was named acting director of national intelligence in February 2020, led a purge of intelligence agency officials.
After Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election and staff members began an exodus from the White House, Mr. Patel’s upward trajectory continued. Mr. Trump named him to one of the most important jobs at the Pentagon: chief of staff to Christopher Miller, the acting defense secretary.
Gen. Mark A. Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was shocked when Mr. Patel presented him a document signed in Sharpie by the outgoing Mr. Trump ordering a full withdrawal of all American troops from Afghanistan by Jan. 15. General Milley, the top military adviser to the president, had never even seen the order, and neither had several other senior advisers. It turned out it was drafted by Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel named as an adviser to the Pentagon after he impressed Mr. Trump with his appearances on Fox News, according to an account in “The Divider,” a book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.
Mr. Trump backed away from the Afghanistan plan, but soon sought to again elevate Mr. Patel by making him deputy director of either the C.I.A. or the F.B.I. Only after Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, and William P. Barr, the attorney general, both threatened to quit — Mr. Barr vowed that Mr. Patel would become F.B.I. deputy only “over my dead body”— did Mr. Trump abandon the idea.
Mr. Patel stayed at the Pentagon for three months, crediting himself in his book with leading “the biggest transition’’ of the Defense Department “in U.S. history.”
In the conference room aboard Air Force One during the waning days of his administration, Mr. Trump engaged his team in a favorite game: predicting who will play whom in the inevitable movie about his presidency. Turning to Mr. Patel, he said, “You’ll probably play yourself.”
Charlie Savage, Kenneth P. Vogel, Adam Goldman and David A. Fahrenthold contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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