A lot has been said about Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to helm the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Current Director Chris Wray’s time is ending, as he’s expected to be fired by Trump as soon as he takes office on January 20. Patel is seen as a Trump loyalist who will wreck the bureau. Stop! You already convinced me this is an elite nomination.
Like with Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, Patel will likely be a bloody slog on the Hill. There’s already a lot said about him, though once you filter out the nonsense—he’s unqualified because he’s Donald Trump’s pick. He’s vowed to make the Jeffrey Epstein list public, a move that the political class wants to be stopped at all costs.
Here's one of The New York Times profiles of him—this passage relates explicitly to what his colleagues have said about him:
Mr. Trump said in his social media post announcing his choice for the F.B.I. that Mr. Patel had “tried over 60 jury trials.” Colleagues from Mr. Patel’s time as an entry-level public defender in Florida recall him as a middling performer with a deep animosity toward the Justice Department prosecutors he found himself up against. His former supervisor, Michael Caruso, a federal public defender who led the Southern District of Florida office at the time, said that Mr. Patel shied away from filing motions that he was likely to lose.
Mr. Patel spent about three years as a terrorism prosecutor at the Justice Department. He has repeatedly claimed he was the “lead prosecutor” 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. In fact, Mr. Patel was a junior Justice Department staff member at the time, and he was not part of the trial team.
Yeah, this is why the media is being laughed at—Patel was awarded an AAG honor for his terrorist hunting abilities by the Obama Justice Department:
Did you know Kash Patel was given a DOJ award for work he did investigating and prosecuting terrorists under the Obama administration? pic.twitter.com/WjuXYFAHTK
— Alex Pfeiffer (@AlexPfeiffer) December 2, 2024
So, I’m not inclined to believe anything said about Mr. Patel that conveniently leaves out this piece of information about his qualifications for the job.
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