Kash Patel, an American attorney and a close political aide of former US president Donald Trump, is likely to take an influential role in the federal government if the Republicans make a comeback in the 2024 elections.
Trump has reportedly prepared a list of people who will join his team if he becomes the US president again, with Patel expected to lead the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in that scenario.
The 44-year-old has served as Trump’s counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council and chief of staff to the acting secretary of defence during his last tenure. He also has experience as a defence attorney, federal prosecutor, top House staffer and national security official.
Patel was born in 1980 in Garden City, New York to Gujarati Indian parents who had immigrated to the United States from East Africa, via Canada, according to reports. Patel’s father worked for an aviation firm as a financial officer.
How Patel Joined Hands With Trump?
After completing his graduation from law school at Pace University, Patel failed to grab a job at a prestigious law firm he wished 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.
Around three years later, Patel was hired as a staffer for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence led by Rep. Devin Nunes, a fierce Trump ally. Later, Patel was trusted to run the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
Patel helped author what has become known as the “Nunes Memo,” a four-page report that detailed how it said the US Justice Department had erred in obtaining a warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign volunteer, reported the Firstpost.
The release of the memo drew sharp protest from the Justice Department. A subsequent inspector general report identified significant problems with FBI surveillance during the Russia investigation but also found no evidence that the FBI had acted with partisan motives in conducting the probe.
The series of developments caught Trump’s attention, and soon Patel was hired to work on the National Security Council and is expected to manage increasingly important roles in the future.
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’s Work After Trump’s Ouster
After Trump’s ouster from the White House, Patel began the ‘Fight With Kash’ organisation that funds defamation lawsuits and sells a wide variety of merchandise, including branded socks and water bottles, sweatshirts and baseball hats, a deck of playing cards with Trump as the ace and a bumbling Joe Biden in a jester costume as the king.
The organisation has since become The Kash Foundation, a nonprofit that purports to support whistleblowers, law enforcement and education in “areas the mainstream media refuses to cover.”
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