Kash Patel Would Bring Bravado and Baggage to F.B.I. Role

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice to run the F.B.I. has a record in and out of government that is likely to raise questions during his Senate confirmation hearings.

Few people tapped for any top federal post, much less a job as vital as F.B.I. director, have come with quite so much bravado, bombast or baggage as Kash Patel.

On Saturday, Mr. Patel, 44, a Long Island-born provocateur and right-wing operative, was named by President-elect Donald J. Trump to lead the F.B.I., an agency he has accused of leading a “deep state” witch hunt against Mr. Trump. The announcement amounted to a de facto dismissal of the current director, Christopher A. Wray, who was appointed to the job by Mr. Trump and still has almost three years left on his 10-year term.

Mr. Patel’s maximum-volume threats to exact far-reaching revenge on Mr. Trump’s behalf have endeared him to his boss and Trump allies who say the bureau needs a disrupter to weed out bias and reshape its culture.

But his record as a public official and his incendiary public comments are likely to provoke intense questioning when the Senate weighs his nomination — and determines whether he should run an agency charged with protecting Americans from terrorism, street crime, cartels and political corruption, along with the threat posed by China, which Mr. Wray has described as existential.

Here are some of the things Mr. Patel has said and done that could complicate his confirmation.

He was accused of nearly botching a high-stakes hostage rescue.

In October 2020, Mr. Patel, then a senior national intelligence official in the Trump administration, inserted himself into a secret effort by members of SEAL Team Six to rescue Philip Walton, an American who was 27 at the time and had been kidnapped by gunmen in Niger and taken to Nigeria.

Mr. Patel, whose involvement broke with protocol, assured the State and Defense Departments that the Nigerian government had been told of the operation.

But defense officials could not confirm the approval, and were forced to scramble to obtain the necessary clearance even as the aircraft circled over the target, according to accounts confirmed by a senior defense official familiar with the operation.

Mr. Walton was eventually rescued. But former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, writing in his memoir, said that Mr. Patel “made the approval story up,” potentially endangering everyone involved.

He wants to shut down F.B.I. headquarters.

In a 2023 book, Mr. Patel supported a plan to greatly weaken the bureau’s central command structure through a range of what he termed “reforms,” including shuttering the bureau’s headquarters and dispersing its staff and leadership to field offices around the country.

“We need to get the F.B.I. the hell out of Washington, D.C.,” wrote Mr. Patel, who has subsequently suggested the building be reopened as a museum to the Trump-slain deep state.

He said he wants to move the headquarters outside the capital and eliminate service in Washington as a step to promotion “to prevent institutional capture and curb F.B.I. leadership from engaging in political gamesmanship.”

Mr. Trump, for his part, does not appear to be on board with that plan. Earlier this year, he opposed moving the F.B.I.’s main offices to Maryland, writing on social media that “THE NEW FBI BUILDING SHOULD BE BUILT IN WASHINGTON, DC.”

The headquarters plan is no lark, however. It is part of a broader strategy, outlined in Mr. Patel’s book, that would entail transferring some decision-making from Washington to lower-ranking Justice Department officials in offices around the country.

Eighty percent of federal employees already work outside the capital.

Current and former officials warn that doing so could marginalize experienced officials responsible for determining the legality, resource allocation and supervision of important investigations. It could also make it easier for White House officials to apply direct pressure on frontline investigators without interference from superiors, they said.

He exaggerated his role in the Benghazi investigation.

Mr. Patel, who began his career as federal public defender in Florida, took a job as a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s counterterrorism division in 2014, a move that served as a springboard to prominence and power.

Mr. Patel has repeatedly claimed that during this period 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.

He 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. In his capacity as a junior prosecutor, he routed arrest warrants and the like up the chain for approval, according to multiple people involved in the case.

He pushed Trump’s “Russia hoax” narrative.

Mr. Patel, then a House Republican aide, cemented his alliance with Mr. Trump in 2018 when he helped write a memo detailing errors made by the Justice Department in securing surveillance warrants on a Trump adviser suspected of communicating with Russia during the 2016 election.

Mr. Patel was one of the first Trump allies to promote the idea that the investigation was, as he put it in his book, “nothing more than a political hit job.”

His efforts impressed Mr. Trump, who elevated him to a series of jobs in the defense, national security and intelligence establishment — where he chafed against officials with greater experience and institutional distance from Mr. Trump.

While the Justice Department’s inspector general determined that the bureau had acted without political bias, investigators unearthed many mistakes associated with the secret surveillance warrants, a small part of the larger Russia investigation.

A four-year investigation by a special counsel appointed under Mr. Trump, John H. Durham, determined that prosecutors had pursued the case too aggressively because they were convinced of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia.

But he found no evidence that officials had been motivated by political animus, contrary to claims by Mr. Trump and Mr. Patel, and did not indict any of the senior F.B.I. officials who oversaw the investigation and had been targeted by Mr. Trump’s allies. The report revealed little substantial new information about the inquiry, known as “Crossfire Hurricane.”

He has promoted lies about fraud in the 2020 election.

Mr. Patel, who was working in the Pentagon during the 2020 election, has consistently promoted Mr. Trump’s false claims that President Biden stole the election.

He was so active in promoting falsehoods, and so wired in with the White House, that his superiors at the Defense Department took notice.

Gen. Mark A. Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, summoned Mr. Patel and another Trump-allied aide to warn them against violating the sacrosanct separation of the military from politics, according to an account in The New Yorker.

Over the past four years, Mr. Patel has continued to echo Mr. Trump’s election falsehoods — and has gone so far as to suggest he would target journalists who dispelled the false claims if he ever returned to power.

“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 said last year in an interview with Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

He has peddled children’s books. And diet supplements. And T-shirts.

Mr. Patel stuck close to Mr. Trump during their four years out of power — politically and commercially.

He 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.

Mr. Patel has also devoted much of his time to personal moneymaking ventures. He established a consulting company that has collected about $465,000 from Mr. Trump’s social media company and political action committee.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Patel has embraced online retail (under the brand “K$H,” a logo he displays on his lapel and a scarf he often wears at Trump events). He has hawked wooden plaques, “Warrior Essentials” anti-vaccine diet supplements and pro-Trump T-shirts.

None of these wares are as striking as Mr. Patel’s line of children’s books, in which he portrays himself as a wizard of the Gandalf type, wearing a midnight blue robe covered with glittering stars and half moons.

Mr. Trump, broad-shouldered and crowned, is known as “the King.”

Trump Transition: News and Analysis

• Targeting the N.I.H.: The National Institutes of Health has been called “the crown jewel of the federal government.” But when President-elect Donald Trump and congressional Republicans take charge, the agency may face a reckoning.
• Support for Patel: Several Republican lawmakers fell in line behind Trump’s plan to choose Kash Patel to lead the F.B.I., defending the president-elect’s right to install a loyalist who has vowed to exact revenge on Trump’s adversaries.
• Roles for In-Laws: Trump tapped Massad Boulos, the father-in-law of his daughter Tiffany, as a senior adviser covering Arab and Middle Eastern affairs. He also picked Charles Kushner, his daughter Ivanka’s father-in-law, as ambassador to France.
• Test of the Senate’s Independence: Trump’s determination to crash over traditional governmental guardrails will test whether the Republican-controlled Senate can maintain its constitutional role as an independent institution.
• Trump and Project 2025: During the campaign, Trump swore he had “nothing to do with” a right-wing policy blueprint known as Project 2025. Now, he has filled his administration with people who have ties to the manifesto.