Meet King Donald’s point man in his Mar-a-Lago fight against the ‘deep state’

The House investigation was led by a staffer named Kash Patel, who has argued that his report for then-chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) showed FBI “tradecraft failings” that compromised its investigation of Trump and Russia from the start. Patel went on to become a senior official at the National Security Council and Pentagon — and he would have had even bigger jobs if Trump had had his way. As I noted in an April 2021 profile, Patel has been “almost a ‘Zelig’ figure in President Donald Trump’s confrontation against what he imagined as the ‘deep state.’ ”

Cut to Mar-a-Lago, where Zelig has emerged once more. It turns out that Trump, in a June 19 letter, designated Patel as one of his two representatives to the National Archives for dealing with his records, classified and otherwise. Patel has also emerged as a chief public exponent of Trump’s claim that he could declassify information, including highly sensitive Russia-probe material, at will.

Patel was touting Trump’s declassification powers long before the Aug. 8 search at the Florida estate, back when Trump’s representatives were still negotiating with the FBI over access. Indeed, on May 5 Patel made a startling claim on a right-wing radio show that Trump had unilaterally declassified an extraordinarily broad range of documents — implicitly raising the possibility that these documents might be at Mar-a-Lago.

“On his way out of the White House, he declassified — made available to every American citizen in the world — large volumes of information relating, not just to Russiagate, but to national security matters, to the Ukraine impeachment, to his impeachment one, impeachment two,” Patel told radio hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton.

On June 21, two days after Trump designated him as a point man in the National Archives battle, Patel announced on a podcast hosted by David Scarlett, a conservative Christian pastor, that he was going to “march down” to the archives and “identify every single document that they blocked from being declassified … and we are going to start putting that information out.”

That broad declassification claim — covering not just the much-disputed Russia documents but “large volumes” relating to other unspecified “national security matters” — is said to have alarmed former senior members of the Trump administration, as well as Biden administration officials. In Trump’s mind, the Russia documents may have been the crown jewels. But sources say they probably were not what the FBI team went looking for at Mar-a-Lago, and they probably weren’t among the 11 sets of classified documents taken by FBI agents from the residence.

Patel has channeled the rage that Trump supporters feel about the Mar-a-Lago incident. He calls the FBI “government gangsters” and “corrupt cops” — arguing that they conspired with Democrats and the media to push the Russia investigation. This combative style endeared him to Trump, who brought him to the NSC as senior director for counterterrorism in 2018 and then, in 2020, made him principal deputy to the acting director of national intelligence.

Patel was Trump’s kind of disrupter, and in mid-2020, the then-president tried to appoint him as deputy director of the FBI, according to former attorney general William P. Barr. Barr recounts in a recent memoir that he told White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that Patel would get the job “over my dead body.” Barr explains: “Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency.”

Trump then tried to install Patel as deputy CIA director. In mid-December, Meadows approached Director Gina Haspel and told her that Trump planned to fire her deputy, Vaughn Bishop and appoint Patel to the position. Haspel said she would quit rather than take Patel, and after Meadows conveyed that threat to Trump, he backed down, according to knowledgeable sources who spoke to me last year about Haspel’s exchange and reiterated their accounts this week.

In the last two turbulent months of the Trump administration, Patel served as chief of staff to acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller. Patel continued to press a range of Trump initiatives, including troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Somalia and changes in the intelligence community.

Patel moved even closer to Trump after the former president left the White House. He became a director of Trump Media and Technology Group, which runs Truth Social; the company’s chief executive is Nunes, his former boss. And Patel became an increasingly visible advocate for Trump’s arguments that he had been throttled and forced from office by a Deep State conspiracy.

Patel didn’t comment on the details in this article, but he criticized the author. He said Thursday through a spokeswoman that rather than “question authority” in the Justice Department’s investigation of Trump, I was “acting as an unthinking, loyal mouthpiece for deep-state goons and the Democratic Party.”

Patel now is a media brand of his own. He has a website, selling hoodies, tank tops and other gear with his logo, “K$H.” And he’s written a children’s book, “The Plot Against the King,” in which the evil Hillary Queenton tries to spread lies against King Donald claiming that he’s working with the Russionians — until a knight called Kash exposes the plot.

I fear that a sequel is coming, where Kash and King Donald’s other knights will joust with what they claim are government gangsters — and this won’t be a children’s book.