Will Patel Be The Next Sycophant To Be Fired By Trump?

 

Donald Trump has fired his head of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Labor Department. Who will be the next to go? Robert Reich thinks it will be Kash Patel. He writes:

You can be Secretary of Defense (War) and cause the mightiest military in the world to be brought to its knees, and still keep your job in the Trump regime.

 

You can be in charge of public health and cause measles to reemerge as a major hazard to Americans, and still keep your job. 

You can be illegally enriching yourself and your family as Commerce Secretary, and still keep your job.

 

But you’ll be fired for actively and unnecessarily getting bad press. 

A few days ago, a senior White House official told Politico that FBI director Kash Patel’s bad press was “not a good look for a cabinet secretary” and had frustrated Trump. “It’s only a matter of time,” they said, before Patel is canned. 

Like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Patel has been his own worse press agent. 

He filed a $250 million defamation claim against The Atlantic magazine over its April 17 report claiming that his FBI colleagues were alarmed by his excessive drinking and unexplained absences. The report included claims that his security detail struggled to rouse him due to intoxication several times in the past year and that he drank heavily at a private club in Washington. Bureau employees expressed concerns that his behavior posed a threat to public safety. 

I doubt it’s Patel’s excessive drinking and absences that are making Trump upset; it’s that they’re being reported, and that Patel has made them even bigger stories by suing The Atlantic over them. 

Last week, Patel added to the drinking story when he erupted at NBC’s Ryan Reilly who asked Patel at a press conference whether, as The Atlantic also reported, he feared he had been fired when he was unable to log into his government computer.

“The problem with you and your baseless reporting is that is an absolute lie,” Patel shot back. “It was never said. It never happened. And I will serve in this administration as long as the president and the attorney general want me to do so.” Patel added, “you are off topic,” and “the answer to your question is you are lying.”

Worse yet, from Trump’s viewpoint, is that some of Patel’s drinking has been in the public eye. One video showed him drinking a beer, banging his fist on a table and celebrating with the US men’s hockey team at this year’s Winter Olympics in Italy.

 

Nothing gets Trump angrier than when one of his underlings is caught doing something stupid on videotape. After the video of Patel spread on social media, Trump called Patel to convey his discontent, Politico reported.

Soon after Patel sued the Atlantic, the New York Times reported that the FBI had been investigating Elizabeth Williamson. Williamson was the New York Times journalist who revealed that Patel had used a swat team to protect his country singer girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, when she was invited to sing the national anthem at the annual convention of the National Rifle Association. And that Patel had “ripped into” the swat team’s commander when the team left after it became apparent there was no threat to her. 

It’s not that Patel misused government funds on his girlfriend. Or that Patel exploded at the FBI swat team’s commander. Or even that Patel ordered an investigation of the journalist who reported this. No, it’s that all of this became a national story — twice.Such self-generated negative press infuriates Trump.

The same day that the Times reported on the FBI’s investigation of Elizabeth Williamson, NBC reported that a federal judge in Texas had tossed out a defamation case brought by Patel against former FBI assistant director-turned-MSNBC contributor Frank Figliuzzi. 

Patel had brought the case over Figliuzzi’s remark on “Morning Joe” that Patel had been “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.”

More self-generated negative press: Not that Patel has been doing the nightclub circuit and disregarding his job, but that he invited a story about it by suing Figliuzzi. 

Similarly, it’s not that Patel has repeatedly wrongly accused people of federal crimes (announcing someone had been arrested for the murder of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk when the real murderer hadn’t yet turned himself in, and that a person of interest had been detained in the Brown University shooting, only for that individual to be released hours later).

It’s that Patel’s wrong accusations were widely reported, making Patel — and, indirectly, Trump — look dumber than dirt. 

Patel simply doesn’t know how to keep a low profile. Like so many others in the Trump regime, he made his name by promoting himself. As a frequent guest on right-wing programs before Trump appointed him FBI director, he pushed conspiracy theories about the “deep state,” the 2020 presidential election, and the January 6 Capitol attack.

 

But the occupant of the Oval Office doesn’t want his underlings engaging in self-promotion and vindictive lawsuits. If anyone’s going to be self-promotional and vindictive, Trump wants it to be himself. 

Patel has been trying to win back Trump’s favor by escalating FBI investigations into Trump enemies. But so far, the investigations haven’t yielded adequate evidence to indict, another mark against him in Trump’s book. 

A week ago Sunday, Patel promised that the Justice Department would soon make arrests related to the 2020 election, stating on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that “We’ve got all the information we need, we’re working with our prosecutors at the Department of Justice under [acting] Attorney General Todd Blanche, and we are going to be making arrests, and it’s coming, and I promise you, it’s coming soon.”

Patel’s plea was obviously directed at Trump.

 

I doubt it will work. Patel will soon be locked out of his computer for good.

Five Things To Know About Kash Patel

The New York Times gives us 5 things we should know about Kash Patel - Trump's pick to head the FBI.

Here are five takeaways from a recent New York Times profile of Mr. Patel.

Former colleagues question his qualifications.

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.

He is the author of the ‘Nunes Memo.’

Mr. Trump ordered that Mr. Patel be given a job on the National Security Council staff after Mr. Patel, then a House Intelligence Committee staffer, impressed Mr. Trump as the primary author of what has come to be called the secret “Nunes memo.” The document was a key element in the effort of House Republicans to undermine the Justice Department’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

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.

He was a would-be ‘political executioner.’

In 2019, as President Trump battled public outrage and a looming impeachment over his effort to enlist Ukraine in digging up dirt on former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., he proposed to a group of top advisers that Mr. Patel, a backbench staffer on the National Security Council, begin vetting White House aides for loyalty. He would have served as a “political executioner,” in the words of Charles Kupperman, the deputy national security adviser at the time. Mr. Kupperman and White House legal advisers talked the president out of it, saying it would create legal and morale problems.

He says his nonprofit helps Jan. 6 defendants.

The Kash Foundation is a nonprofit that Mr. Patel 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. 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.

He sells pro-Trump merchandise under the logo K$H.

Since the end of the Trump administration, Mr. Patel has parlayed his association with the former president into enterprises he promotes under the logo “K$H.” He sells pro-Trump T-shirts and other items as well as a series of his children’s books that pay homage to “King Donald.” Mr. Patel also collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees from the 2024 Trump campaign and from Friends of Matt Gaetz, the campaign committee for the former House Republican from Florida, who withdrew from consideration as Mr. Trump’s attorney general after criticism over allegations of sex trafficking and drug use.