After hawking merch, Trump’s FBI nominee Kash Patel makes a new pitch

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President Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, watches Trump speak during a rally ahead of his inauguration at Capital One Arena in Washington on Jan. 19. MUST CREDIT: Tom Brenner for The Washington Post

Just months ago, Kash Patel was hawking merchandise on social media from the boutique apparel brand he co-founded – an online storefront that sells T-shirts emblazoned with Christmas trees made of guns and decks of playing cards showing former FBI director James B. Comey as a smiling joker.

On Thursday, Patel – President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the FBI – will appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to make a very different sales pitch: that he is the right candidate to lead the nation’s premier law enforcement agency.

To Democrats, Patel lacks the gravitas to helm the FBI and is an erratic national security risk who has spent years denigrating the 38,000-person agency he now seeks to lead. Republicans, meanwhile, say Patel only plays the provocateur in media appearances and can fix an agency they think has unfairly targeted conservatives in recent years.

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If all Democrats vote against him, Patel would need the votes of all but three Republican senators to be confirmed.

Thursday’s hearing will include questions about Patel’s public and professional record, which is heavy on public displays of loyalty to Trump but light on the management experience that recent FBI directors had before they took the job. Lawmakers could also focus on Patel’s business and charitable ventures since working for the Trump administration, and his vows to clean house at the FBI. Those pledges have taken on new urgency over the last 10 days as the Justice Department removed or reassigned key leaders and fired several prosecutors who worked on criminal cases against Trump.

Patel spokeswoman Erica Knight defended his qualifications, citing government experience that includes stints as a White House aide during Trump’s first term, staffing an intelligence committee on Capitol Hill and as a Justice Department trial attorney.

“Kash Patel’s extensive experience in national security, law enforcement, and government oversight makes him uniquely qualified to lead the FBI and address the critical challenges facing our nation,” she said in a statement. “He looks forward to appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, and demonstrating his steadfast commitment to ensuring the FBI operates with integrity and excellence.”

Since leaving government service in 2020, Patel has largely made his living off building a personal brand as a conservative warrior and launching business ventures tied to Trump’s political movement. He’s earned hundreds of thousands of dollars consulting for Trump’s leadership PAC and the president’s social media company, for which he also serves as an unpaid board member, according to public disclosures.

Patel is a regular and pugilistic Trump ally on conservative podcasts, cable news and political rallies. And until last month, according to written answers he provided to senators’ questions, he worked as a managing member of Based Apparel, a company that includes in its catalogue shirts, hoodies and flags emblazoned with the phrase: “Fight with Kash.”

He launched a short-lived payment processing firm called Paytriots in 2021, pitching it as a conservative alternative to GoFundMe, which has drawn criticism from the right for censoring political fundraising efforts.

In 2022, he formed a nonprofit, the Kash Foundation, with the stated goal of funding veterans, scholarships and “legal defense [of] whistleblowers [and] defamed American citizens.” The nonprofit reported raising more than $1.4 million in its first two years. According to its 2023 tax filings – the most recent publicly available – Patel’s foundation has given less than 20 percent of that sum, or just over $260,000, away in grants.

Some money went to pay legal fees for a pair of FBI agents who testified at a contentious Republican-led House hearing last year on the alleged “weaponization” of the bureau, according to congressional testimony. Tax filings show grants of $20,000 or less also went to veterans organizations, a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Fairfax County, Virginia, and other charitable groups.

Foundation representatives did not respond to requests this week for a full list of its grant recipients or updated figures on its giving from 2024. But they pointed to a December statement announcing that by the end of last year, the foundation had given away more than $1 million.

With his potentially contentious hearing looming, Patel has sought to show a less combative side on Capitol Hill. He has worked to shore up vocal Republican support, even as other Trump nominees – including director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, whose hearing is also on Thursday – are facing public skepticism from some GOP senators.

Senators attribute Patel’s more firm footing to the charm offensive he’s waged in one-on-one meetings, where he’s pledged to run the FBI apolitically and denied that he has an “enemies list” of people he would target in the job. He has prepared with mock hearings where allies playing Democratic senators pepper him with blistering questions.

As a former House Intelligence Committee staffer, Patel speaks the language of the Hill and knows what lawmakers are looking for, his boosters say. They emphasized that the firebrand persona Patel presents in media interviews is not the person sitting down with senators.

“There’s a social media, national media persona of who Kash is and then there’s who he actually is,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), adding that Patel impressed him in their individual meeting with his commitment to impartial and fair law enforcement. “There’s this cartoon of him that’s out there, that he’s this mean, hateful, intense individual that when you meet him you think, where is that person that’s being described?”

In his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters,” Patel painted the FBI as deeply politicized and called for firing its top brass. An appendix includes dozens of government officials as members of what he calls the “Executive Branch Deep State.” But he has forcefully argued to senators that the appendix in his book should not be characterized as an enemies list.

“I don’t see it as an enemies list and I don’t think he goes into the FBI with that intent,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), a Judiciary Committee member and Patel supporter who said he read the book and had “extensive discussions” with the nominee.

Mike Davis, the founder of the Article III Project group that is pressuring Republican senators to back Trump’s nominees, said lawmakers should take Patel seriously: “He’s said some fiery bombastic things with his political hat on, but when he puts on the national security hat he’s a very serious operator.”

Democrats, though, still see cause for alarm. When Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general pick, was on Capitol Hill this month for her own confirmation hearing, several questions focused on Patel rather than her, highlighting the degree to which Democratic senators seem unnerved by his nomination.

Their concerns have only been magnified since Trump’s inauguration. After taking office, Trump ordered up an investigation “to correct past misconduct” at federal law enforcement agencies during Joe Biden’s presidency. Interim Justice Department leaders moved swiftly to reassign or remove veteran lawyers they portrayed as potential obstructions to the president’s agenda.

Democrats have highlighted other concerns related to Patel’s background. In a letter released Monday, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Judiciary Committee’s ranking Democrat, called Patel “unfit to lead” the bureau and suggested he had endangered the success of a hostage rescue mission in Yemen while serving as an aide to the National Security Council in 2020.

Durbin, citing a source he did not name, accused Patel of speaking to reporters about the mission to recover two Americans held by Iranian-backed Houthi fighters while it was still playing out and before the hostages were safe.

“An official who puts missions and the lives of Americans in jeopardy for public notoriety and personal gain is unfit to lead the country’s primary federal law enforcement and investigation agency,” Durbin wrote.

Alexander Gray, an NSC chief of staff during the first Trump administration, defended Patel’s role, calling the allegations “absurd.”

“In everything he did at the NSC and DoD, Kash put the interests of the American people, and particularly the interests of American hostages and unlawful detainees and their families, first,” Gray said in a written statement provided by the Trump transition team.

Some Democrats also have found Patel is likable in person. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Delaware) described their recent meeting as “constructive” and said Patel stressed that his principal focus at the bureau would be prosecuting terrorists and dangerous criminals.

The senator said he would reserve judgment on how to vote until after the hearing, however.

“He did say several times, ‘I want to look forward not backwards,’” Coons said, noting that Patel’s past comments critical of the FBI left him with doubts about that promise. “I’m left unpersuaded about exactly what his intentions are and where he’s going.”