I listened to hours of Trump’s FBI pick on Steve Bannon’s podcast. Oh boy.

Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s pick to direct the Federal Bureau of Intelligence, has never served in the FBI. But he has hosted Steve Bannon’s podcast.

Patel is a contributor at Real America’s Voice, the right-wing news network that produces Bannon’s show War Room, and has long appeared as a guest on the show. After top Trump adviser Bannon was imprisoned for four months earlier this year — on charges of contempt of Congress after he refused to comply with a January 6 Committee subpoena — Patel stepped up to serve as an occasional guest host.

To try and understand Patel better, I listened to every episode and clip tagged with “Kash Patel” on the War Room website — and a few others that Bannon’s team missed. The overwhelming impression is that Patel is a man whose entire worldview revolves around paranoid conspiracy theories — specifically, conspiracies against both America and Trump, which for him are one and the same. It’s a specific kind of obsession that reminds me of the FBI’s first director: J. Edgar Hoover, a man who infamously abused his power to persecute political enemies.

During his various appearances on Bannon’s show, Patel and/or his interviewees declared that:

• China is funding the Democratic Party and sending “military-aged males” across the Mexican and Canadian borders to prepare for a preemptive strike.
• Barack Obama directs a “shadow network” that is quietly directing the intelligence community and Big Tech to persecute Trump.
• Attorney General Merrick Garland wants to throw “all of us” — which is to say, Trump allies — in prison.

And Patel is willing to go to extreme measures in response to these alleged threats.

In one episode, he called on the Republican majority in Congress to unilaterally arrest Garland — invoking an obscure legal doctrine called “inherent contempt” that has never been used in this fashion in the entirety of American history. In another, he outlined a plan for a MAGA blitz of American institutions focused on getting loyalists into high office.

It is hard to tell whether Patel genuinely believes this stuff or is merely performing for Bannon’s audience. But it’s largely immaterial. 

Because it is this performance that made him a star in Trumpworld: his willingness to ape Trump’s own conspiratorial worldview making him into a person Trump wants to be in charge of America’s domestic security services. Once in power, his stated commitment to these beliefs — whatever he thinks privately — will push him to act in line with them.

Patel, in short, is the kind of man who could become Trump’s Hoover: a man willing to push federal law enforcement into dangerously anti-democratic territory in pursuit of alleged domestic enemies.

The world according to Kash Patel

Patel owes his career to Russiagate: the seemingly never-ending fight over whether the 2016 Trump campaign colluded with Russian efforts to interfere in American elections. 

Patel worked as a staffer for then-Rep. Devin Nunes, the Republican chair of the House subcommittee on intelligence and Trump’s chief defender during the controversy. Patel authored the famous 2018 “Nunes memo” arguing that the FBI application to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was filled with errors and motivated by political bias.

The memo got more right than many observers (including myself) gave it credit for at the time — though it did get the bigger picture about FBI bias wrong. Regardless, the incident turned Patel into a Trumpworld star. He ascended to several high-level positions in the first Trump administration relating to defense, national security, and intelligence.

These experiences have given Patel a worldview that I think is best defined as paranoid.

Patel believes that foreign enemies — ranging from China to Iran to drug cartels — are doing their best to infiltrate the United States and wreak havoc on its homeland. Only Trump has the strength and the fortitude to stand up against these enemies and defend American allies like Israel.

The Democrats, he believes, do not just disagree with Trump on how to handle these threats: They are actively aligned with America’s enemies.

In one War Room segment, for example, Patel hosted a discredited China “expert” named Gordon Chang to warn that China was “planning an attack on our facilities on our soil.” But it’s worse than that, Chang argued: China had installed Joe Biden as the president of the United States.

“They were actually able to cast the decisive vote in 2020,” Chang told Patel, claiming without evidence that China “poured money into Joe Biden’s campaign” through the Democratic crowdfunding platform ActBlue. Patel’s response was not skepticism but credulity: “I hope people are paying attention.”

But Democrats are not merely unwitting cat’s paws of foreign powers, per Patel: They are nefarious actors aiming to tear down American democracy.

One of Patel’s favorite phrases, one that he uses again and again on Bannon’s show, is “two-tiered system of justice.” In his mind, federal law enforcement employs two distinct standards — one for “the deep state’s” friends and another for its enemies. Its allies, like the Bidens, receive only limited and superficial scrutiny, while its enemies are constantly harassed and persecuted. The four prosecutions of Trump, for Patel, are not legitimate inquiries into wrongdoing and abuses of power, but rather agents of a corrupt system lashing out at the one man who threatens their grip on America.

For this reason, Patel has an enemies list — literally. His book Government Gangsters, which he is constantly hawking on War Room, contains an appendix listing dozens of names that comprise the “executive branch deep state.” The list ranges from names of people you know, like Vice President Kamala Harris, to people you’ve never heard of, like a former State Department diplomat named Elizabeth Dibble.

Patel’s potential power perversions

If this all reminds you of the most infamous director of the FBI — J. Edgar Hoover — well, it should. The two men share a dangerous tendency to link enemies foreign and domestic, and a willingness to entertain dangerous abuses of law enforcement powers in fighting them.

In his book Enemies, journalist Tim Weiner argues that Hoover’s worldview was defined by a bone-deep fear of Communist plots against the American homeland — up to and including physical attacks from “kamikaze airplanes” and “dirty bombs.” Hoover began maintaining a secret list of “enemies of the United States” inside of government and out, conducting illegal surveillance and other law-bending operations designed to bring them to heel. One example: a plot to convince Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself by threatening to expose the civil rights leader’s sexual indiscretions.

In theory, this is the kind of abuse of power that Patel is against. He rails constantly against government surveillance and abuses of power against political enemies.

Yet at the same time, he is constantly proposing schemes — like Congress arresting Garland — that amount to efforts to criminalize political disagreements. This includes proposals to investigate prominent Democrats and even prosecute journalists.

“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 in a guest appearance on War Room last year. 

“Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”