WASHINGTON — (AP) — The FBI agents who searched Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate found boxes of classified documents in his office and storage room and retrieved sensitive government secrets about nuclear systems and weapons capabilities.
One person unmoved by the gravity of the allegations: Kash Patel.
Days after Trump’s June 2023 indictment on charges of hoarding the documents, Patel insisted to listeners of his “Kash’s Corner” podcast that Trump was permitted under a law known as the Presidential Records Act to take classified records with him when he left the White House.
“When you’re president and you leave, you can take whatever you want,” Patel said, advancing an argument later adopted by Trump’s lawyers but dismissed as meritless by the Justice Department. “And when you take it, whether it’s classified or not, it’s yours.”
It's but one example of how Patel positioned himself as a steadfast Trump loyalist well before the president picked him to run the FBI. An Associated Press review of more than 100 podcasts that Patel hosted or on which he was interviewed over the last four years reveals how Patel has habitually denigrated the investigations into Trump, sowed doubt in the criminal justice system, criticized the decision-making of the institution he's been asked to lead and professed sympathy for jailed Jan 6. rioters.
The vast catalog of provocative public statements, sometimes made in the company of like-minded FBI antagonists, provides an unusually extensive record of a nominee’s unvarnished and controversial worldviews. At his Senate confirmation hearing Thursday, Democrats are likely to seize on Patel’s often explosive — and conspiracy-riddled — commentary, which is unprecedented in volume, tone and substance for a potential FBI leader. While those critics say his views make him unfit for the job, his supporters argue the FBI needs someone as brash as Patel to shake up the agency.
Asked to respond to his comments, Patel spokeswoman Erica Knight said the nominee “looks forward to his upcoming hearing as an opportunity to highlight his extensive experience and present the truth to the American people in a comprehensive and meaningful way.”
The AP’s review found that Patel frequently expressed the same views — or iterations of them — on various podcasts:
"Those same criminal gangsters at the FBI and DOJ are running this Mar-a-Lago raid investigation," Patel said in August 2022 on his show, "Kash's Corner," for The Epoch Times, a pro-Trump media company that has been a key online supporter of the president and spreader of conspiracy theories.
"Gangsters” is a favored Patel term for federal investigators he perceives as tainted by anti-Trump bias. It’s even part of the title of his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy.”
Patel has sought to distinguish his dim view of the FBI's leadership, direction and decision-making from what he says is his support for the rank-and-file. But his harsh rhetoric about the bureau could nonetheless create an awkward dynamic if he’s confirmed to lead the 38,000-person premier federal law enforcement agency.
The name-calling in this instance — he's also called intelligence officials "bozos" and "Muppets" — is consistent with Patel's scathingly critical perspective of the investigations into Trump's interference in the 2020 election and his retention of classified documents at his Florida resort after he left office.
Trump faced felony charges in the two cases, but the indictments were abandoned by prosecutors after he won the November election because of Justice Department policy prohibiting the federal prosecution of a sitting president.
Patel's reference to investigators as the "same criminal gangsters" is part of a persistent effort to draw a straight line between the documents probe and a 2016 investigation into Trump and Russian election interference, notwithstanding significant differences in FBI and Justice Department personnel in the two inquiries.
Patel rocketed to prominence as a House staffer through his criticism of the Russia investigation, which he's dubbed "one of the biggest conspiracies ever perpetuated against a presidential candidate and then president." He's made a name for himself in MAGA circles by seeking to expose what he has described as misconduct in how the probe was pursued. Later reviews by the Justice Department inspector general and a specially appointed prosecutor identified significant flaws with that investigation, though neither presented evidence that partisan bias had guided specific decisions.
“We need to really educate the world on the weaponization of justice that occurred on January 6th,” Patel said in January 2024 on “The Alec Lace Show," as he called the prosecutions of U.S. Capitol rioters “baseless."
The FBI arrested more than 1,500 people arising from the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and many of them pleaded guilty to serious crimes. The recently departed FBI director, Christopher Wray, bluntly labeled the violence as "domestic terrorism" and has called the attack emblematic of a rapidly growing threat of homegrown extremism.
Patel, like Trump, has taken a different view, saying the rioters have been mistreated by the criminal justice system. A former federal public defender and prosecutor, he has called them “political prisoners” and offered on at least one occasion to represent them for free.
Patel will almost certainly be asked if he supports Trump's sweeping grant of clemency to all Jan. 6 defendants. The pardons, sentence commutations and indictment dismissals upended the largest investigation in Justice Department history, benefiting even those found guilty of violent attacks on police, along with leaders of far-right extremist groups who plotted to keep Trump in power.
Patel's support for the defendants has included more than just rhetoric. He's boasted about having helped produce a song, "Justice for All," that was recorded over a prison phone line, sung by a group of Jan. 6 defendants and overlaid with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
“The powerful thing about it,” he said in a 2023 podcast, “is the people who have been impacted most are the ones raising awareness.”
He's also talked up a right-wing conspiracy theory that Ray Epps, an Arizona man arrested in connection with Jan. 6, was actually an undercover operative for the FBI — something Epps has adamantly denied and prosecutors have described as false.
And he's been openly skeptical about the FBI’s use of confidential informants related to Jan. 6 at a time when conspiracy theorists have suggested, inaccurately, that the bureau helped instigate the violence.
The department's internal watchdog said in a report last month that no undercover FBI agents were in the crowd on Jan. 6, and that though more than two dozen FBI informants were in Washington that day, none was tasked by the FBI with entering the building or breaking the law.
“It’s up to Congress, who has law enforcement capabilities, to go out there, arrest Chris Wray and hold him in contempt in a jail cell until the document’s produced,” Patel said on “Kash’s Corner” in June 2023.
Patel in recent years has mused about the idea of Wray, who stepped down as FBI director on Jan. 19, being arrested for the FBI's failure to promptly turn over records subpoenaed by Congress — an outcome he's acknowledged as extreme but one he contends would befall less prominent people who ignored lawmaker demands for documents.
That position could come back to haunt Patel, particularly if Democrats take back a chamber of Congress in 2026.
He's also suggested that Congress could withhold or restrict “pockets of money” to induce cooperation with its document demands.
“You ground Chris Wray's private jet that he pays for with taxpayer dollars to hop around the country. You take away the fancy new fleet of cars from DOJ that they’re going to use to shuffle around executives,” he said in 2023 on “Kash’s Corner." “You stop the construction of new buildings.”
What will a Director Patel say if Democrats push to limit funding for his flights on FBI jets?
“Once President Trump hopefully gets back in power, there’ll be an investigation into members of Congress who destroyed and withheld evidence from law enforcement agencies," Patel said in March 2024 on "In the Litter Box w/ Jewels and Catturd."
Patel's stated desire to rid the government of "conspirators" has raised alarms he could direct the FBI to target Trump's adversaries, even though long-established FBI guidelines are meant to protect against investigative abuses and require that criminal inquiries be rooted in a legitimate purpose.
Like Trump, Patel has channeled particular ire toward the House committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol. He told Catturd, a right-wing social media personality whose real name is Phillip Buchanan, that a Trump victory could result in investigations of lawmakers who have committed "federal felonies" and "covered up the truth from the American people."
That rhetoric wasn't lost on former President Joe Biden, who on his final day in office preemptively pardoned members of that committee, as well as Dr. Anthony Fauci and retired Gen. Mark Milley.
Fauci and House lawmakers are just some of the targets Patel has excoriated. His book includes a list of people he identifies as "members of the Executive Branch Deep State," including former Attorney General William Barr — who disputed Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen — and Andrew McCabe, the former FBI acting director and a top figure in the Russia investigation.
Ahead of Thursday’s hearing, Senate Judiciary Democrats circulated a social media post that they said Patel shared in 2022 in which he was depicted as taking a chainsaw to news organizations and high-profile members of Congress.
Democrats will make the prospect of reprisal center stage at Patel's confirmation hearing, something they foreshadowed with pointed questions about him directed at Trump's attorney general pick, Pam Bondi, during her own hearing this month.
When Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, asked Bondi if she would have hired someone who had an “enemies list” into her office when she was Florida attorney general, she replied: “Senator, to cut to the chase, you’re clearly talking about Kash Patel. I don’t believe he has an enemies list.”
A “toilet rag” is how Patel described Vice Media on a podcast when it declared bankruptcy two years ago. He has frequently attacked media organizations and reporters, accusing them of publishing “fake news.” He has also threatened reporters with serious consequences for crossing Trump.
"We're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections," Patel told Steve Bannon, a Trump ally who served four months in prison for defying a congressional subpoena and who has also warned about retribution against Trump adversaries, in December 2023.
Patel later backed off some of his statements about the media, telling NBC News last February that reporters are "invaluable" and that his threat referred only to those who have broken the law.
But he’ll face pressure from his party to go after journalists, as well as election officials and activists that Republicans have accused of crimes.
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Associated Press Artificial Intelligence Product Manager Ernest Kung contributed to this report.
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