Written by Sarah N. Lynch
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican President-elect Donald Trump said on Saturday that he wants former National Security Director and firefighter Kash Patel to lead the FBI, implying that he intends to fire the agency’s current director, Christopher Wray.
Patel, who during the Trump administration advised both the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense, has previously called for the FBI to be stripped of its intelligence-gathering duties and to remove any personnel who refuse to support Trump’s agenda.
“The biggest problem the FBI has had is getting out of their intel stores. I was breaking that part of it. I was closing the FBI Hoover building on the first day and opening it the next day as a deep. state museum,” Patel said in a September interview on the Shawn Ryan Show.
“And I would take the 7,000 workers that work in that building and send them all over America to chase criminals. Go be the police. Be the police. Go be the police.”
With Patel’s nomination, Trump signals that he is preparing to carry out his threat to fire Wray, a Republican who was Trump’s first appointee, whose 10-year term at the FBI does not expire until 2027.
FBI directors are appointed by law to 10-year terms, as a way to protect the office from politics.
Wray, whom Trump tapped after firing James Comey in 2017 for investigating his 2016 campaign, has been under fire from Trump supporters.
During Wray’s tenure, the FBI conducted a court-ordered search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents and has been criticized for his role in overseeing Attorney General Merrick Garland’s executive order aimed at protecting the property. school boards from threats of violence and harassment.
Special counsel Jack Smith, who led two federal prosecutions against Trump for his role in rigging the 2020 election and keeping secret documents, on November 25 asked the judges presiding over those cases to drop them before Trump takes office on January 20, citing the Justice Department’s policy of not prosecuting a sitting president.
Previously, Wray had not intended to step down early and was busy planning events on his 2025 calendar, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Patel, 44, a former public defender and federal prosecutor, emerged as a controversial figure during Trump’s first term in the White House.
He was instrumental in working to lead the House Republican investigation into the 2016 FBI investigation into contacts between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia while serving as an aide to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes.
Later, during Trump’s first impeachment hearing, former National Security Council official Fiona Hill told House investigators that she was concerned that Patel was secretly working as a support channel for Trump and Ukraine without authorization.
Patel denied those allegations.
After Trump left office in January 2021, Patel was one of the few people Trump appointed as a representative for access to his presidential records. He was one of several former Trump administration officials who claimed, without evidence, that Trump had hidden all the records in question.
He was later subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in connection with the investigation.
As a private citizen, Patel wrote a book called “Government Gangsters” that Trump in 2023 announced would be used as a “roadmap to end Deep State Governance.”
Patel’s nomination is likely to bring backlash from Senate Democrats and possibly some Republicans, although Patel has received public support from some high-profile Republicans such as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
(This story has been reposted to correct the day of the week in section 1)
