Mother Jones illustration; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Zuma; Ajay Suresh/Wikimedia
In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters, which claims a supposed Deep State has been plotting against Donald Trump for years, Kash Patel, whom Trump has tapped to replace Chris Wray as FBI director, recounts his three-year stint as a mid-level attorney at the Justice Department. For him, this gig was apparently a radical learning experience. During that time, Patel writes, he came to see that the top leaders of the government were “political gangsters, frauds, and hypocrites.” Yet in the book and in interviews, Patel has embellished his own work at the department.
Patel, previously a public defender in Miami, was a lawyer at the Justice Department’s counterterrorism section from late 2013 until after the 2016 election. In his book, he calls it “a dream job for a young and ambitious lawyer,” and he states that he played a key role in the Benghazi case, in which the FBI and the Justice Department pursued the culprits responsible for the September 11, 2012, attack on a US diplomatic compound in Libya that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. “I was leading the prosecution’s efforts at Main Justice in Washington, DC,” Patel writes.
Several FBI and Justice Department officials who worked the Benghazi case say this description is an exaggeration. Asked about Patel’s characterization, a former FBI special agent who was on that investigation for years exclaimed, “Oh my god, no. Not on that case. Not on Benghazi.”
“Kash has claimed he made certain decisions on what crimes should have been charged and should not have been. He did not make those decisions. He had no major role.”
This former agent said that the counterterrorism section had a small role in the Benghazi probe. Primarily, the FBI and the US attorney’s office in Washington, DC, handled the case. “I don’t recall Patel having any influence on it,” he said. He recounted one meeting during the investigation that Patel attended in which Patel was not taken seriously by the main attorneys on the investigation. “The issue was whether or not we had the information needed to make a charge,” the former agent said. “He wasn’t a very experienced attorney and was dismissed by some of the attorneys at the table. The message was, we’re not paying attention to you.”
A former official in the counterterrorism section pointed out that Patel “briefly” worked on the Benghazi case but “made no major decisions.” He added, “Kash has claimed he made certain decisions on what crimes should have been charged and should not have been. He did not make those decisions. He had no major role.”
Andrew McCabe, a former top FBI official who oversaw much of the Benghazi investigation, said he didn’t recall Patel playing any significant part in that case: “I was deeply involved in that case and personally involved in numerous meetings and briefings and interactions with Justice Department personnel. I don’t believe I ever met the guy. While it is possible we did meet or that we were in the same meeting on occasion, he was not one of the many people I worked closely with while overseeing the FBI’s long investigation of the attack.” (In his book, Patel includes McCabe on his list of purported anti-Trump Deep Staters who deserve “investigation.” Patel has vowed to seek revenge against Trump’s opponents, and Trump recently suggested he expects Patel to take such steps if he becomes FBI chief.)
Since writing his 2023 book, Patel has repeated his claim that he was a “lead prosecutor” on the Benghazi case. “I was the Main Justice lead prosecutor for Benghazi,” Patel said in a YouTube interview earlier this year. NBC News subsequently reported, “The Justice Department’s 2017 announcement that the Libyan [Ahmed Abu Khattala] had been charged in the attack and of his conviction in a 2019 federal trial do not list Patel as the lead prosecutor or as part of the prosecution team.”
The New York Times, too, has reported that Patel “has repeatedly claimed he was the ‘lead prosecutor’ in” the Benghazi case, but was “a junior Justice Department staff member at the time, and he was not part of the trial team.”
In his book, Patel claimed that he argued for a more aggressive prosecution of the Benghazi case and contended the investigation was unduly influenced by political decisions made to protect the Obama administration. But the former counterterrorism official disputed this, saying that there was “no political interference” and that Kash was not part of the discussions in which the critical decisions were made.
In an email to Patel, Mother Jones asked him to respond to the statements from the former FBI and Justice Department officials challenging his description of his involvement in the Benghazi case. Replying for Patel, Alex Pfieffer, a Trump transition team spokesperson, addressed only the McCabe comment: “Kash was assigned as the lead prosecutor for Main Justice in DC on the Benghazi case as part of his role as a national security prosecutor in the Obama Justice Department. Andrew McCabe was fired from the FBI after lying to investigators. He clearly resents that Kash will bring reform to the agency.”
(A 2018 Justice Department inspector general report concluded McCabe had “lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions” when he had been questioned about a leak to the Wall Street Journal. He was fired soon after. Three years later, the Justice Department reversed his dismissal and restored his pension, settling a lawsuit McCabe filed insisting that he had been fired for political reasons.)
In Government Gangsters, Patel also inflated his role in another terrorism case.
On the evening of July 11, 2010, bombs exploded at an Ethiopian restaurant and a rugby club in Kampala, Uganda, where patrons were watching the World Cup final. More than 70 people were killed, including an American who worked for a nonprofit. Al Shabaab, a Somali terrorist group with ties to Al Qaeda, claimed responsibility. Within days, the FBI’s New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, at the request of Ugandan authorities, dispatched a team of FBI agents, analysts, and forensic experts to assist the investigation.
Eventually, nine conspirators, including the accused mastermind, were captured and found guilty in Ugandan courts of assorted crimes related to the bombings. They received sentences ranging from five years to life imprisonment. This was a major victory for the fight against terrorism, for it marked, according to the BBC, “the first major conviction of al-Shabaab suspects outside Somalia.”
In his book, Patel boasted that he “served as the lead DoJ prosecutor” on this case. But there was no prosecution in the United States related to this bombing. “Kash was assisting the Ugandans,” the former counterterrorism official said. “There was no DoJ prosecution. He was for a time the DoJ lead in working with the Ugandans. But if that description makes you think he was prosecuting this case, that was incorrect.” A former FBI agent who worked for years on the Uganda investigation said, “No one on the team would have considered him a lead prosecutor. Maybe he did.”
In his reply to Mother Jones, Pfeiffer did not address these comments about Patel’s participation in the Uganda case. Instead, he noted, “Kash Patel received the Assistant Attorney General Award For Excellence in 2017 for his efforts assisting Uganda prosecute and convict the Al Shabaab terrorists responsible for the 2010 World Cup bombings.”
In response to a question about Patel’s statements indicating that he aims to pursue revenge against Trump’s political opponents and journalists, Pfeiffer said, “The FBI will target crime, not individuals with Kash leading the bureau,” and he maintained, “Kash is committed to safeguarding Americans’ First Amendment rights.”
The former counterterrorism official noted that Patel was a competent employee when he worked at this Justice Department section: “He was fine. He did his job. He’s exaggerated what he did for us. But I had no issue with him. He got along with the FBI and the military, who he often worked with. They had no issues with him. He wasn’t a problem. The one glitch was in Houston.” That glitch occurred when Patel had to rush from Tajikistan to a courtroom in Houston for a hearing in a case involving a suspected ISIS operative accused of planning to blow up an American shopping mall. The judge berated Patel for not wearing a tie and threw him out of his chambers. This kerfuffle drew some press attention, and in his book Patel bitterly expresses dismay that his superiors at the department did not stick up for him. “Cowards,” he wrote.
The former counterterrorism official noted that he and others who worked with Patel at the Justice Department have been surprised by Patel’s transformation into a self-proclaimed warrior against what he calls the Deep State. “He left the counterterrorism section to work for Devin Nunes [then the pro-Trump California Republican chairing the House Intelligence Committee], and the rest is history,” he said. “Up until then, he was a regular employee. He didn’t talk politics in the office that much. There was nothing to explain his view now that the DoJ should go after Trump’s enemies. I didn’t see this coming. None of the people I worked with saw this coming. I am mystified by what he’s become.”