Patel had arrived in court wearing a borrowed, ill-fitting jacket, wrinkled khakis, and boat shoes. Hughes asked, “And where is your tie? Where is your suit?”
The judge demanded to see Patel’s passport. “If you want to be a lawyer, dress like a lawyer,” he said. He then asked Patel what purpose there was “to me and to the people of America to have you fly down here at their expense, eat at their expense, and stay at their expense. . . . You don’t add a bit of value, do you?” The judge tossed Patel out of his chambers and sanctioned him with an obscure disciplinary measure known as an “order on ineptitude.”
Hughes had a history of making inappropriate comments in court about minorities, including Indian Americans, and Patel believed that Hughes had singled him out for abuse. A Washington Post story that chronicled Patel’s humiliation—and the judge’s cruelty—was meant to be lighthearted, but Patel viewed the piece as a hit job. Years later, he was still stewing over the coverage. “They ran with it and dragged my name through the mud,” he wrote in his book. “It was far from the last time the media would slander me.”
The tie incident “was very personal for Kash,” an attorney who worked at Main Justice at the time said. “It was the beginning of his turn.” In the years that followed, Patel would lash out at the D.O.J. for refusing to “stand up for me after being attacked by the unstable judge in Houston.” He also began to malign news organizations that “will do anything to stop you.” Since 2019, Patel has filed defamation lawsuits against the Times, CNN, and Politico, all of which he either later withdrew or saw thrown out by a judge. Patel has also proposed requiring federal workers to sign nondisclosure agreements and have their phones and laptops scanned monthly for any contacts with the press. “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig Presidential elections,” he told Steve Bannon on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, in 2023. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
A number of Patel’s colleagues told me that he is prone to viewing the government, the media, and career politicians as part of a larger cabal. Rogan joked with him about this tendency. “We love conspiracies, don’t we?” he said during their interview. “We love the craziest conspiracies. They’re exciting.”
Patel chuckled and said, “They’re our thing.”
After the 2016 election, Devin Nunes, then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, approached Patel and offered him a position investigating allegations that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia. Patel turned it down, thinking that a job in the Capitol would be a bore. “I NEVER wanted to work on the Hill,” he wrote in his book. He was hungry to get to the White House, ideally to the National Security Council. But Nunes persisted, telling Patel that, if he accepted the job, the congressman would do everything he could to parlay the position into a White House gig. Patel took the deal, a decision that, he said, “would change my life—and change America—forever.”
Patel’s methods quickly became controversial. Soon after joining the House-committee staff, in 2017, he pushed to subpoena the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the N.S.A., seeking evidence that the Obama Administration had tried to “unmask” the names of Trump campaign officials who were mentioned in intelligence intercepts. A couple of months later, Patel and another Republican staffer travelled to London, where they showed up at the law office that represented Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent who had compiled a since-discredited report alleging strong ties between Trump and Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. Patel reportedly failed to inform either the American Embassy or Democrats on the Intelligence Committee about the visit. He wrote in his book that he and his colleague did not go to London to find Steele, but were there on an unrelated matter and decided, impromptu, “to stop by the office.” Patel wrote that he “left immediately after we were told that he was unavailable,” and “then enjoyed a full English breakfast, got on the plane, and headed home.”
“It’s always been ‘the three little pigs’ this and ‘the three little pigs’ that. I’m here to announce I’m going solo.”
Cartoon by Victoria Roberts
That summer, Patel and Nunes went to Vicenza, Italy, on a congressional junket to, as Patel put it, “improve our intelligence community.” One night, the two men met in the town square for Negronis. It was a ritual that Nunes called “the final,” a chance to recap the day’s work. Patel had already learned that the F.B.I. had relied on the Steele dossier to obtain a wiretap on Carter Page. He now pressed Nunes to subpoena records from Fusion GPS, the research firm that had contracted with Steele to gather intelligence on Trump. Nunes was reluctant, but Patel told him that the records would reveal who had paid for the Steele dossier in the first place. “If I was wrong,” Patel said, “he could fire me right on the spot.”
