Kash Patel

Kashyap "Kash" Patel is the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, confirmed by the Senate 51 to 49 on February 20, 2025. A former public defender and Department of Justice national security prosecutor, he was senior counsel to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and served in Donald Trump's first administration on the National Security Council and as chief of staff to the acting Secretary of Defense. In his first year as director the bureau was tasked with House requests on the declassification of its Jeffrey Epstein holdings, joined the unsigned Justice Department memorandum of July 7, 2025 finding "no incriminating 'client list,'" and faced Senate questioning on the files.¹²³⁴

Career

Patel graduated from the University of Richmond in 2002 with a degree in criminal justice and history, took a law degree and a certificate in international law from University College London, and worked as a public defender in Florida from 2005. From 2014 he was a national security prosecutor in the Justice Department, prosecuting defendants linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, and served as the department's liaison officer to Joint Special Operations Command. As national security advisor and senior counsel to the House intelligence committee he led its inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election and, in the FBI's own biography of him, "unearthed U.S. intelligence malpractice during the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation." In the first Trump administration he was deputy assistant to the president for counterterrorism on the National Security Council and then chief of staff to the acting Secretary of Defense. He is the author of Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy (2023).¹

Confirmation

Trump nominated "Kashyap Patel, of Nevada, to be Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for a term of ten years" (PN12-35). The Senate confirmed him on February 20, 2025, 51 to 49 (Vote No. 61), with the Republican senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voting no with all Democrats.²

The Epstein Files

On February 21, 2025, the day after his confirmation, the bureau's congressional affairs staff reported "receipt of five letters from Chairman Comer and Chairwoman Luna requesting briefings on the declassification process of documents regarding various FBI equities and to view the relevant documents," addressed to Patel from James Comer of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and Anna Paulina Luna. The attachments were titled for the September 11 attacks, an "Assassination" letter, COVID-19 origins, unidentified anomalous phenomena and Epstein. The next day an official wrote to the team, "to get ahead of this inevitable data call, please assign for action Monday am with a COB Monday deadline. We'll need a RIDS inventory of what we have on these five subjects in the below categories: Vault posts / Preprocessed / Requests in progress / UAP state of play / Any open litigations and status."³

The unsigned two-page memorandum of July 7, 2025, on Justice Department and FBI letterhead, stated that searches had "uncovered a significant amount of material, including more than 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence," that the "systematic review revealed no incriminating 'client list,'" that there was "no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions," that "Epstein harmed over one thousand victims," and that "no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted." It stated that FBI investigators "concluded that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on August 10, 2019," and that the bureau had "enhanced" the jail camera footage "by increasing its contrast, balancing the color, and improving its sharpness," releasing "full raw and enhanced" versions.⁴

On July 18, 2025 the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dick Durbin, wrote to Patel citing reports that bureau personnel "were instructed to 'flag' any records in which President Trump was mentioned" during the review, and quoting Patel's post of July 12 on reported friction with Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Director Dan Bongino: "The conspiracy theories just aren't true, never have been." Durbin asked for answers by August 1, 2025.⁵

At a Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on September 16, 2025, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana asked Patel to whom Epstein had trafficked his victims besides himself. Patel answered: "There is no credible information, none. If there were, I would bring the case yesterday that he trafficked to other individuals." He added, "I am not saying that others were not trafficked and others were not involved," and said the bureau held only "limited search warrants" from the Florida investigation of 2006 and 2007.⁶