Since 1978, every FBI director has either been a former judge or a Department of Justice official. Kash Patel has never served in either of those capacities. He has also never been an FBI agent.

Since 2022, Patel has operated the Kash Foundation, a nonprofit supposedly dedicated to providing financial support to “those who have the courage to stand up against government wrongdoing.” 

• While Patel and his nonprofit’s directors reported that they do not receive compensation, in 2023, the group’s most significant expense was $275,475 in contracting fees paid to a company owned by Andrew Ollis, the foundation’s Vice President and Patel’s business partner at his MAGA merch shop Based Apparel. 
  

• In 2023, the Kash Foundation reported giving out collectively $168,000 in direct cash assistance to 50 anonymous individuals. Of the few individuals who have publicly identified themselves as Kash Foundation grantees, several took specific actions that would seem to benefit Patel and President Trump, such as two self-professed FBI whistleblowers who admitted to receiving money from Kash Patel around the same time that they testified to Congress that the FBI had become “weaponized.”
  

Patel has promised to combat human trafficking as FBI Director, but recently disclosed that he held between one and five million dollars in shares of Elite Depot Ltd., the controlling company of Chinese fast fashion retailer Shein. Multiple Shein investors have ties to the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese military apparatus, and since 2023, Shein has come under considerable fire for its alleged use of forced labor. 

In 2023, Patel published a book that included an enemies list of 60 people he deemed the “Executive Branch Deep State,” which named President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and a number of former Trump administration officials who refused to deny the results of the 2020 election. Patel has said he is on a “mission to annihilate the deep state” and has branded supposed “deep state” individuals as “criminals.”

Patel has ridden Trump’s coattails to personal wealth with multiple grift ventures. These included launching a price-jacked MAGA merch store, publishing three children’s books promoting lies about the Trump presidency and 2020 election, and receiving producer credits on a song featuring incarcerated insurrectionists, some of whom assaulted Capitol Police. 

• Patel has claimed that proceeds from his ventures have benefited January 6 insurrectionists, but there is little to no public documentation of this happening.