Talk:Kash Patel/GA2: Difference between revisions

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I think overall his views on the deep state should be covered in more detail. There is probably a small section worth of content here.[[User:Czarking0|Czarking0]] ([[User talk:Czarking0|talk]]) 04:50, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

==== Government ~~gangseters=~~===

=== Government ===

Here is what the article says about the memoir spread out through multiple sections:

* {{xt|Patel wrote Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, a memoir that falsely describes the origins of the FBI investigation into Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the authorization to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump advisor. An appendix to Government Gangsters includes a list of 60 names labeled “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State”.[150] The list has been widely interpreted as an enemies list,[d] though Patel rejected that term in his Senate confirmation hearing.[157] The memoir was later adapted into a documentary produced by former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.}}

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* <blockquote>Bloomberg News identified six cases that Patel has filed since 2019. Four involved defamation claims. The other two were against a federal agency and former US officials that Patel accused of violating his rights. Taken together, they show how Patel has taken action in what he described in a 2023 book as a “battle” against “government gangsters” and “peddlers of propaganda.”</blockquote>

My thoughts:

My thoughts

# Given the balance of the sources the claim regarding his suit with the DoJ seems to be simultaneously undue weight and missing significant context. [[User:Czarking0|Czarking0]] ([[User talk:Czarking0|talk]]) 15:41, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

# I think the emphasis on Page is fair but some of the other themes here should be similarly emphasized.[[User:Czarking0|Czarking0]] ([[User talk:Czarking0|talk]]) 15:42, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

=== Spot Checks ===

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

Nominator: ElijahPepe (talk · contribs) 13:28, 16 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: Czarking0 (talk · contribs) 04:00, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I’ll take this one Czarking0 (talk) 04:00, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Starting with eligibility nom has 88% of current authorship. Second most edits at 93. Czarking0 (talk) 04:01, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Earwig has several findings but all are phrases like Directory of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or attributed quotes in the article.Czarking0 (talk) 04:09, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I’m skeptical of citing claims directly from Patel himself, though the questionnaire does appear reliable, at least based on the muted references to Benghazi. elijahpepe@wikipedia (he/him) 04:18, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

routing arrest warrants seems like unexplained jargon. What does it mean to route arrest warrants?

Patel sent warrants to judges for approval. elijahpepe@wikipedia (he/him) 04:18, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Patel served as a board member of the South Asian Bar Association of North America Can this be attributed to any additional sources? I take this source to indicate that his answers overall are notable but not that each of them is due for inclusion.Czarking0 (talk) 04:21, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Not any source worth including. I did search for the organization and Patel’s name in search of sources that could confirm other very specific details, to no luck. elijahpepe@wikipedia (he/him) 04:23, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

but he was allegedly removed over disagreements he had with the office leading the case, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia This is one of those cases where if the allegedly is important then you should note who is doing the alleging if it is not then you should probably drop the allegedly.Czarking0 (talk) 04:23, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Should be fixed. Patel was punished, but he denies that he was removed. elijahpepe@wikipedia (he/him) 05:01, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Later, he incorrectly said he had been the case’s lead prosecutor. Based on the source I think incorrectly said is not the right phrasing considering he published this in a book he wrote. Not a tweet, not an off the cuff remark in an interview, it was in a book that presumably went through an editing process. To quote NYT

Mr. Patel has repeatedly made it sound as if he led the government’s overall effort to investigate and prosecute militants involved in the 2012 attack. As Mr. Patel himself acknowledges, he worked at the department’s Washington headquarters, or “Main Justice,” and he did not remain for the duration of the investigation.

Czarking0 (talk) 04:28, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

From Rice, “Patel was not in charge, as he has often suggested, but he did play an aggressive role” this seems like a bit of a pattern for Patel. A bit more of this in the sources and I would suggest a small section.Czarking0 (talk) 04:59, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That is not the article I wrote. For future reference, the draft I merged is here. Some other users have rewritten sections. elijahpepe@wikipedia (he/him) 05:01, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A liaison is a coordinator, and that is the term that CBS News used. I imagine that “legal counsel” was not his role, otherwise that would have been used. elijahpepe@wikipedia (he/him) 05:01, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Nunes

The New York Times later reported that he was the primary author of the Nunes memo,[9] which alleged that Federal Bureau of Investigation officials abused their authority in the FBI investigation into links between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials, seeking a warrant for Carter Page, an advisor to Donald Trump, and relying on claims made by Christopher Steele, a British intelligence officer who was allegedly paid by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. I sure hope this is the longest sentence in the article better yet I hope it gets split.Czarking0 (talk) 05:04, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Given that Rice contradicts this NYT attributed claim, I think some more reworking on this section with a wider view of the sources would help. Also for two years of this life this might be a bit brief.
From Rice “Patel was not in charge, as he has often suggested, but he did play an aggressive role, clashing with members of the Trump administration who got in his way. He reportedly once used his congressional credentials to enter the CIA’s headquarters and tried to personally serve then-Director Mike Pompeo with a subpoena.” seems notableCzarking0 (talk) 05:11, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hardan incident

Made a little section for this because I have several thoughts.
At a trial for Omar Faraj Saeed al-Hardan, a Palestinian accused of providing material support to the Islamic State, Judge Lynn Hughes repeatedly berated Patel for his unprofessional attire and had him removed from the court chambers. Patel had flown from Tajikistan to the courtroom in Texas, although he was not required to be present

accused should be updated^[1]
From the same source there is

Hughes, 74, is something of a maverick, known for courtroom outbursts and comments about race that have led some plaintiffs to call on him to recuse himself. At a pretrial conference in a discrimination case involving an Indian American, for instance, he discussed “Adolf Hitler’s use of swastikas, the origin of Caucasians and the futility of diversity programs at universities,” according to a report in the Texas Observer.

So I don’t think the claim here represents a NPOV of this source.
Ellen Nakashima and Julie Tate contributed to this report. Should be added to the ref.

As far as I’m aware, that is not a GA requirement nor a general requirement. WP:CITEHOW only mentions that the byline should be included for {{Cite news}}. elijahpepe@wikipedia (he/him) 05:04, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

although he was not required to be present basically seems like OR someone almost certainly required him to be present those people are presumably the ones that authorized payment for his flight. The transcript in the source reads like an angry old man looking for a brown man to hate on.

Here is the Atlantic’s retrospective reporting on the incident:

Judge Lynn Nettleton Hughes lost it. “If you want to be a lawyer, dress like a lawyer,” Hughes snapped in chambers. “Act like a lawyer.” Hughes proceeded to berate Patel as “just one more nonessential employee from Washington.” “What is the utility to me and to the people of America to have you fly down here at their expense?” he said. “You don’t add a bit of value, do you?” The judge dismissed Patel from chambers.

Patel’s bosses were furious on his behalf. Hughes, then 74, had a history of eruptions in court, including disturbing remarks about race. Three years earlier, an Indian American plaintiff had tried but failed to have the judge removed from his discrimination case after Hughes held forth in a pretrial conference on “Adolf Hitler’s use of swastikas, the origin of Caucasians and the futility of diversity programs at universities,” the Texas Observer reported. DOJ officials’ attempts to get a transcript of the Patel exchange only enraged Hughes further; the judge issued an “Order on Ineptitude” castigating the “pretentious lawyers” at Main Justice.
The Washington Post included all of this in a report on the incident. In the article, Patel comes across as a sympathetic figure. But the Justice Department chose not to comment, and for Patel, this was what counted. He writes in his book that, although his superiors privately praised him for keeping a level head, they “refused to say any of that publicly,” standing by as the media “dragged my name through the mud.”
Patel brought complaints again and again to the leadership of the department’s National Security Division—adamant that something be done to hold the Texas prosecutors to account for not standing up for him in front of the judge, one of his former DOJ colleagues recalled. It wasn’t that his superiors had failed to understand his frustration; yes, they agreed, the judge was a “wack job,” in the words of the second former DOJ colleague, and they had called the U.S. Attorney’s Office to express their disappointment. “I finally said, ‘I don’t really know what else you want,’ ” the first former colleague recalled. “ ‘The U.S. attorney is presidentially appointed, like, I—what do you want us to do?’ ”

“He just felt so aggrieved,” this person added, “and this continued throughout the rest of his tenure. And I actually think it was part of why he left.”

Seems like additional context is warranted.

Czarking0 (talk) 04:44, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Deep state

The article consistently says he promoted conspiracy theories about the deep state. This is a fine claim for the lead but the body should be much more precise as covered in several sources for example from Rice.

Government Gangsters includes a now-notorious appendix that names 60 individuals as agents of the “deep state.” “It’s not an enemies list,” Patel said at his confirmation hearing, claiming the appendix was merely meant to be a “glossary.” But that’s not how he spoke when he was promoting the book and campaigning for Trump. “I’m going on a government-gangsters manhunt,” he said in a speech last year at CPAC. “Who’s coming with me?” Trump went so far as to blurb Government Gangsters and called it his “blueprint” for taking back the government.

I think overall his views on the deep state should be covered in more detail. There is probably a small section worth of content here.Czarking0 (talk) 04:50, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Government gangsters

Here is what the article says about the memoir spread out through multiple sections:

Patel wrote Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, a memoir that falsely describes the origins of the FBI investigation into Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the authorization to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump advisor. An appendix to Government Gangsters includes a list of 60 names labeled “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State”.[150] The list has been widely interpreted as an enemies list,[d] though Patel rejected that term in his Senate confirmation hearing.[157] The memoir was later adapted into a documentary produced by former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.
although he was interested in medical school programs,[8] he was inspired by defense lawyers who golfed at the club
In May, he sued the Department of Defense over a review of his memoir, Government Gangsters (2023).
calls for weakening civil service job protections;[133] Trump praised the book as a “roadmap to end the Deep State’s reign”.

Here is what the sources say:
Rice:

“posits the FBI has been controlled by criminals, “
Government Gangsters includes a now-notorious appendix that names 60 individuals as agents of the “deep state.” “It’s not an enemies list,” Patel said at his confirmation hearing, claiming the appendix was merely meant to be a “glossary.” But that’s not how he spoke when he was promoting the book and campaigning for Trump. “I’m going on a government-gangsters manhunt,” “Who’s coming with me?” Trump went so far as to blurb Government Gangsters and called it his “blueprint” for taking back the government.
““They are the criminals,” he wrote in Government Gangsters, “we are the ones who are persecuted.””
“he says Schiff, now a senator, is “from the inner circle of Dante’s Inferno.””
Some of the people named in the appendix to Government Gangsters say they have no idea why they are on his list. Many are well known, but there are some who served at relatively low levels, including current and former FBI agents. “I’m not calling for any sort of harm to them physically,” Patel said on Kash’s Corner.
Patel has articulated some substantive proposals for structural reforms. Government Gangsters contains several incongruously wonky chapters that read like they’re coming from a former public defender. He says he wants greater transparency and increased safeguards for civil liberties at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorizes the FBI to secretly intercept electronic communications. His critique of the head count at headquarters, around 7,000 employees, is widely shared among those who have worked at the bureau, even if they don’t think the answer is to turn the building into a museum. (Patel claims the proposal was hyperbolic but he’s serious about redeploying resources — as the reported 1,500 relocations attest. “You’re cops — go be cops,” he says.)

Goldman:

Patel distorted the Justice Department’s decisions.

“Despite the fact that we had reams of evidence against dozens of terrorists in the Benghazi attack, Eric Holder’s Justice Department decided to only prosecute one of the attackers.”

“By the time the D.O.J. was moving in full force to compile evidence and bring prosecutions against the Benghazi terrorists, I was leading the prosecution’s efforts at Main Justice in Washington, D.C.”
Patel trivialized the case against an attack ringleader.

“Ultimately, when it came to Benghazi, the Obama administration, the F.B.I. and the D.O.J. wanted to seem tough on terrorism, so they kept minimal prosecutions open and brought up big-sounding charges that we couldn’t support.”

Savage:

“served to delegitimize the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, stoke baseless suspicions that the F.B.I. helped instigate the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and muddy the waters of the inquiry into Mr. Trump’s refusal to return classified documents after leaving office.”
The origins of the Russia investigation

The root of Russia-gate is the Steele Dossier paid for by the Hillary Clinton for President Campaign and the DNC. … The fake dossier was the linchpin for the whole operation. This was yet another detail the Deep State tried to hide when Obama’s former director of national intelligence James Clapper went on to CNN and said that the dossier was not used to start the investigation. It was a flat-out lie, but it did serve Clapper’s true purpose, which was to help his Deep State allies at the F.B.I.

The Carter Page wiretap applications

   Steele would leak the information, then the F.B.I. would use the media reports planted by their own source to bolster its investigations. One particular story went to Michael Isikoff at Yahoo News, which discussed how Trump campaign aide Carter Page traveled to Moscow … in order to justify part of their FISA warrant application on Carter Page. … The F.B.I. knew about Steele’s bias and that the Clinton campaign and the DNC had paid for the dossier at the time they submitted their FISA warrant application to spy on Carter Page, but they never told the FISA judge either of these facts, as was required by law.
   — “Government Gangsters”

To put the Carter Page FISA warrant into perspective, this wasn’t just routine police work. By getting a FISA warrant on Carter Page, the F.B.I. effectively had the ability to spy on most, if not all, of the Trump campaign communications, including messages from Donald Trump himself. That’s because these warrants don’t just let the F.B.I. observe the subject of the warrant but also people one or even two degrees removed from the subject. That means the entire Trump campaign could have been in the F.B.I. dragnet. … As I mentioned earlier, the F.B.I. didn’t need to spy on Donald Trump personally because a single surveillance warrant on one person in the campaign would give them the ability to do all the spying they could need on effectively any person in the campaign, including the candidate himself.

Calabro:

“It was only a matter of time before they found each other, is how Patel seemed to see it. Just a “couple of guys from Queens,” he has said, trying to synonymize his brand with Trump’s home borough, and the scrappy knuckle-crack caricature that comes with it. In Government Gangsters, Patel reminds readers of this piece of shared heritage four times.”
In Garden City, Patel caddied for “very wealthy” and “important” New Yorkers at the local country club, some of them defense attorneys, he writes in Government Gangsters; as they played, he listened to their stories about the drama of court. “I could be a first-generation immigrant lawyer at a white shoe firm making a ton of money,” Patel thought. After he graduated from the University of Richmond and then Pace University’s law school, however, his dreams of Big Law and high retainers were complicated when, by his account, no firm would hire him.
The lesson of the bench slap and its aftermath, as Patel explains in Government Gangsters, was this: Although he had tried “to do my best to serve my country,” senior government officials had “refused to step up to the plate” for him in return. Patel decided to stop working for “cowards.”

The bench slap here is the Hardan incident above.
Patel tends to emphasize his reluctance when he recounts going to work for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in April 2017, whether he is a teal-caped wizard in the telling or just another 30-something civil servant looking for the next thing. He has said that when he first met with Nunes, the committee’s Republican chair, about a staff opening on the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, he thought the job sounded boring; what Patel had really wanted, since Trump’s election, was to work in the White House. But Nunes won him over, Patel writes in Government Gangsters, by promising to recommend him for a spot on Trump’s National Security Council once the probe concluded.
“60 names in Patel’s compendium of “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State,” found in Appendix B of Government Gangsters.”

Tillman:

Patel worked for the House Intelligence Committee and served in senior national security posts in the Trump administration. Patel sued the Defense Department in May 2023, suggesting it was “unreasonably” delaying a review of his memoir manuscript because he was critical of government officials. Patel withdrew the case two months later and his book was published that fall.

Bloomberg News identified six cases that Patel has filed since 2019. Four involved defamation claims. The other two were against a federal agency and former US officials that Patel accused of violating his rights. Taken together, they show how Patel has taken action in what he described in a 2023 book as a “battle” against “government gangsters” and “peddlers of propaganda.”

My thoughts

Given the balance of the sources the claim regarding his suit with the DoJ seems to be simultaneously undue weight and missing significant context. Czarking0 (talk) 15:41, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think the emphasis on Page is fair but some of the other themes here should be similarly emphasized.Czarking0 (talk) 15:42, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Spot Checks

raised Hindu Done
He left the Department of Justice in 2017, later saying that the impetus for his departure had been the department’s response to the 2016 presidential election Basically Done however maybe it would be better to say it is more about the response of leaders in the department rather than the department as an institution?

Nunes

Hardan incident

Deep state

Government gangsters

My thoughts

Spot Checks

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