FBI Director Christopher Wray announced Wednesday that he will step down at the end of President Joe Biden’s administration, meaning President-elect Donald Trump won’t have to fire him to appoint the longtime Cash ally. Patel to lead the service.

Trump announced in late November that he wanted to nominate Patel, who has repeated the president-elect’s pledges to make sweeping changes to the agency and use federal law enforcement to go after Trump’s perceived enemies. The FBI director is subject to Senate confirmation and can serve a 10-year term.

“Cash did an incredible job during my first term,” Trump commented on Truth Social, citing Patel’s various positions, including at the Department of Defense and the National Security Council. The new chairman said Patel would “bring dedication, bravery and integrity back to the FBI.”

Patel, who served as a senior official in the first Trump administration, is the author of a book that includes a list of “deep state” officials to target – a book that Trump called “a blueprint to help take back the White House and remove the Gangsters from all over the government,” according to promotional material.

What you need to know about Patel:

He supports Trump’s plans for revenge and punishment

Accounts of Patel’s rise from an obscure figure on Capitol Hill to one of the most powerful players in the intelligence community focus on one key detail: his loyalty to Trump and his willingness to go after Trump’s opponents at all levels of the bureaucracy.

Patel’s appointment could spark heightened concern about potential retribution among those Trump has described as his “enemies,” in the administration and beyond.
Some named on the “deep state’s” target list have begun to take precautions.

In a 2023 interview on “War Room,” a podcast hosted by Stephen Bannon, Trump’s onetime chief strategist, Patel threatened to go after reporters if he took a significant role in a Trump administration. “We will pursue you, either criminally or civilly – we’ll see along the way,” he said.

The Associated Press described Patel this year as Trump’s “trusted aide and campaign surrogate who mythologizes the former president while promoting conspiracy theories and his own brand.”

He served in the first Trump administration

Patel has held multiple roles: chief of staff to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, deputy assistant to the president, senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, and acting deputy director of national intelligence.

In his last post as chief of staff at the Department of Defense, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote in 2021, Patel challenged the authority of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA), and nearly became the acting director of the CIA. Of his tenure at the defense ministry Ignatius wrote that Patel ran the place effectively.

In the final months of his presidency, Trump considered making Patel deputy director of the FBI. The move was blocked by Attorney General William Barr. Barr reportedly told White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that Patel would become deputy director “over his dead body.”

Patel is a director on the board of Trump Media Technology Group, the conglomerate that owns the Truth Social platform. He is active on the platform, frequently retweeting Trump’s posts to his 1.35 million followers.

He played a key role in the Nunes memo

Patel served as counsel to former House member Devin Nunes when Nunes chaired the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 and 2018. A memo authored by Patel alleging that a surveillance warrant targeting a campaign adviser Trump was an anomaly, quickly becoming the focus of a political firestorm.

The Nunes memo, it was learned, said the 2016 warrant request for Carter Page, Trump’s foreign policy adviser, was based in part on information from a former British intelligence officer who was allegedly biased against Trump. The memo concluded that the warrant was invalid, and therefore the investigation into Trump regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election was invalid.

He is a child of immigrants

In his book Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy, Patel describes his parents as Hindu working class immigrants. class from India. The family didn’t eat meat at home, he writes, describing weekly trips to the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens with his father for breaded chicken.

He wanted to be a doctor, like a “stereotypical Indian-American,” he writes, but gave up after researching medical school programs and meeting a group of defense attorneys playing golf while at the Garden City Country Club on Long Island.

“Instead of being a first-generation immigrant carrying golf clubs, I could be a first-generation immigrant attorney at a prestigious firm making a ton of money,” he wrote.

Patel attended the University of Richmond and earned a law degree at Pace University in New York before working for nearly a decade as a defense attorney in Florida.