Few people tapped for any top federal post, much less a job as vital as F.B.I. director, have come with quite so much bravado, bombast or baggage as Kash Patel.
On Saturday, Mr. Patel, 44, a Long Island-born provocateur and right-wing operative, was named by President-elect Donald J. Trump to lead the F.B.I., an agency he has accused of leading a “deep state” witch hunt against Mr. Trump. The announcement amounted to a de factodismissal of the current director, Christopher A. Wray, who was appointed to the job by Mr. Trump and still has almost three years left on his 10-year term.
Mr. Patel’s maximum-volume threats toexact far-reaching revenge on Mr. Trump’s behalf have endeared him to his boss and Trump allies who say the bureau needs a disrupter to weed out bias and reshape its culture.
But his record as a public official and his incendiary public comments are likely to provoke intense questioning when the Senate weighs his nomination — and determines whether he should run an agency charged with protecting Americans from terrorism, street crime, cartels and political corruption, along with the threat posed by China, which Mr. Wray has described as existential.
Here are some of the things Mr. Patel has said and done that could complicate his confirmation.
He was accused of nearly botching a high-stakes hostage rescue.
In October 2020, Mr. Patel, then a senior national intelligence official in the Trump administration, inserted himself into a secret effort by members of SEAL Team Six to rescue Philip Walton, an American who was 27 at the time and had been kidnapped by gunmen in Niger and taken to Nigeria.
Mr. Patel, whose involvement broke with protocol, assured the State and Defense Departments that the Nigerian government had been told of the operation.
