Sometime in February 2019, date unknown, Kashyap Patel is moved to the National Security Council as a staffer for International Organizations and Alliances. A few months later, he’s promoted to a role created specifically for him: a senior counterterrorism adviser.
But no one knows who gave him the job or how he’s qualified.
Previously, Patel was a Devin Nunes’ top staffer on the House Intelligence Committee.
Over the next few months, Patel becomes so ingrained in the still-secret Ukraine scandal that Donald Trump thinks his job at the NSC is directly related to Ukraine. (It isn’t).
The type of Ukraine work Patel was doing that [Fiona] Hill described would not be within his purview as a senior counterterrorism adviser, said Joshua Geltzer, who held Patel’s position early on in the Trump administration.
“If true, this sort of activity seems wildly outside the scope of anything a counterterrorism senior director at NSC should be spending their time on,” Geltzer said. “What’s more, it politicizes a piece of the NSC staff that administrations of both parties have worked for decades to keep as apolitical as possible.”
Politico
The week following the 2020 election, Patel is named chief of staff to the new secretary at the Dept. of Defense, who was also given his position after the election.
Before 2019, he was most known for drafting a memo on behalf of Trump that tried to discredit government agencies and the Mueller report.
Sources
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/23/nunes-protege-ukraine-trump-055837
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/20/kash-patel-odni-post-116546
Photo: Matt Walsh
