The nomination of Trump hyperloyalist Kash Patel as FBI director is unusual.

First, the job is currently occupied by one Christopher Wray — himself a Trump appointee — who technically has three years left on his 10-year term. On Wednesday, however, Wray preemptively capitulated to Trump, pledging to step down at the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, saying he wanted to “avoid dragging the agency deeper into the fray,” politically.

Even stranger — and probably unprecedented — is that Patel has sued the man he hopes to replace in federal court. And he lost. Big time.

Patel sued FBI Director Wray, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and other top Justice Department officials in 2023, alleging that they violated his Fourth Amendment rights by issuing a subpoena for his private email data in 2017. Patel claimed that this was a ” vendetta” to dig up “dirt” on him during a time he worked for the House Intelligence Committee doing critical work from the FBI and DOJ. The case, which received little scrutiny at the time, was dismissed in September last year.

The background is important here, and a bit complex. Patel rose to prominence in MAGAland during Trump’s first term as senior adviser to the House Intelligence Committee, then chairman of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). Patel was a sharp-eyed operative who sought to undermine any notion that Trump and his team deserved investigation for their troubling ties to Russia — many of as where boastful. (This included Trump’s infamous “Russia, if you’re listening” invitation to “find” Hillary Clinton’s emails; Russia began efforts to hack Clinton’s email servers that same day.)

Patel was the lead author of the so-called “Nunes’ memo.” This four-page summary purported to reveal a partisan plot behind the surveillance of Carter Page, an aide to the first Trump campaign who had curious Kremlin contacts. The memo argued that the issuance of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant relied too heavily on the ill-fated, now infamous “Steele Affair,” which had been funded, indirectly, by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

The Nunes memo was criticized when it was released by Democrats and intelligence officials who said it relied on “selective declassification” — resulting in significant “distortions” and “misrepresentations.” And you didn’t need a security clearance to note important omissions in the memo — like that the company behind the Steele dossier, Fusion GPS, had begun its Trump-oppo research with financing from the right-leaning one Washington Free Beacon.

Nevertheless, Patel presents this memo as a world-shattering revelation of the “Deep State” – which he describes in his 2023 book Government gangsters as a “cabal” of “incestuous, power-hungry, unelected oligarchs in Washington who hate us.” Patel’s book claims the Nunes memo revealed “the biggest bombshell political scandal in American history.” He claims that “the Russian collusion story was a Democrat-funded, government-sponsored crime of historic proportions” and that his work exposed “the full-scale politicization of the national security apparatus.”

By his own account, Patel clashed with the DOJ staff he had to interact with — he privately referred to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as “Hot Rod” (for a supposed quick temper) and believed Rosenstein “deserved to be impeached.” Patel describes also how he installed a Mickey Mouse Club rug in his team’s Capitol Hill office, to troll Democratic staffers who thought he was running a “Mickey Mouse” operation.

During the period he worked for Nunes, Patel himself came under covert federal scrutiny. Patel’s complaint reveals that in November 2017, the government obtained a subpoena requiring Google to hand over data linked to Patel’s private email account. The legal proceedings do not clarify what prompted the issuance of the subpoena or what federal investigators may have been looking for.

Patel argued that this search was a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights—a “constitutional” attempt to “look for dirt” on him. Because the warrant was issued amid the intelligence work Patel was conducting with Nunes, the lawsuit alleges it was an “act of retaliation.” The complaint alleges that “the FBI and DOJ did not want Mr. Patel to disclose their abuse.”

The lawsuit’s list of named defendants includes some of the biggest Justice Department honchos. That included the FBI’s Wray — whom the lawsuit describes as “involved in the approval of the grand jury subpoena application.” Other defendants included Rosenstein; a couple of his top deputies at the DOJ; and Jessie Liu, then the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, who filed the suit, according to the lawsuit.

Patel sued for monetary damages under a Supreme Court precedent called Bivens — A case from the 1970s in which federal narcotics agents, without probable cause, entered a man’s apartment, searched it without a warrant, and arrested him on drug charges. Patel also sought attorney’s fees as well as “an injunction preventing the agents who improperly investigated Mr. Patel from being involved in future proceedings against him” and “destruction” of the records obtained with the subpoena.

President-elect Trump recently praised Patel on Truth Social as “the most qualified candidate to lead the FBI in the agency’s history.” In reality, Patel is such an extreme loyalist that he has written one children’s book dramatize his defense of the president. Patel is a see-no-evil when it comes to Trump. He writes about January 6, 2021, for example, in a book chapter called: “The Rebellion That Never Was.” Patel insists “it was NOT a coup” and “it was NOT an attack by domestic terrorists on our democracy.” Those who claim otherwise, he writes, are liars engaged in a “disinformation narrative” that has been “hammered into our faces” for only “one purpose: to destroy dissent.”

So it was with some irony that Patel’s lawsuit ended up in the court of Justice Amit Mehta – who oversaw the convictions of top Oath Keepers for seditious conspiracy for their violent roles surrounding the events of January 6. In the case of Oath Keeper leader Stuart Rhodes, Mehta introduced a “terrorism” enhancement of his sentence, and told Rhodes in court: “You are not a political prisoner.” He added that Rhodes was actually “prepared to take up arms to incite a revolution. That’s what you did.”

Mehta dismissed Patel’s case long before it went to trial — shredding his team’s legal theories.

The damages Patel sought, the judge ruled, required a new interpretation of bivens, of a type that other courts have previously ruled out of bounds. Mehta insisted that the “stark contrast” to precedent meant that Patel would instead have to rely on the “DOJ Office of the Inspector General” for redress, and look to Congress “to provide a cause of action.” (Mehta called a claim by Patel’s lawyer that “Congress would face backlash” for such a move “speculative at best.”)

Mehta also changed the substance of Patel’s case. The suit had alleged that the subpoena obtained to review Patel’s email data was issued without probable cause. But Mehta insisted that Patel’s legal team had made a legal misstep, because “probable cause does not govern grand jury subpoenas” and therefore, Patel’s charge “does not establish a violation of the Fourth Amendment.” (Mehta noted that Patel’s team acknowledged this flaw in a filing to contest the government’s motion to dismiss the case—and had then turned to questioning the breadth of the lawsuit instead. But Mehta had no patience with the pivot, writing, “The plaintiff cannot change his plea through its opposition manual.”)

In the end, Mehta ruled that the government defendants were entitled to “qualified immunity” — the same legal principle that prevents people from suing police for mistakes made on the job — and dismissed the case.

Trump’s transition team did not respond to an interview request for Patel. A message to Patel’s attorney in the case was also not returned.

The fact that Patel has sued Wray is based on a pattern of litigation. Patel has too agreed media outlet as Politico and that New York Timesand claimed defamation in their reporting of his work in the first Trump administration. He also briefly sued the Defense Department, where he worked late in Trump’s first term, to speed up the department’s legal review of Government gangsters. Even in recent days, during the public debate over his qualifications to lead the FBI, Patel has done so threatened a former colleague, one-time Vice President Mike Pence adviser Olivia Troye, with legal action after she criticized him on MSNBC.

Patel is also notorious for threatening retaliation against Trump’s enemies during a second term. “We will go out and find the conspirators not only in the government, but in the media,” he told Steve Bannon 2023 and adds: “We’re coming after you.”

Ultimately, the qualification Patel seems to have in spades is his unwavering loyalty to Trump. While welcoming Wray’s decision to resign, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he harbored personal grievances — about the federal raid at Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents Trump kept in a bathroom, which led to federal charges. “Under the leadership of Christopher Wray, the FBI illegally raided my home,” Trump wrote, “without reason.”

As it happens, Patel sees these events through the same, MAGAfied lens. IN Government gangstershe writes that the FBI had “crossed the Rubicon” by searching Trump’s compound, adding that “the Mar-a-Lago raid makes Watergate look like a teacup ride at Disney World.”

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