Kash Patel's path to nomination to become FBI director started on Long Island

WASHINGTON — Kash Patel’s journey to the nomination to become director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation may have started on the golf course of the Garden City Country Club.

It was there where President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the nation’s top law enforcement agency worked as a golf caddie while attending Garden City High School. Patel got to know defense attorneys who were members of the club who made him reconsider pursuing a career in medicine, according to his memoir, "Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for our Democracy."

"In high school, I used to caddie at the Garden City Country Club in Long Island," Patel wrote in the book, published in 2023. "There were a lot of very wealthy members and important New Yorkers who hit the links there, but a few guys in particular always caught my attention. It was a group of defense lawyers. Of course, when they got on the course, they always talked business, and they had some of the most interesting (and sometimes terrifying) stories about their clients and the high drama of the courtroom. I didn’t understand exactly what they did, but being a lawyer seemed interesting."

Patel, a 1998 graduate of Garden City High School, went on to graduate with a law degree from Pace University’s School of Law in 2005. Over the span of 20 years he would go from being a public defender in Miami, representing indigent criminal defendants, to being part of Trump’s close circle of advisers, serving in several national security roles during the president’s first administration, including a stint on the National Security Council.

On Friday, the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee, in a 12-10 party line vote, advanced Patel’s nomination to FBI director for a full Senate vote, where he is widely expected to be confirmed next week by the Republican majority.

"We were raised in the household of my father's seven siblings, their spouses, at least half a dozen children," Patel told the committee about his upbringing on Long Island and in Queens. "That's the only way we knew how to do things at the time in the '70s and '80s — the Indian way, but we would soon learn the American way. These values have shaped me and been the driving force of my career in 16 years of government service."

Academic focus

Kashyap Pramod Vinod Patel, 44, was born in New York to parents of Indian descent. During his opening remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee last month Patel said his father, Pramod, fled Uganda during the "genocidal dictatorship" of Idi Amin, the military strongman who ruled the country during the 1970s and orchestrated the killing of more than 300,000 people, according to reports from international humanitarian groups including Amnesty International.

Patel said his family's history "profoundly shaped my worldview." In his book he said his mother, Ajana, and father "urged me to focus on my studies."

At Garden City High School, Patel served as a kicker on the school’s varsity football team in 1997, and he won a 1998 scholarship from the Long Island Caddie Scholarship Fund, according to Newsday high school sports coverage at the time.

His senior high school yearbook indicates he was also a member of the Future Business Leaders of America and the Stock Market Club.

He quoted Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Jewish theologian who was active in the Civil Rights Movement, in a space under his senior photo, where each student was asked to include a favorite quote.

"Racism is man's gravest threat — the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason," reads the Heschel quote used by Patel.

Patel did not respond to an interview request submitted by Newsday to his spokesperson, but in his book he describes his time on Long Island as being "a pretty milquetoast Americana upbringing."

"I grew up watching the New York Islanders and playing hockey, a passion I still have today," Patel said in the book.

While Patel never worked for Long Island law enforcement agencies, the Nassau Police Benevolent Association and a coalition of Suffolk County’s law enforcement unions both submitted letters of recommendation on his behalf to the Senate Judiciary Committee ahead of his hearing.

"As a former resident of Nassau County, he understands the needs and difficulties our community is dealing with," Nassau PBA president Thomas Shevlin wrote in a Jan. 28 letter to the committee.

Patel’s nomination has not been without controversy. A number of former officials from Trump’s first term have publicly criticized his nomination, including former National Security Adviser John Bolton and former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr.

Barr, in his 2022 memoir, said he "categorically opposed making Patel deputy FBI director," when approached with the idea by Trump’s then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

"I told Mark Meadows it would happen ‘over my dead body,' " Barr wrote. "Someone with no background as an agent would never be able to command the respect necessary to run the day-to-day operations of the bureau."

D.C. experience

Patel’s work in Washington kicked off in 2014 when he was hired by the Obama-era Department of Justice as a terrorism prosecutor. That role would lead to a stint as senior aide to House Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee from 2016 to 2017, where Patel reportedly worked with GOP lawmakers to attack the 2016 Justice Department investigation into the Trump campaign’s purported ties to Russia.

He was hired in 2019 to join Trump’s National Security Council, where he reportedly developed a reputation as a staunch Trump loyalist and was later tapped to serve in brief roles as a top aide to Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell and later Trump’s acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee last month grilled Patel for hours, casting him as a Trump loyalist who would carry out the president’s prior pledges to "go after" political rivals.

"Mr. Patel has neither the experience, the temperament, nor the judgment to lead an agency of 38,000 [people] and 400 field offices around the globe," Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, said during the hearing.

Pushing back on questioning from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) about his ability to serve independent of pressure from Trump, Patel said: "The only thing that will matter if I'm confirmed as a director of the FBI is a deweaponized, depoliticized system of law enforcement completely devoted to rigorous obedience of the Constitution and a singular standard of justice."

By Laura Figueroa Hernandez

laura.figueroa@newsday.com@Laura_Figueroa

Laura Figueroa Hernandez is the White House correspondent and previously covered New York City politics and government. She joined Newsday in 2012 after covering state and local politics for The Miami Herald.