The official FBI portrait of Kash Patel shows a smiling man in front of U.S. flags and the agency seal. But the guiding principle that “the law is impartial,” meaning justice should be administered without regard to personal loyalties or politics, sits uneasily with Patel’s record. As the BBC observes, Patel “is a staunch Trump supporter and critic of [the FBI].” He has repeatedly cast himself as a crusader against a vague “deep state,” aligning his fate with one political faction. With a man like Patel it is fascinating to compare him to Rawl's ideal of the veil of ignorance. Rawls' veil of ignorance is a thought experiment in which individuals design a just society without knowing their own place in it, ensuring fairness by removing personal bias. Rawls’s theory of justice would imagine him sitting behind a veil of ignorance, neutral, not knowing whether he might be a plaintiff or defendant, yet Patel often sounds partisan. From his writings and statements, he seems to see the law through a pro-Trump lens rather than an impartial one. This article examines Patel’s rise and the controversies surrounding his use of official power, contrasting each turn with the ideal that justice be impartial to personal allegiances.
Patel’s résumé is unusual for a law-enforcement chief. A former Miami public defender, he joined the Justice Department as a national-security prosecutor in 2014. He later served on Capitol Hill as chief counsel to the House Intelligence Committee and, in early 2019, became a senior aide on the National Security Council, overseeing counterterrorism. By 2020, he also acted as Deputy Director of National Intelligence and Chief of Staff at the Pentagon. Shortly before his FBI confirmation, he founded the Kash Foundation (a 501(c)(3) charity for veterans and law enforcement). In February 2025, the Senate approved him as the ninth Director of the FBI, a controversial pick, given that Democrats warned Patel is likely to turn the Bureau into Trump’s tool. His trajectory (public defender → prosecutor →, congressional adviser → NSC official → FBI chief) is often traced in his biographies, but the partisan uses he’s made of those offices have drawn deep scrutiny.
In 2017, as a senior aide to GOP Rep. Devin Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee, Patel helped rewrite the Trump-Russia investigation narrative. He co-authored the infamous four-page “Nunes memo” that charged FBI and DOJ officials with abusing surveillance powers. Patel later praised this memo as a “bombshell report” and even dubbed it the “Kash-Gowdy” memo in his memoir. These grand claims contrast sharply with reality. The Justice Department had warned that releasing the memo, which baselessly questioned an FBI warrant application on a Trump adviser, was “extraordinarily reckless.” The memo’s release was narrowly managed and yielded no new evidence of wrongdoing by the FBI. Senior Justice Department officials later told senators that Patel had exaggerated his role. The memo was essentially a partisan attack by political staff, not an objective legal document. Patel’s testimony to Congress showed he only claimed to “collaborate” on Benghazi-related cases. In contrast, publicly, he had described himself as “leading the prosecution’s efforts” on the matter. In short, Patel’s spin on the Nunes memo and the Russia probe suggests he was using classified processes to serve a political narrative, precisely the outcome that the veil of ignorance is supposed to prevent.
This pattern continues with the 2012 Benghazi terrorism case. In Government Gangsters, Patel dramatically portrays himself as the Department of Justice’s point man on the Benghazi attack prosecutions, claiming he was “leading the prosecution’s efforts at Main Justice” and could see Justice officials “go soft” on the terrorists. He even wrote that Justice “asked [him] to join the trial team” against Ahmed Abu Khattala, the Libyan gunman. Yet the published record tells a different story. Prosecutors in Washington, D.C. (not Main Justice headquarters) ran the Khattala trial. Once Abu Khattala was in U.S. custody, one lawyer in that U.S. Attorney’s Office prosecuted him to conviction. Former colleagues say Patel was only a junior line attorney on the team. Indeed, he was quietly removed from the case after just a few months amid objections. Justice Department veterans note that Patel “exaggerated his role,” made no independent prosecutorial decisions, and was merely “one of several line attorneys” assisting the D.C. team. In other words, Patel’s public description of himself as Benghazi’s “lead prosecutor” was false. That discrepancy is more than boastful bragging: it shows how Patel reshaped the narrative to his benefit. Under a Rawlsian veil-of-ignorance scenario, an impartial observer might wonder why a supposed career prosecutor recounted his tale so self-aggrandizingly; the answer lies in the partisan benefits to Patel and the grievances he aimed to fuel.
Far from defusing partisan tension, Patel has intensified it with rhetoric about “enemies.” After the 2020 election, he announced an “enemies list” of about 60 government officials he labeled “government gangsters.” He wrote that this list would allow Trump to “get even” in future prosecutions. During his FBI confirmation hearings, Democrats warned that Patel’s mindset risked turning the Bureau into a political weapon. Senator Dick Durbin bluntly said Patel repeatedly displays “an instinct to threaten retribution against his political enemies.” House Judiciary Democrats even pointed out that Patel once joked about conducting a “manhunt” of government officials on camera. On social media, he has posted thinly veiled threats against lawmakers he dislikes. For example, Roll Call notes that Patel re-posted an AI-generated video showing him “chainsawing” the heads of figures like Nancy Pelosi and Liz Cheney. (Patel later excused this as “humor,” but the images were graphic and political.) Such talk is chilling. If the law should indeed be blind, then an FBI Director who publicly fantasizes about carving up his political foes is acting in stark opposition to impartial justice. It suggests he might view enforcement as a cudgel to punish a preferred faction’s adversaries.
Patel’s conspiratorial worldview has also been expressed publicly on hot-button issues. He has repeatedly peddled debunked narratives about the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Rather than treating January 6 as a serious breach of law and order, Patel amplified fringe claims about it. He highlighted an internet meme depicting the rioters as “patriots.” He even described January 6 defendants as “political prisoners” in his social posts. In a cable news appearance, he astonishingly said he was collecting evidence that “federal law enforcement” had provoked the Capitol violence, promising he could prove it “beyond a reasonable doubt.” (He offered no such evidence.) Similarly, on election conspiracies, he once mused publicly that Democrats needed to explain a sudden influx of supposed “non-citizen” voters implying, without proof, that the 2020 election had been rigged. On Ukraine, too, Patel echoed Kremlin talking points. He questioned President Zelenskyy’s credibility after a tense missile incident in Poland, claiming a supposed Russian rocket strike “turned out” to be false. Patel then went on to assume that Zelensky must be misspending U.S. aid money because of his perceived lack of credibility without any hard evidence. Each time, Patel’s statements have aligned with partisan or foreign disinformation lines, not neutral fact-finding. Even fundraising appeals by his “Fight With Kash” charity have cast political events in ideological terms. In March 2023, an email from Patel solicited money to help “peaceful” January 6 protesters “stand up against the Deep State.” Patel has routinely treated controversies as opportunities to amplify a Trumpist narrative, not as policy issues to evaluate dispassionately.
These controversies extend beyond speeches into his professional outputs. While serving as a senior official in national security, Patel authored the so-called Nunes memo and publicly asserted allegations about “FISA abuse” that were never substantiated by other sources. He praised the memo as vindication, calling the FBI’s work “proof positive that government officials were weaponizing intelligence to derail a presidential campaign,” claims widely debunked at the time. Even from the Justice Department’s perspective, that memo was a misuse of information: the Deputy Attorney General warned it was a politically charged piece that could severely damage innocent careers if released prematurely. In short, Patel’s use of highly classified material (like the Nunes memo) appeared intended more to stoke partisan distrust than to promote genuine oversight. Contrast this with Rawls’s ideal of fairness: a civil servant making decisions under a “veil of ignorance” would refrain from pushing one side’s narrative. Patel’s track record suggests he has instead pulled levers on behalf of one side, insisting that “they should be fired” or prosecuted if they voted against Trump.
Finally, Patel’s personal and financial ties also illustrate the blurring of law enforcement and political promotion. As Washington Post reporters documented in early 2025, Patel took a $25,000 payment in 2024 from Igor Lopatonok, a Russian-born filmmaker known for producing pro-Kremlin propaganda. Patel received this money from a Los Angeles production company run by Lopatonok after appearing in Lopatonok’s Tucker Carlson, hosted series All the President’s Men: The Conspiracy Against Trump. That six-part series portrayed Trump’s former aides as victims of a Democratic “deep-state” conspiracy. One clip even shows Patel vowing to convert the FBI headquarters into a “museum of the deep state” while he was on camera. The Post noted the conflict: the man poised to protect the U.S. from Russian influence was concurrently taking money from a figure linked to Russian propaganda efforts. Such entanglement with a Kremlin-aligned filmmaker creates troubling optics for a concept like justice-as-neutral-as-possible.
Patel’s charitable work has drawn similar scrutiny. The Kash Foundation (also called “Fight With Kash”) is nominally a 501(c)(3) charity for veterans and law enforcement. However, investigations reveal it functions more as a MAGA fundraising platform than a traditional charity. The Guardian reported that the Foundation is “linked to MAGA-merchandise firms” and spends far more on fundraising than on any grants. Its website mission statements (offer help to veterans, etc.) sound noble. Still, its actual activities have involved marketing Trump-slogan apparel and sponsoring partisan events. The Foundation even registered WinRed (a GOP fundraising platform) as its payment processor. Patel himself has boasted publicly that “everything I do” on the site is charitable. In one podcast, he crowed that “my life lives at fightwithkash.com” and that all of his branded merchandise and donations on that site are within the 501(c)(3) charity. Fact-checkers noted the oddity: a tax-exempt charity actively selling partisan merch to support specific political causes, with little evidence of independent charitable output, suggests the line between philanthropy and politics has blurred. In a sense, Patel has been using the veneer of a charity to further a political brand, again foregoing the blind impartiality we expect from a justice official.
Patel’s career and actions frequently clash with the principle that justice should be impartial. Many of his statements and strategies, from pushing a partisan memo and grandstanding about Benghazi to openly plotting against Democrats and parroting conspiracy lines, illustrate a pattern of putting Trump’s allies ahead of neutral enforcement. He has called for purges of FBI agents who “refuse to support Trump’s agenda,” mingled with Russian propaganda figures, and taken credit for legal victories that belong to others. Rawlsian justice, by contrast, would have him treat every person as if he did not know whether they would someday protect or persecute him. Patel’s record suggests he more often acted as if he knew where he stood and whose side his bread was buttered on. Now leading the nation’s premier law-enforcement agency, he inherits a mission to protect all Americans. Whether he will fulfill that mission with true neutrality remains an open question, one that Rawls’s veil of ignorance says should concern everyone who believes the law must serve the public, not personal allegiances.
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