When Patel was installed as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense just after the 2020 election, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised him not to break the law in order to keep President Donald Trump in power. "Life looks really shitty from behind bars," Milley reportedly told Patel.
(Patel denies this.) When Trump entertained naming Patel deputy director of the FBI, Attorney General Bill Barr confronted the White House chief of staff and said, "Over my dead body." When, in the final weeks of the administration, Trump planned to name Patel deputy director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, the agency's head, threatened to resign. Trump relented only after an intervention by Vice President Mike Pence and others.
Who was this man, and why did so many top officials fear him? It wasn't a question of ideology. He wasn't a zealot like Stephen Miller, trying to make the bureaucracy yield to his agenda.
Rather, Patel appeared singularly focused on pleasing Trump.
Even in an administration full of loyalists, Patel was exceptional in his devotion.
This was what seemed to disturb many of his colleagues the most: Patel was dangerous, several of them told me, not because of a certain plan he would be poised to carry out if given control of the CIA or FBI, but because he appeared to have no plan at all his priorities today always subject to a mercurial president's wishes tomorrow. (Patel disputes this characterization.) What wouldn't a person like that do, if asked? Most Americans had no idea Patel existed, yet rarely a day passed when administration leaders weren't reminded that he did.
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