The conservative ex-FBI agents who have Kash Patel’s ear

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WASHINGTON — When President-elect Donald Trump announced that he wanted Kash Patel to be the next director of the FBI, one of Patel’s first moves was to reach out to three conservative former special agents who have been critics of the bureau and its sprawling investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

The former agents Patel spoke to refer to themselves as “The Suspendables.” They have claimed whistleblower status, and Republicans have called two of them (along with an FBI analyst) to testify before Congress. Patel, through his Kash Foundation, provided financial support to several of them during their suspensions, they testified in 2023.

Kyle Seraphin, 43, a military veteran who is a member of the group, said Patel reached out to the three “Suspendables” the night Trump announced that he wanted Patel atop the FBI; Seraphin was busy getting his kids asleep and couldn’t join the discussion.

Patel’s relationship with the former agents, who ran into trouble with FBI leadership during their tenures, helps illuminate his potential agenda as FBI director beyond the bombastic public statements he has made for years before Thursday’s Senate confirmation hearing, like when he talked about making the FBI headquarters into a “museum of the deep state.”

They see themselves as victims of what Trump has called “weaponization” of the justice system and are wholehearted supporters of Patel, whose book named potential targets for investigation and described the FBI itself as the “prime functionary of the Deep State.”

Meanwhile, the installation of new advisers in the director’s office at the FBI, including a person affiliated with Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, have some former officials concerned about the potential injection of partisan politics at the top of an agency that has traditionally had only one political appointee: the director himself.

Patel “keeps tabs on me and the guys that he’s helped out, and also we share information about FBI stuff,” Seraphin told NBC News.

“There’s a potential that Kash Patel could be the most loved FBI director by the actual people of the FBI; he could be the real thing that Jim Comey pretended to be,” he said, referring to the FBI director Trump fired in 2017.

Patel, a former federal prosecutor and federal public defender who faces a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, has more recently been known for his service in several roles in the first Trump administration and then for conspiracy theory-inflected rhetoric about the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies.

Steven Friend, who was an FBI special agent in Florida, was another of the “Suspendables” Patel talked to, Seraphin said. Friend’s security clearance was revoked and the FBI put him on unpaid leave after he refused to participate in the arrest of a Jan. 6 defendant who had been a part of a group of right-wing militia members.

Friend told his supervisors that there “was no way” that he would want to be involved in any Jan. 6 cases “in any way” and that he didn’t think that rioters who assaulted officers on Jan. 6 should be charged, according to a transcript of an audio recording Friend made and published.

On a podcast after Trump’s announcement, he called Patel a “friend” to him and to the “Suspendables at large,” saying Patel’s experience as a public defender would give him a perspective that is needed inside the FBI.

“Kash Patel, at long last, he’s the guy — #OnlyKash, #KashOnly, whichever you prefer — Kash seems to be the man who’s going to take over our ex-girlfriend over at the FBI,” Friend said on the podcast. “That’s why I lost my voice, because I was just screaming to the heavens.”

Seraphin told NBC News that Patel first reached out to him in the fall of 2022, after he appeared on “The Dan Bongino Show,” a popular right-wing program hosted by the former Secret Service agent.

Seraphin was still an FBI employee when he appeared on Bongino’s show but hadn’t received a paycheck in months. He had objected to the Biden administration’s Covid-19 vaccination mandate on religious grounds and took personal leave in 2021.

In 2022, an officer in Las Cruces, New Mexico, responded to a call of shots fired near a school and found Seraphin engaged in target practice near federal land, an incident that sparked an internal FBI investigation. In 2023, the FBI informed Seraphin that his top-secret security clearance had been suspended over his violation of “numerous FBI rules and regulations,” including gun safety policies; his “routine use of derogatory, racist, sexist, and/or homophobic language”; and his unauthorized release of “sensitive government information.”

Seraphin told NBC News no one has “produced any derog/racist/sexist ‘and/or’ homophobic language,” and he noted that “no one made such allegations prior to my whistleblower activity.”

After his Bongino segment ran, Seraphin said, Patel reached out to offer financial help through his foundation. Seraphin’s family had sold their home, and they were staying with his parents, but they weren’t “destitute,” so, he said, his initial reaction was to point Patel to others.

Patel’s foundation, Seraphin said, gave him $10,000, and they’ve since developed a friendship. Seraphin said he, Friend and another “Suspendable,” Garret O’Boyle, ran into Patel at the premiere of the movie “Police State” at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate in Florida, and that Patel gave them a VIP tour, taking them to areas that weren’t open to the public. Seraphin posted photos of the trio, all of whom say they received money from the Kash Foundation, at Mar-a-Lago with Patel.

Several of the “Suspendables” say the FBI wronged them by using the security clearance process as leverage against them — putting them on unpaid leave after suspending security clearances but also banning them from taking outside work because they were still technically Justice Department employees.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said last year there was a risk that security clearance revocations and the indefinite unpaid suspensions that come with them could be “misused as part of an inappropriate effort to encourage an employee to resign.”

Now, Patel could be joining an administration that is seeking its own ways to encourage employees to resign.

Steve Baker, a writer for The Blaze, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor Jan. 6 charges and had been set to be sentenced this March before Trump pardoned him and all the other Jan. 6 defendants. He told NBC News there’s a limit to Patel’s engagement with conspiracy theories, as he said he learned during a discussion with Patel around December 2023, when Baker explained his theory that elements of the Defense Department were involved in setting up the Jan. 6 riot.

“When I had this conservation and laid that conspiracy, we’ll call it, conspiracy theory on Kash’s desk, he totally shot me down,” Baker said. “Literally, he obliterated me, told me that it wasn’t even possible that what I believe happened that day happened.”

Baker and other Patel supporters say they believe Patel would bring about major changes to the FBI if he’s confirmed.

“I believe that Kash Patel, who is a friend, will do what needs to be done at the FBI,” said Julie Kelly, a conservative commentator with strong ties to the Trump administration, “which is not just dismantle this agency from the top headquarters down to 56 FBI field offices, but also hold accountable those agents who have used their unaccountable power to weaponize the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country against the political foes of the regime.”

Baker said: “To the extent that everybody’s pulling their hair out saying that he’s going to be a dis-assembler of the FBI, guess what? That’s what the people who voted for Trump want him to do.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

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