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.”
