If Republican senators vote to confirm Kash Patel to lead the FBI, a former national security advisor said those who voted to support him will be forever known for their mistake.
John Bolton, who served in Donald Trump's first administration, has since criticized him for being "unfit" for the top office.
In an editorial for the Wall Street Journal, Bolton confesses he should have taken seriously that someone like Patel could end up on Trump's shortlist for positions of great significance.
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"I regret I didn’t fully discern Mr. Patel’s threat immediately. But we are now all fairly warned. Senators won’t escape history’s judgment if they vote to confirm him," he warns.
Bolton recalls working with Patel when Trump demanded that he be hired despite lacking experience.
"Charles Kupperman, my deputy, and I placed Mr. Patel in the International Organizations Directorate, which had a vacant," Bolton wrote. "Some five months later, we moved him to fill an opening in the Counter-Terrorism Directorate. In neither case was he in charge of a directorate during my tenure as national security adviser or thereafter, as he contends in his memoir and elsewhere."
Patel wasn't in charge and had "defined responsibilities," Bolton said.
"His puffery was characteristic of the résumé inflation we had detected when Mr. Trump pressed him on us," Bolton continued. "We found he had exaggerated his role in cases he worked on as a Justice Department lawyer before joining Mr. Nunes’s committee staff. Given the sensitivity of the NSC’s responsibilities, problems of credibility or reliability would ordinarily disqualify any job applicant."
Any lies or skeletons in closets disqualify applicants because international governments can use them as blackmail to get secret government information.
Bolton noticed that Patel was less interested in doing his job than "worming his way into Mr. Trump’s presence."
According to Fiona Hill's testimony to Congress, Patel was in the Oval Office meeting in May 2019 that dealt with Ukraine. At that time, Bolton said, Patel was supposed to be working for the International Organizations Directorate.
"Whatever he did on Ukraine while an NSC staffer, at least during my tenure, was unrestrained freelancing," wrote Bolton.
Patel has denied any communication with Trump on Ukraine.
Patel also appeared in former Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s memoir. It was October 2020, and there was a critical hostage rescue.
"Mr. Patel, then in the Counter-Terrorism directorate, misinformed other officials that a key airspace-transit clearance had been granted," Bolton wrote. "In fact, Mr. Esper writes, the clearance hadn’t been obtained, threatening the operation’s success, and his team 'suspected Patel made the approval story up' but wasn’t certain."
Patel denied this in his book and boasts that he acted "beyond the authority of NSC staffers," Bolton recalled.
The editorial examines several cases in which Patel has embellished himself and his role from other former Trump appointees and aides.