How Kash Patel found himself stuck on the horns of a dilemma

He has been granted immunity by the DOJ and must testify a second time before the Washington grand jury investigating Donald Trump

Grand jury witnesses Boris Epshteyn, left and Kash Patel, right.

How does an obsessively loyal Trumpazoid like Kash Patel, who once swaggered down the wide halls of the E-Ring in the Pentagon as Chief of Staff to the Acting Secretary of Defense (an enormously powerful position even if he held it for only two months) find himself between a rock, the Department of Justice, and a hard place, Donald Trump, on this sunny day in November?

Well, he was put there by the men he served, Donald Trump at the top of all of them.  Yes, they were all men – from Devin Nunes, whom Patel served when he was Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee; to John Bolton, Trump’s third National Security Adviser, under whom he served as a “senior director” in a position created especially for him; to Richard Grenell, Acting Director of National Intelligence, whom Patel served as a principal deputy; to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, who was appointed after Patel reportedly urged Trump to fire the previous Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, for being disloyal to the president by refusing to have active duty troops deployed to put down protests after George Floyd was killed in the summer of 2020.

I realize that’s an unusual number of acting directors Patel served under, but hey!  It was the Trump administration, and he couldn’t be bothered with meddlesome stuff like the Senate confirmation process, so Trump just kept appointing acting directors, letting them serve the time they were statutorily permitted and then moving them along in favor of the next acting director.  So, Patel himself did a lot of acting, too, serving in senior positions in important places in the government like the Department of Defense and the Office of National Intelligence.  Indeed, “acting” is a good name for Patel’s jobs, because what he did in those positions was not really to serve as a deputy, or whatever the other jobs he held were called, but rather to keep the acting director he reported to in line for his real master, who was always Donald Trump.

In that way, Patel was like one of the party enforcers Stalin sprinkled throughout his government and military, whose jobs were never to, say, carry a rifle in the army, or push papers in some corner of the bureaucracy, but rather to report back through the Communist Party chain of command to Stalin himself on whether the department heads they nominally worked for were adequately loyal to the great man himself.  Under Stalin, this led to a series of purges of top government officials.  With a few tweaks and tucks, something of the same thing happened repeatedly throughout the Trump administration, as officials were continually forced out of their jobs.  Their replacements were invariably less qualified than the people they succeeded, but far more loyal to the man at the top.