Kash Patel, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to be F.B.I. director, often burnishes his credentials as a former prosecutor even as he portrays law enforcement agencies as an inept and politicized “deep state.” A critical piece of that narrative is the investigation into the 2012 attack on a diplomatic compound and a C.I.A. annex in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans.
Mr. Patel, who worked at the Justice Department from early 2014 to 2017, was involved in that inquiry. He described it in his 2023 memoir, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy,” and in a conversation on a September podcast of “The Shawn Ryan Show.”
But he has both exaggerated his own importance and misleadingly distorted the department’s broader effort, according to public documents and interviews with several current and former law enforcement officials familiar with the matter. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Patel did not lead the Benghazi investigation.
“By the time the D.O.J. was moving in full force to compile evidence and bring prosecutions against the Benghazi terrorists, I was leading the prosecution’s efforts at Main Justice in Washington, D.C.”
— “Government Gangsters”
“I was the main Justice lead prosecutor for Benghazi for awhile.”
— “The Shawn Ryan Show”
Mr. Patel has repeatedly made it sound as if he led the government’s overall effort to investigate and prosecute militants involved in the 2012 attack.
As Mr. Patel himself acknowledges, he worked at the department’s Washington headquarters, or “Main Justice,” and he did not remain for the duration of the investigation.
In fact, Mr. Patel, a former public defender, was a prosecutor in the department’s counterterrorism section, where his assignments included work on the Benghazi investigation. But the section only supported the investigation, which was run by a team of prosecutors at the office of the U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia, along with agents and analysts at the F.B.I.
Mr. Patel took a junior position in the counterterrorism section in late January 2014 — well after the Benghazi investigation started. He left the department in April 2017, about six months before the first Benghazi case went to trial.
A spokesman for the Trump transition did not say for how much of that period he was working on the Benghazi investigation. But Mr. Patel was responsible for handling the section’s contribution to the interagency effort for only part of his time there, the officials familiar with the matter said.
He took up the task when a predecessor in the counterterrorism division left; records show that person started a detail working in a Senate office in November 2014. And at a later point, before leaving the section, he is said to have passed off the role to another colleague after friction with the prosecutorial team.
In the counterterrorism section, Mr. Patel’s contributions, the current and former officials said, included tasks like helping search for material at various intelligence agencies that had to be turned over to defense lawyers and routing paperwork up the chain to supervisors. (Department rules for terrorism cases require prosecutors to get prior approval for search warrants or indictments from the head of the National Security Division, or his or her designee.)
In his book, Mr. Patel also said that Main Justice asked him whether he would join the trial team for the prosecution of Ahmed Abu Khattala, a local militia leader accused of planning the attacks and who was captured in 2014. He says he declined.
But former and current officials said Mr. Patel was never offered an opportunity to join the trial team — a decision that they said would not have been made by Justice Department officials at main headquarters.
Alex Pfeiffer, a spokesman for the Trump transition, stood by Mr. Patel’s description of his duties.
“Kash was assigned as the lead prosecutor for Main Justice in D.C. on the Benghazi case as part of his role as a national security prosecutor in the Obama Justice Department,” Mr. Pfeiffer said, adding, “Kash’s time at the D.O.J. was spent fighting terrorism and he received an award for his efforts from the Justice Department.”
That award was not related to Mr. Patel’s work on the Benghazi inquiry. And in 2018, a team of current and former prosecutors and F.B.I. officials who had worked on the investigation and prosecution of Mr. Khattala received the attorney general’s award for distinguished service, the department’s second-highest award for employee performance.
Mr. Patel was not among the recipients.
Patel distorted the Justice Department’s decisions.
“Despite the fact that we had reams of evidence against dozens of terrorists in the Benghazi attack, Eric Holder’s Justice Department decided to only prosecute one of the attackers.”
— “Government Gangsters”
“I remember this meeting with then-A.G. Holder. And we had a deck of like 19 guys we wanted to prosecute. You know, JSOC had them rolled up and we wanted to get them all. They killed four Americans. You know, it’s a legit terrorist attack. And the basic general response from the F.B.I. and D.O.J. leadership was ‘it’s only politically convenient to get one guy.’”
— “The Shawn Ryan Show”
Mr. Patel’s statements suggest that the Justice Department under the Obama administration decided to initiate criminal proceedings against only one of the attackers, Mr. Khattala.
But as early as late 2013, the department had already filed sealed complaints against about a dozen militants, officials said at the time. Criminal complaints initiate prosecutions, but are often kept under seal if the charged person remains at large.
And prosecutors filed more secret complaints as the investigation identified additional suspects. A complaint filed against a Libyan man, Mustafa al-Imam, in May 2015, for example, became public only after his capture in 2017. (He was convicted in 2019 and sentenced to more than 19 years in prison.)
Other Benghazi suspects have since died.
Mr. Patel’s statement that the military had already “rolled up” as many as 19 attackers implied that they were already in American custody, raising the seemingly inexplicable question of why they did not get sent to trial.
In fact, to date, only Mr. Khatalla and Mr. al-Imam have been tried because the military has not captured any others — including on Mr. Patel’s watch as the Trump White House’s senior director for counterterrorism.
Capturing a specific person in a war-torn country where the military has scant ground presence is costly, risky and difficult. The operation to find and grab Mr. Khatalla required months of complex planning, including recruiting an informant to befriend and then lure Mr. Khattala to an oceanside villa, where an F.B.I. agent and American commandoes captured him and took him to an American warship waiting off the coast.
“Because of the efforts and resources the operation took, we wanted to go after the main guy,” said Robert D’Amico, a former F.B.I. agent who was involved in planning for the capture. “Nobody was against going after other people — it just wasn’t feasible. You would have needed thousands of troops and invaded a country to get all of them.”
Patel trivialized the case against an attack ringleader
“Ultimately, when it came to Benghazi, the Obama administration, the F.B.I. and the D.O.J. wanted to seem tough on terrorism, so they kept minimal prosecutions open and brought up big-sounding charges that we couldn’t support.”
— “Government Gangsters”
“And they went and got basically the wrong guy. And then we prosecuted that wrong guy. Not that he wasn’t a part of it. He just wasn’t like the top tier of guys I would have gone after. And they screwed up the prosecution because they didn’t listen to us.”
— “The Shawn Ryan Show”
Mr. Patel has repeatedly minimized the main conviction in the Benghazi inquiry, that of Mr. Khattala, while also pointing to a mixed verdict in that case as a sign of prosecutorial incompetence.
Mr. Khattala has been widely understood to be a central ringleader in orchestrating the attacks, and former officials directly involved said he was always the top priority and not a low-level foot soldier or scapegoat. The officials said they had no idea who Mr. Patel could have meant when he talked about a purported “top tier” of more significant militants.
At his trial in late 2017 — by which time the Trump administration was in charge of the Justice Department — Mr. Khatalla was convicted of terrorism offenses but acquitted of murder. Proving the murder charge was made more challenging, officials said, because an intended key witness from Libya got cold feet and refused to travel to the United States to testify against him.
Patel severely understated Khatalla’s sentence
“For example, Khatalla — Greenbrier River — the guy that’s getting, that first got prosecuted. He is getting out — for his participation in Benghazi, where he killed four Americans — he’ll be out of prison before the next presidential election’s done. … It’s so atrocious because they charged him with the wrong crimes.”
— “The Shawn Ryan Show”
Mr. Patel’s claim that Mr. Khatalla is set to be freed from prison before the November 2028 election is false.
Mr. Khatalla, whose classified code name during the operation to find and capture him was Greenbrier River, was sentenced in 2018 to 22 years in prison. An appeals court in June 2022 ruled the sentence was too low, and in late September, after the podcast featuring Mr. Patel aired, the trial judge raised Mr. Khatalla’s prison term to 28 years.
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