After President Trump’s first term, many of his loyalists found new perches by setting up advocacy groups to promote conservative policies. Kash Patel’s was not like the rest.
Other former Trump staff members used the millions of dollars they raised to build a second Trump administration in waiting. Their nonprofits had names like America First Policy Institute or the Center for Renewing America.
Mr. Patel’s charity was called the Kash Foundation. And its greatest cause often seemed to be the promotion of Mr. Patel himself.
Mr. Patel, now Mr. Trump’s nominee for F.B.I. director, used his charity to promote his media appearances, hawk his books and sell T-shirts with his name on them — made by a company he co-owned. His charity did make donations to those in need, including veterans, but also to Jan. 6 rioters and other Trump allies. But its most recent tax filings showed it spent more on “advertising and promotion” than on charitable giving. By law, charities must serve the public good and not the private interests of their leaders.
“It looks like the charity is fundamentally about making sure merchandise promoting Kash Patel gets sold into the world,” said Philip Hackney, a former I.R.S. lawyer who now teaches nonprofit law at the University of Pittsburgh. He said that the I.R.S. only enforced this rule in extreme cases, but that Mr. Patel’s use of his nonprofit for self-promotion raised questions.
Mr. Hackney said that if Mr. Patel wanted to set up a site to promote his views and sell his name-branded gear, “run it with your own money — not with your charity.”
Mr. Patel declined to be interviewed for this article.
Erica Knight, a spokeswoman for Mr. Patel, said he had not sought to use the charity to enrich himself, or to promote his brand. She said that he lent the foundation $150,000 to get it started and that the group had made more than $1 million in donations to people and other nonprofits, including disaster relief organizations and veterans groups, over its three-year life.
“It’s a do-good machine, driven by a mission to make tangible, positive change,” Ms. Knight said in a written statement. “Any claim to the contrary is nothing more than noise trying to distract from the undeniable good this foundation achieves every single day.”
She said Mr. Patel would leave his role as president of the foundation if confirmed.
Mr. Patel, 44, is a fervent defender of Mr. Trump who rose quickly in his first term, serving as chief of staff at the Pentagon. He will face a Senate committee hearing on his nomination on Thursday. Democrats have said Mr. Patel is unqualified to lead the F.B.I., citing his embrace of false claims about the 2020 election, the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, and the bureau’s investigations of Mr. Trump. The president and some Republicans have said that the F.B.I. needs a shake-up, and that Mr. Patel is the right person to do it.
Mr. Patel started his charity in 2022, saying he wanted to raise money for those persecuted by what he called the “deep state” — those in government he said were hostile to conservatives and Mr. Trump.
“This year we want to give away a million dollars,” Mr. Patel said in March 2023 at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a gathering of Trump fans. “Come check us out.”
Reality did not match Mr. Patel’s boast. Instead of $1 million, his nonprofit gave away just $212,000 that year, according to tax filings. The recipients included both individuals and nonprofits that help veterans.
The group’s biggest expense that year — $332,000 — was on advertising and promotion. The nonprofit spent $275,000 on what it described in its tax filings as “advertising merchandise.”
One beneficiary of the foundation’s distributions was Kyle Seraphin, an F.B.I. agent who said he had been suspended after he went to a member of Congress to raise questions about the bureau’s scrutiny of parents protesting at school boards.
The Biden administration has said its investigations were focused on threats of violence, not peaceful protests. The F.B.I. declined to discuss the circumstances of Mr. Seraphin’s dismissal.
Mr. Seraphin said Mr. Patel had called him out of the blue in 2022, after hearing him on a conservative podcast.
“There’s never been an ask,” Mr. Seraphin said. “There’s never been a quid pro quo.” He recalled that Mr. Patel just wanted to make sure that he was not destroyed because he knew people who had been destroyed by the government.
Mr. Seraphin said Mr. Patel sent $10,000 to help him pay bills, and asked for nothing in return.
Mr. Patel’s group also sent money to the families of some Jan. 6 rioters. Those gifts were funded, in part, by $50,000 in royalties from a song called “Justice for All,” which mashed up a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Jan. 6 defendants in the D.C. jail and a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance by Mr. Trump.
Ed Henry, a former Fox News host who produced the song, said the intent was to help the families of defendants who had not committed violence against police officers that day.
“I was about to be kicked out of the house because we didn’t have any money for the rent,” said Vianne York, whose husband, Sean Dennison, entered the Capitol on Jan. 6 and spent six months in jail after being convicted of disorderly conduct.
She said Mr. Patel’s group provided about $1,400, routed through another organization. Other groups provided another $14,500.
“Kash’s whole brand is that the F.B.I. has been weaponized and needs to be essentially destroyed from within,” said Stuart Richardson, of the left-leaning watchdog group Accountable.us. “His work is his audition. He’s proving, through the people that he uplifts, the type of F.B.I. director that he would be.”
Mr. Patel, who had also set up private businesses to capitalize on his celebrity in Mr. Trump’s circle, did not take a salary from the foundation. But its advertising often benefited Mr. Patel or his businesses.
The Kash Foundation’s website, for instance, promoted dozens of Mr. Patel’s appearances on conservative media, where he praised Mr. Trump and spotlighted his books — including one for children in which a besieged King Donald is helped by a wizard named Kash.
In the charity’s fund-raising emails, it also promoted another book Mr. Patel wrote: “Get your copy of Kash’s new book ‘Government Gangsters’!” Ms. Knight said that if those emails resulted in a book sale, Mr. Patel donated the profit back to the foundation.
The Kash Foundation also sells T-shirts and scarves emblazoned with a phrase Mr. Patel had personally trademarked: “Fight With Kash.” Since last year, his spokeswoman said, that merchandise has been made by Based Apparel, a company that Mr. Patel founded with Andrew Ollis, another of the Kash Foundation’s board members.
Mr. Patel became, effectively, a vendor to his own nonprofit, allowing him to turn tax-exempt donations into private revenue. Legal experts have said that type of arrangement can be legal, but it raised a risk that Mr. Patel could put his business’s interests ahead of his charity’s.
“It’s always a potential conflict of interest when you have a director doing this,” said Ellen Aprill, a senior scholar in residence studying nonprofit law at U.C.L.A.
Ms. Aprill said she would advise the nonprofit to survey the market before choosing Mr. Patel’s company: “You need to make sure they’re not raiding the charity, by getting more than fair market value for what they are selling.”
Ms. Knight declined to say what Mr. Patel’s for-profit charged his nonprofit, but she said it was not more than the prevailing market rate.
She said Mr. Patel had given up his ownership of the company after being nominated.
“Neither Andrew nor Kash have ever turned a profit from Based Apparel,” Ms. Knight said.
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