At the NSC, he was less interested in his assigned duties than in proving his loyalty to Donald Trump.
The president’s constitutional obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” requires evenhanded action in the national rather than his personal interest, a distinction Donald Trump doesn’t grasp. His oft-stated intention to seek retribution against opponents, if implemented, facially contravenes the Take Care Clause.

Too many of Mr. Trump’s personnel selections evidence his assiduous search for personal fealty, not loyalty to the Constitution. Kash Patel’s nomination as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation squarely fits this pattern.

Rep. Devin Nunes pushed Mr. Patel for the National Security Council staff after Republicans lost the House in 2018. Notwithstanding Mr. Patel’s lack of policy credentials, the president ordered him hired. NSC staff has long been divided into directorates responsible for different policy areas. Charles Kupperman, my deputy, and I placed Mr. Patel in the International Organizations Directorate, which had a vacancy.

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. He reported to senior directors in both cases and had defined responsibilities. His puffery was characteristic of the résumé inflation we had detected when Mr. Trump pressed him on us. 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.

He proved to be less interested in his assigned duties than in worming his way into Mr. Trump’s presence. Fiona Hill, NSC senior director for Europe, testified to Congress during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment hearings that Mr. Patel, at that time assigned to the International Organizations Directorate, participated in a May 2019 Oval Office meeting on Ukraine, and that he had engaged in various other Ukraine-related activities. Whatever he did on Ukraine while an NSC staffer, at least during my tenure, was unrestrained freelancing. (He has denied any communication with Mr. Trump on Ukraine.)

In August 2019, when I was overseas, Mr. Trump called Mr. Kupperman and White House counsel Pat Cipollone to the Oval Office. They arrived to find Mr. Patel already there. The subject of the discussion was making him an administration enforcer of presidential loyalty. Messrs. Cipollone and Kupperman strongly objected to any such role, whether in the NSC or the counsel’s office, and the issue disappeared. I resigned in September 2019.

According to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s memoir, during an October 2020 hostage-rescue mission, Mr. Patel, then in the Counter-Terrorism directorate, misinformed other officials that a key airspace-transit clearance had been granted. 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. Typically, Mr. Patel’s version of this episode in his memoir denies any error—though, ironically, it also boasts of his acting beyond the authority of NSC staffers. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also knew the day’s details, including about the clearance issue. He hasn’t spoken publicly about the incident. He should.

Last week Olivia Troye, who served as counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, elaborated on these concerns, tagging Mr. Patel with “making things up on operations” and lying about intelligence. His lawyers responded by threatening to sue her for defamation, writing that “at no point did Mr. Patel ever lie about national intelligence, place Navy Seals at risk, or misinform the Vice President.” What Mr. Esper and Ms. Troye accuse Mr. Patel of lying about is the airspace-transit clearance, the lack of which would have made transit by U.S. forces though the airspace of the country in question an act of war.

These are but a few of many cases that touch directly on Mr. Patel’s character and his consistent approach of placing obedience to Mr. Trump above other, higher considerations—most important, loyalty to the Constitution. His conduct in Mr. Trump’s first term and thereafter indicates that as FBI director he would operate according to Lavrenty Beria’s reported comment to Joseph Stalin: “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”

Mr. Patel has frequently called for investigations of journalists, comments he has since tried to walk back. He has been accused of seeking to declassify sensitive information for political rather than legitimate national-security reasons. During Mr. Trump’s first term, both Attorney General William Barr and Central Intelligence Agency Director Gina Haspell threatened to resign if Mr. Patel was forced on them as deputy FBI or CIA director, respectively.

Mr. Trump claims to have been unfairly, even illegally, targeted by partisan Biden prosecutors. That may or may not be true. But if illegitimate partisan prosecutions were launched, those responsible should be held accountable in a reasoned, professional manner, not in a counter-witch-hunt. The worst response is for Mr. Trump to engage in the prosecutorial conduct he condemns. Simply threatening to do so politicizes and degrades the legal process and the American people’s faith in evenhanded law enforcement. A president possessed of civic virtue wouldn’t launch retribution against opponents, and he certainly wouldn’t appoint an FBI director who saw himself solely as the president’s liege man.

If Mr. Trump is determined, wrongly, to remove Christopher Wray as FBI director, there are previous examples of appointees who restored faith in a battered Justice Department and FBI. In 1975 President Gerald Ford selected Edward Levi, dean of the University of Chicago Law School, as attorney general, and in 1978 President Jimmy Carter named Judge William Webster, a Republican, to be FBI director.

Mr. Patel is no Ed Levi or Bill Webster. To resolve questions over his integrity and fitness, a full-field FBI investigation, as prior nominees have undergone, is warranted. With more facts available and less rhetoric, the result will be clear. 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.

This article was first published in the Wall Street Journal on December 10, 2024. Click here to read the original article.