Kash Patel, Trump's FBI pick, is QAnon's 'name to remember'

Kash Patel, Donald Trump's pick for FBI director, has repeatedly engaged with QAnon -- the sprawling conspiracy theory that the top US law enforcement body currently says is linked to violent domestic extremism.

Patel, 44, once said QAnon -- based on the fantasy that Trump is waging a secret war against a global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles -- has "a lot of good to a lot of it."

The Federal Bureau of Investigation briefly probed who was behind QAnon years ago and has warned multiple times that the shadowy movement has incited extremist violence. This included after the January 6, 2021 attack by Trump supporters on the US Capitol, when several QAnon adherents took center stage.

Current FBI Director Christopher Wray himself has expressed concern about the group's potential to spark turmoil.

But Patel -- who held several high-level posts during Trump's first term, including as chief of staff to the acting defense secretary -- is hailed as a hero by the conspiracy theory's followers.

"Kash Patel has openly praised Q," one influential QAnon account said on X after his nomination. "Picture an FBI Director who sees the Q movement in a positive light."

Other supporters shared pictures they had taken with Patel, whose rise in Trump's favor includes having written three little-known children's books about "King Donald."

Patel has also made multiple appearances on QAnon-promoting web shows.

During one 2022 interview that AFP reviewed, Patel said he agreed with a host who insisted that "Q," the anonymous persona whose posts on fringe message boards gave rise to the conspiracy theory in 2017, "has been so right on so many things."

Patel told the host he had tried to "incorporate" the mysterious poster "into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences, because whoever that person is has certainly captured a widespread breath of the MAGA and the America First movement."

In other appearances on QAnon-promoting shows documented by the left-leaning Media Matters for America, Patel has said that "Q" has done both "good" and "bad."

He said that one of the movement's biggest influencers "knows what he's doing" and that he is "blown away at the amount of acumen some of these people have."

In a statement to AFP, Trump transition team spokesman Alex Pfeiffer dismissed what he said were "false smears about Kash Patel," though without substantiating that assertion.

"He's going to restore integrity to the FBI," Pfeiffer said, adding that Patel worked in the Justice Department under the Obama administration.

- 'Name to remember' -

The QAnon community's excitement over Patel appears in part because "Q" said he was a "name to remember" in a 2018 post.

"Kash becoming FBI Director is probably one of the GREATEST Q PROOFS OF ALL TIME," one prominent account wrote on Telegram.

On Truth Social, Patel once posted an image of himself with a flaming "Q" in the background.

He also interacted repeatedly in 2022 with a Truth Social account that used the handle "@Q" as he courted users to the Trump-owned platform, where he is on the parent company's board.

Mike Rothschild, author of "The Storm is Upon Us," a book on the cult of QAnon, said Patel's nomination “is indicative of the degree to which conspiracism and paranoia have consumed the mainstream Republican Party.”

The idea that Trump is fighting a shadowy “deep state” of unelected bureaucrats, in particular, is central to QAnon and has also “become orthodoxy in the GOP,” Rothschild said.

"All of the conspiracy theories about Covid, the 2020 election, vaccination and trafficking rings stem from that endless battle, and it's something that Q believers think Patel is going to help win as FBI director."

Patel told conservative strategist Steve Bannon last year that law enforcement agencies -- typically seen as independent from politics -- would under his leadership "come after" journalists as well as government officials.

He has also embraced other conspiracy theories popular in QAnon circles.

In multiple posts on Truth Social, he spread false claims about vaccine safety and "shedding" as he hawked "detox" supplements that supposedly "reverse" the Covid-19 shots.

After the 2020 election, Patel called a former Justice Department official to enquire about claims that Italian satellites altered votes, the official testified to Congress.

And in "The Plot Against the King 2000 Mules," the second of Patel's Trump-themed children’s books, he parroted far-right commentator Dinesh D'Souza's discredited allegations that ballot-trafficking "mules" smuggled fraudulent votes to sway the result four years ago.

Select copies of the book were signed with a special message: "WWG1WGA," an abbreviation for the QAnon slogan meaning, "Where we go one, we go all."