Controversial Trump Aide Lashes Out At 'Hypocrisy' Of Fellow Indian Americans

WASHINGTON: Kashyap "Kash" Patel, the controversial top aide to former President Donald Trump and also a close associate, said he feels "forsaken and vilified" by the Indian American community at a time when he has been "unfairly targeted by the US justice department for the colour of his skin".

"I think it's the height of hypocrisy that they won't support people who are first generation Indian Americans, who have made it to somewhat the highest levels of the United States government just because they disagree with you politically," Patel said in an exclusive interview to IANS, which is his first to an Indian news publication.

He added: "I will help any Indian American and everyone looking to advance in government service or in other ways, in law enforcement, national defence, wherever I can. But they take the opposite position because they have the fake news media to back them. All they care about is publicity and media. The only thing I care about is the mission. I put the mission first every time.'

Patel said that he has been getting hateful messages from the Indian American community on "email, or messages on social media, hateful messages, spiteful messages, disgusting messages, which is sad because these are supposed to be our brothers and sisters".

Patel is an Indian American who was born in New York to Gujarati parents who came to the US via East Africa. He is an attorney by training and rose to become the chief of staff to the acting secretary of defence in the dying days of the Trump administration and almost came to head the CIA as acting director.

He is now a leading member of a small group of Republican Indian Americans disliked intensely by the rest of the community, which remain overwhelmingly Democratic. This so-called rogues' gallery of Desis includes former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, who earned the community's wrath for not wanting to be called an Indian American because he was opposed to the concept of hyphenated Americans; and Dinesh D'Souza, a Ronald Reagan White House staffer who went on to reinvent himself as a documentary filmmaker and was jailed for election funding fraud and became the first Indian American to receive a Presidential pardon, from Trump.

He remains a close associate of the former President. "The President and I talk all the time. I'm not going to reveal our private conversations, but he's been pretty public about what his intentions are and how much he wants to fix the country," Patel said, when asked if Trump is planning to run again. "So I think you'll see that an announcement will be coming in the next couple of months and then we'll follow behind it."

Patel had travelled to Ahmedabad with Trump in February 2020 and calls its a "special moment".

"It was extremely humbling for the President to invite me. At the time, I was the highest ranking Indian American official at the White House, to invite me to see Prime Minister Modi in Gujarat, in my hometown and have my parents there on my birthday... ," Patel said, adding, "It was, you know, a moment of a lifetime to go into the stadium, give my mom and dad a hug, see the Prime Minister, meet him in person. It was just such a surreal experience."

Patel was named recently in an affidavit that the Department of Justice filed before a federal judge to secure a warrant to search Trump's Mar-a-Lago beach home for presidential documents that he had carried there with him from the White House in violation of the Presidential Records Act, which required him to turn them over to the National Archives.

The affidavit, a heavily redacted copy of which has been released, cited a news report in which Patel had characterised as "misleading" reports in other news organizations that the National Archives had found classified materials among records that provided by Trump from Mar-a-Lago. "Patel alleged that such reports were misleading because POTUS had declassified the materials at issue," the affidavit said.

Patel took issue with the naming. "Me, as a former National Security prosecutor, knows that the policy of DOJ (department of justices) and FBI is redact names of people just to protect their security and the only name they didn't un-redact last Friday, when they released the affidavit besides Donald Trump was mine and the next seven pages were redacted," Patel said. (IANS)

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