Inside the Fight to Confirm Kash Patel as FBI Director

If you ever plan on climbing Mount Everest, you’ll need what they call a sherpa. Named after the small Nepalese ethnic group that populate the Himalayas, sherpas are mountain guides to help climbers navigate the brutal and unpredictable conditions of Everest. It’s no surprise, then, that Washington has adopted the term “sherpa” for counselors to presidential cabinet nominees during the confirmation process. If you think climbing Everest is hard, just try climbing Capitol Hill.

Clint Brown, now the president of American Path, was the sherpa for one of the Trump administration’s toughest nominee battles: the confirmation of FBI Director Kash Patel. Brown takes viewers inside this uphill battle, which ended with a 51-49 vote to confirm Patel, in this week’s episode of “The Signal Sitdown.”

With over a decade of Senate experience, Brown helped Patel understand Senate dynamics and procedure so Patel could sell the vision he and Trump had for the FBI.

One afternoon shortly after Trump’s election win, Brown got a call. A friend on the Trump transition asked if he’d help get Patel confirmed. Brown was given just hours to make up his mind. Brown decided to do it because “one, it sounded like fun, but, two, I didn’t want to go into the administration. It’s just not a good time in my life for that.” Nevertheless, Brown “wanted to help,” and this was his opportunity.

Brown quickly learned that “it’s all DIY if you’re a sherpa.”

“When you’re working at that level with a principal at that level, you’d think you’d have like an army of 10 people,” Brown tells The Daily Signal. “But it literally is just the sherpa. And, if you’re lucky, you have a scheduler and a comms sherpa.”

A decade of Senate experience could not prepare Brown for what was to come. “I had no idea how brutal the confirmation process really is,” he says. 

Each meeting with senators on Capitol Hill, of which Patel and Brown had more than 50, is “a job interview.” And you’re interviewing, Brown explains, to become “the executive in charge of a multi-billion dollar organization with thousands of people.”

It’s a punishing process for nominee and sherpa alike. “[If] you’re exhausted, you haven’t slept in days, you’re not feeling well, and you go in and you say something totally off the wall, they go tell other senators,” Brown recalls.

Clearly explaining the vision is key. “You’ve got to tell them what your vision is for the organization. You better know your stuff about the organization,” Brown says. 

Dealing with sensitive information severely complicates matters. “At these organizations, everything is secret,” Brown adds. “So you can give your vision of how it should work, but there’s things you can’t say that you know from being briefed behind the scenes. They know you know, you know they know, but you can’t talk about it because everybody has a security clearance and none of it’s in a SCIF.”

Patel’s pitch was twofold: “One, we are going to let good cops be cops. We’re gonna refocus the FBI on going after bad guys. And two, we are going to have radical transparency at the FBI where we give everything to Congress,” Brown says, paraphrasing Patel.

It was a smart pitch not because it focused on the Trump administration’s interests, but the individual interest of each of the senators.

For one, “everybody has a crime problem in their state,” Brown explains. “[It] doesn’t matter what state you’re in. Crime has gone up over the last decade, and especially the last four years under the Biden administration.”

The second part of Patel’s pitch, radical transparency, addressed senators’ long-held frustrations with the FBI under Director Wray. “Virtually every senator that we met with, and they said it publicly, too, complained about how they would send an information request to the FBI and they would get back nothing,” Brown explains.

“The FBI should be accountable to Congress. And they have an oversight function where they need to know what’s going on in the FBI,” Brown adds. Still, “no response.”

Brown had never met Patel before their first meetings on Capitol Hill, but Brown was thoroughly impressed long before Patel was confirmed as FBI director on Feb. 20. “[Patel] did a great job in the confirmation process,” Brown says. “He’s exceptionally talented at laying out a vision and [able] to communicate it in a way that senators understand it.”

“At the end of it, I was saying I would never do this again,” Brown recalls, “but now I’m like, ‘I kind of want to do this again.’”

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