Opinion | The Trumpworld climber at the heart of the declassification fight

The House investigation was led by a staffer named Kash Patel, who has argued that his report for then-chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) showed FBI “tradecraft failings” that compromised its investigation of Trump and Russia from the start. Patel went on to become a senior official at the National Security Council and Pentagon — and he would have had even bigger jobs if Trump had had his way. As I noted in an April 2021 profile, Patel has been “almost a ‘Zelig’ figure in President Donald Trump’s confrontation against what he imagined as the ‘deep state.’ ”

Cut to Mar-a-Lago, where Zelig has emerged once more. It turns out that Trump, in a June 19 letter, designated Patel as one of his two representatives to the National Archives for dealing with his records, classified and otherwise. Patel has also emerged as a chief public exponent of Trump’s claim that he could declassify information, including highly sensitive Russia-probe material, at will.

Patel was touting Trump’s declassification powers long before the Aug. 8 search at the Florida estate, back when Trump’s representatives were still negotiating with the FBI over access. Indeed, on May 5 Patel made a startling claim on a right-wing radio show that Trump had unilaterally declassified an extraordinarily broad range of documents — implicitly raising the possibility that these documents might be at Mar-a-Lago.

“On his way out of the White House, he declassified — made available to every American citizen in the world — large volumes of information relating, not just to Russiagate, but to national security matters, to the Ukraine impeachment, to his impeachment one, impeachment two,” Patel told radio hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton.

On June 21, two days after Trump designated him as a point man in the National Archives battle, Patel announced on a podcast hosted by David Scarlett, a conservative Christian pastor, that he was going to “march down” to the archives and “identify every single document that they blocked from being declassified … and we are going to start putting that information out.”

That broad declassification claim — covering not just the much-disputed Russia documents but “large volumes” relating to other unspecified “national…