'Useful tool': Deep dive report sounds alarm on Trump loyalist

Donald Trump intends to stock the federal government with loyalists if re-elected to another term and, according to a report Monday, one likely candidate stands out for his allegiance to the former president.

Kash Patel joined the first Trump administration in 2019 with little government experience but swiftly rose through the ranks all the way to chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense just after the 2020 election. The author of a new deep dive into his career told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that Patel posed a real danger if the former president returned to the White House.

"That was something I started thinking a great deal about as I interviewed people, former Trump administration officials," said The Atlantic's Elaina Plott Calabro. "I would say what is it that this person actually believes? ... Kash Patel, his ideology, in essence, is loyalty to Donald Trump. So when I talk about [former CIA director] Gina Haspel objecting adamantly to his promotion to the top of the national security establishment, what is motivating those objections is the fact that whatever it is that Kash Patel wants to do hinges almost entirely on what it is that Trump wants to do."

The former administration officials she interviewed told Calabro that Patel was dangerous because his priorities revolved around the mercurial Trump's whims, and they feared there was nothing he would not do to please the former president.

"There's no independent world view in his decisions, so he is the type of person, as I noted in the piece, a former Trump official said to me, he's the person Trump knows he can turn to and say, 'Hey, I'm not telling you to break into the DNC, but,'" Calabro said.

"To know that Trump sees him as this quote-unquote useful tool, as this official put it to me, means that it's quite unpredictable what it is he can do in a second term."

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Patel played a crucial role in trying to keep Trump in power despite losing the 2020 election, and Calabro said that showed how far he was willing to go to prove his loyalty.

"He doesn't have a deep background in national security matters," Calabro said. "The fact that he was in these positions of power, for example, one of his last positions was chief of staff to the Department of Defense Acting Secretary Chris Miller. In that position, Kash Patel decided that he really wanted to investigate an insane conspiracy theory related to Donald Trump election fraud claims of two people imprisoned in Italy at the time.

"The fact that he was in that position of power, it didn't matter, really, what his background was or his precise knowledge of levers of government, because of his proximity to the president of the United States, the fact that he wants to pursue this one conspiracy theory meant that you got to a point where the White House chief of staff himself was discussing this seriously."

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