By Sadie Gurman and James Fanelli

WASHINGTON -- Trump officials tried to start their shake-up of the Federal Bureau of Investigation even before the president took office, picking supervisors in New York and New Jersey to run the agency until the Senate could confirm Kash Patel, Trump's choice for FBI director.

But in an Inauguration Day scramble, White House officials goofed on the White House website and listed the wrong man in charge of the agency, people familiar with the matter said. Instead of correcting the error, officials let it stand, and the two men traded temporary titles, hopeful that Patel could soon be in the job, the people said.

Trump's aggressive plans to reshape the bureau, and the chaos that could bring, will be in the spotlight Thursday when Patel is set to appear for his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He is expected to face sharp questions about his close ties to Trump and whether he has the experience to lead the nation's premier law-enforcement agency.

Patel has in the past said he wants to see investigations into many of the people Trump sees as enemies, including former FBI Director Christopher Wray, whom Trump picked during his first term and who stepped down this month before Trump could fire him. "I'd shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the Deep State," Patel said on a podcast last year.

In a Senate questionnaire, Patel listed more than 1,000 media appearances and said he worked as a Trump surrogate, an unusual background for an FBI director.

Some Trump aides warned it would be problematic to pick Patel, given his controversial comments. Trump's attorney general nominee, Pam Bondi, who wasn't involved in Patel's selection, told senators: "Mr. Patel would fall under me and the Department of Justice, and I will ensure that all laws are followed -- and so will he."

In recent meetings with lawmakers, Patel has assured some senators that he will name a special agent with FBI experience to be his deputy, rather than a political outsider, said one person familiar with the meetings. Patel, 44 years old, dismissed some of his more bombastic comments as hyperbole, another person said, and told senators he would be fair.

At his confirmation hearing, Patel plans to emphasize his life story as the son of Indian immigrants and his years as a public defender and career federal prosecutor, according to a person helping him prepare for it. He has recruited some former FBI officials who share his views to advise him.

"Mr. Patel will run an FBI Americans can be proud of, with people at all levels that will execute its important mission," a representative for Patel said.

Some FBI officials are concerned Patel will undermine the bureau's nonpartisan ethos and unnecessarily punish the workforce. Others are cautiously optimistic and say they are on board with some proposed changes, including sending more agents from headquarters to the field.

Becoming FBI director would be a huge rung up in Patel's rapid career ascension. In the questionnaire, most of the significant cases he described working on are from his time as a public defender in Florida. Among his clients: a man charged with helping 17 people enter and live in the U.S. illegally and another charged with trying to sell 6,000 stolen Amazon Kindle readers.

Patel came on Trump's radar in 2018 when, as a staffer for the House Intelligence Committee, he wrote a memo alleging improprieties in how the FBI had targeted a former Trump adviser. The thrust of the memo was later validated by the Justice Department's inspector general.

Patel's critics, including senior officials who worked with him in the first Trump administration, say his résumé masks a lack of management experience and a firm grasp of how the FBI works. They point to alleged missteps he made when he had moved from his House staff job to the first Trump national-security staff, including some that appear to have scrambled high-stakes hostage rescue operations.

In October 2020, Patel told The Wall Street Journal that two Americans held hostage by Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen had been freed. On Monday, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary panel, said his office had received information alleging that Patel broke protocol in making those comments and revealed an operation as it was still in progress, several hours before the hostages were confirmed to be in U.S. custody. Other former Trump administration officials disputed the account.

After leaving the first Trump administration, Patel stuck close to Trump. He launched a clothing company that sold pro-Trump T-shirts, as well as those with his own "K$H" moniker. He became a director of Trump's social-media company Truth Social, which paid his company $120,000 a year for consulting work, and earned another $210,000 during the 2024 election cycle from Save America, Trump's political-action committee. He also wrote a provocative children's book that pays homage to its hero, King Donald.

Patel has lived in Las Vegas for the past few years, renting a home owned by Trump donor Michael Muldoon, who co-owns a timeshare company. There, he socialized in rarefied circles, joining the Poodle Room, a members-only club at the Fontainebleau hotel that attracts celebrities.

The former president of the Nevada Republican Club, Rudy Pamintuan, said he thought Patel moved to Nevada because it is a place where people can get a fresh start. At GOP events, Patel put in long hours patiently answering voter questions about Trump, Pamintuan said.

Patel was hired last April as a director at VK Integrated Systems, a Tennessee-based weapons technology company, which won a $1.25 million contract with the Pentagon earlier last year to develop an explosive gel for the Air Force.

At FBI headquarters, officials are bracing for what Patel's tenure could bring. The director mix-up appears to be indicative of the move-fast-and-break-things approach of the second Trump administration.

A week before Trump's inauguration, the Trump transition reached out to Robert Kissane, a bureau official running counterterrorism operations in New York, to serve as the FBI's temporary leader, according to people familiar with the matter. Officials asked Brian Driscoll, who worked in the bureau's hostage rescue operations, to serve as deputy. Driscoll is known to sign his name 'Drizz,' and his friends affectionately liken him the fictional Captain Jack Sparrow, from "The Pirates of the Caribbean."

Each man had one conversation with Patel, traveled to Washington and had set up in their respective suites on Inauguration Day when word reached them that the White House had incorrectly listed Driscoll as the acting director on its website, according to people familiar with the matter.

Instead of fixing the error, the pair swapped their temporary FBI roles -- and offices.

--Aruna Viswanatha contributed to this article.

Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com and James Fanelli at james.fanelli@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 29, 2025 21:00 ET (02:00 GMT)

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