Editorials & Other Articles

As regular readers might recall, Patel first came to national attention during Trump’s first impeachment scandal. Fiona Hill, the former top Russia expert at the White House National Security Council, told Congress that she discovered that the then-president was ignoring the NSC’s Ukraine expert, choosing instead to listen to Patel — which struck Hill as quite odd.

In fact, Patel had no expertise on Ukraine, though he was a congressional aide who seemed to have a knack for telling Trump whatever the then-president wanted to hear. With this in mind, Hill found it necessary to warn her staff to be “very careful” about communications with the Republican operative, and she removed Patel from internal distribution lists.