President-elect Donald Trump announced this evening that he will nominate Garden City-born Kash Patel as the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Patel, a Trump loyalist and a staunch critic of the FBI, signals the incoming administration’s intent to take on the law enforcement and national security bureaucracy, often referred to the former president as the “deep state.”
A Garden City Native
Born in 1980 in Garden City, Kashyap “Kash” Patel describes himself in his book, “Government Gangsters,” as “just a guy from Queens and Long Island with the same story as so many others.”
The book contains a few anecdotes about his childhood in Long Island. Patel writes that he “grew up watching the New York Islanders and playing hockey.”
He also mentioned that he used to caddy at the Garden City Country Club — and that his interactions with lawyers there sparked his interest in a career in law.
Patel graduated from Garden City High School in 1998 and went on to the University of Richmond.
Patel selected a quote from Abraham Heschel, a venerated Jewish theologian, for his Class of 1998 senior yearbook: “Racism is man’s gravest threat—the maximum of hatred for a minimum reason.”
An Elite Group of Two
Patel is not the only senior U.S. official to graduate from Garden City High School.
Steven Chu, a Nobel-winning physicist, served as energy secretary in the first Obama administration, graduated from Garden City High School decades earlier.