Good evening. I'm John Yang. President-elect Trump continues stocking his new administration with staunch loyalists.

He said this weekend he'll nominate Cash Patel to be FBI director. Patel is an ardent supporter of Mr. Trump and says the FBI is part of what he calls the deep state conspiracy against the president-elect and his allies.

On social media last night, Mr. Trump said Patel played a pivotal role in uncovering the

Russia-Russia-Russia hoax standing as an advocate for truth, accountability, and the Constitution.

The job requires Senate confirmation.

Ryan Riley covers the Justice Department and federal law enforcement

for NBC News. He's the author of Sedition Hunters, How January 6th Broke the Justice System.

Ryan, tell us who Cash Patel is. What's his background? What's his relation to a relationship with

Mr. Trump? Yeah, so he started off as a staffer with Devin Nunez, which is really what sort of got him

into Donald Trump's orbit.

And I think what he's most known for is being willing to do sort of whatever Donald Trump

would like him to do.

And, you know, I think the difference between him and most folks in federal law enforcement

and within the FBI is that, you know,

within the FBI, you sort of follow the facts where they lead you, and then you reach a

conclusion based upon those facts. And I think with the issue with Cash Patel here, is that he

sort of reaches the conclusion ahead of time and then tries to implement something that would

justify what he wanted to reach in the first place to begin with.

So I think a lot of the conclusions he comes up with, it's sort of the accusation up front as opposed to necessarily the facts.

And we've seen that repeatedly with Cash Patel, who has also authored a children's book, actually, that stars Donald Trump as

king and features himself as a wizard sort of helping out the king. So that's definitely the

dynamic that this brings to this FBI nomination. And of course, we should say that Chris Ray still

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