A close ally of former US President Donald Trump who said he was present as Trump declassified broad categories of material appeared before a federal grand jury after being granted immunity for his testimony, according to a person familiar with the matter. Kas Patel testified Thursday after the Justice Department granted him immunity from prosecution and after a federal judge in Washington issued a sealed order to that effect. He had invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during an earlier grand jury appearance, but the Justice Department — in an apparent recognition of his importance as a witness — later granted him a limited form of immunity that allowed him protects against using his testimony against him. In a statement issued Friday through a spokesman, Patel made it clear that his appearance was not voluntary and denied that he had reached any kind of immunity “deal” with the Justice Department. “Rather, his testimony was compelled over his objection through the only legal remedy available to the government — a grant of qualified immunity,” the statement said. The Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into the discovery of top-secret files seized in an FBI search of Trump’s Florida property, Mar-a-Lago, on August 8. The FBI removed more than 100 classified documents during this investigation. That’s in addition to the 15 boxes of records recovered in January by the National Archives and Records Administration, as well as more than thirty classified documents handed over to investigators in June. A former Justice Department prosecutor himself, Patel is a close Trump ally and has held multiple roles in his administration, including as senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council and later as chief of staff to acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller. In recent months, he has repeatedly and publicly criticized the Justice Department’s Mar-a-Lago investigation. In an appearance this week on a conservative podcast, he described himself as “all about the boss” when asked if he would accept the job of FBI director if Trump won in 2024. Patel is likely of interest to investigators because of his claims, including in a May interview with Breitbart News, that he was present as Trump declassified material, even though no changes had been made to the classifications of the documents. In that interview, Patel said, Trump “declassified entire sets of material in anticipation of leaving the administration that he believed the American public should have the right to read for themselves.” Trump has previously claimed that a president can declassify information “just by thinking about it,” but has provided no evidence that he has done so. His lawyers, notably, do not argue that he had taken steps to declassify the material found at Mar-a-Lago, though they have repeatedly argued that presidents have broad authority to declassify as they wish. Patel’s testimony, first reported by the Washington Post, was confirmed by a person familiar with the matter who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. Justice Department policy authorizes prosecutors to seek a court order to compel the testimony of a witness, providing immunity when the witness invokes their right against self-incrimination. Among the factors to be weighed in that decision, according to Justice Department policy, is the value of the person’s expected testimony in the investigation or possible prosecution. Separately, FBI agents interviewed a former deputy White House adviser in the Trump administration in May and June about Trump’s handling of classified information as president, a person familiar with the matter told the AP on Friday. That lawyer, John Eisenberg, told investigators that he didn’t help pack the boxes taken to Mar-a-Lago after Trump left the White House and didn’t know what documents they contained. He also said he did not remember Trump, as Patel claimed, broadly or unilaterally declassifying entire categories of intelligence or doing so on the spot, the person said. Eisenberg told agents that while he believed a president had broad declassification authority, the scope of that authority also depended in some cases on context, institutional analysis and the specific nature of the information involved, the person said. He also recounted to investigators an episode in which Trump wanted to tweet sensitive information related to an image of a missile exploding on a launch pad. Eisenberg, who served as a top lawyer at the NSC, then contacted a stakeholder agency to see if this would be a problem. Some tags were then removed before the image was published, according to a person familiar with Eisenberg’s account. The Post earlier reported details from Eisenberg’s interviews. FBI officials spoke with a number of other witnesses, including a Trump aide who was seen on video moving boxes at Mar-a-Lago.
