Maya Wiley

04/26/2026

Patel’s loyalty to Trump and abuse of power didn’t save him. The oversight and mounting public concern about the true cost of unqualified leadership and blind loyalty to a man over the mission, is working. Allen’s violence was morally and legally wrong, but it was also unjustifiable given his stated reasons. He seems to believe that we can no longer rely on our laws or courts, and by extension, our civil rights and social justice advocacy. Patel’s apparent ouster should be a lesson to us all beause peaceful power has not been defeated.

There is no question that Patel, along with Pam Bondi, and Todd Blanche, among others, have led the Department of Justice into the very political waters that have been violating our civil and human rights. In January, Patel sent FBI agents to Fulton County, Georgia, where almost half of the County population is Black, to seize 2020 ballots. After Trump’s renewed rant that he won the election he most definitely lost in 2020, Patel’s FBI charged in with a warrant based on debunked conspiracy theories. The DOJ has also pursued election denial investigations in Arizona’s Maricopa County and Wayne County, Michigan, all driven by flimsily and dated election denial claims and all that undermine voting by Black, Latino and other voters. To cap a long run of political ions you can have a match, but that’s not the issue. The latest indictment of the civil rights organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), for its work to un-cover the hate filled activities of the Ku Klux Klan, by paying informants, to whitewash the very existence of racism. See my Substack on that here.

Patel, like former Homeland Security head Kristi Noem, former AG Pam Bondi, and former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez DeReemer, are simply not covering up their dirt well enough and the dirtier this administration acts the more the civil rights community advocates and the more ordinary people protest.

Noem presided over too many ICE killings of citizens. Bondi botched efforts to make the Epstein files work against Trump’s political enemies, instead bringing criticism from his own base. DeReemer has just looked too dirty to be delivering. Patel is reported to be an excessive drinker, leading him to sue The Atlantic. News coverage earned Patel an oversight letter from Rep Jamie Raskin, demanding a kind of Congressional breathalyzer demand! Worse, Patel ordered a security detail for his girlfriend and an investigation opened into a reporter for looking into a story on that girlfriend. This last bit of breaking news is a very loud alarm bell about Patel’s view of an independent press and its job to shine a light on government abuse and corruption.