Kashyap “Kash” Patel, 38, a lawyer who and a Trump loyalist, has been promoted as senior director of counter-terrorism of the White House-based National Security Council (NSC), according to media reports.

He is a former senior staffer of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee working for its Republican leadership, which he left in February to join the NSC's International Organizations and Alliances directorate.

The NSC is the president's main outfit for coordinating security and foreign policy matters and is headed by National Security Adviser John Bolton. Earlier in his career, Patel had been a counter-terrorism prosecutor for the Justice Department.

While a senior aide to Representative Devin Nunes, who was the chairman of the Intelligence Committee when Republicans controlled the House, Patel worked to raise questions credibility of the allegations against Trump of colluding with Russians that led to the protracted inquiry by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

He was the principal author of a memo issued by Nunes that accused Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department of bias against Trump and of abusing laws to get warrants to conduct surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.

Patel was a public defender -- a government-paid lawyer to represent those who could not afford an advocate -- before he joined the Justice Department in 2014. From there he went on to the House Intelligence Committee.

While working as a counter-terrorism prosecutor for the department, he caused a flutter when a federal judge in Houston admonished him for not wearing a suit and tie and used expletives for him and other officials.