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see lie gaslight esp ~ military

nunes re-elected and 2 guys in coup setup?!

see benghazi BS

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45 hours in Kash’s Corner: A look at the show co-hosted by Trump’s pick to lead the FBI

Brandy Zadrozny

Updated December 8, 2024

Rampant FBI misconduct, election fraud, the deep state. Such were the weekly topics on “Kash’s Corner,” the eponymous online show hosted by President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the FBI.

From 2021 to 2023, Kash Patel made content for The Epoch Times, a news organization known for its far-right conspiracy theories, its association with a Chinese dissident religious group, and, since June, a sprawling multimillion-dollar money laundering scheme allegedly perpetrated by one of its top executives.

NBC News reviewed 79 episodes totaling over 45 hours of content featuring Patel and his co-host, Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek, neither of whom is accused in the federal case. Together, they spun detailed but unfounded claims of conspiracies involving government officials, law enforcement agencies, the media and tech companies, among others, all aiming to rig elections, silence conservative voices and undermine Trump’s presidency and re-election.

Billed as a show where the former deputy director of national intelligence would “break down the biggest issues of our day, from the origins of Covid-19 to the politicization of the intelligence community,” “Kash’s Corner” offered commentary on the news, often with a conspiratorial flourish.

The show, available only to Epoch Times subscribers, could receive fresh scrutiny as Patel faces Senate confirmation hearings. His lack of experience, his promotion of politically motivated conspiracy theories in a book vilifying the FBI, and his public remarks promising to “come after” judges, lawyers and the media involved in Trump’s many legal investigations are also likely subjects.

It wasn’t just his namesake show. Patel was a constant contributor across Epoch Times properties, appearing on other shows, on the sister television network NTDTV, and in the outlet’s Jan. 6 documentary. The last “Kash’s Corner” dropped in August 2023 with an announcement that Patel would be appearing on other shows and that the “Corner” would be back after the election.

The details of Patel’s contract with The Epoch Times aren’t known. (Financial disclosure forms filed by talk radio and Epoch Times host Larry Elder during a failed presidential run showed the company paid between $1 million and $5 million for a similar show.) A representative for Patel declined to comment.

Jekielek and The Epoch Times did not respond to requests for comment. In a June statement on the money laundering allegations, The Epoch Times said it “intends to and will fully cooperate with any investigation dealing with the allegations,” and noted that its chief financial officer, Bill Guan, had been suspended “until this matter is resolved.”

Turning the 'Corner'

“Kash’s Corner” debuted in the summer of 2021, when after years of increasingly powerful roles within Trump’s national security agencies, the former federal prosecutor was out of a full-time job following his boss’ election loss.

That January, he began consulting for Trump’s Save America PAC, which devoted most of its spending to the ex-president’s legal bills. (Patel ultimately earned $325,000 for the job.) In April, he started “fundraising consulting” for the campaign committee Friends of Matt Gaetz, pulling in $145,000 that year, following news that the far-right congressman was the subject of an underage sex-trafficking investigation (Gaetz has denied the allegations and no charges were brought). Patel also set up a website, Fight for Kash, where he solicited donations for undefined legal efforts that promised to “strike a major blow to the far-Left media and Big Tech!”

It was a consequential moment for The Epoch Times, too. After years of struggling, the once-fringe newspaper powered by Falun Gong, a religious group persecuted in China, had finally found a foothold in conservative media. The company had spent a small fortune on pro-Trump ads in the run-up to 2020 and was amassing a windfall in the wake of Trump’s loss, increasing revenue by a staggering 685% over two years, to $122 million in 2021 — revenue that would later come under federal scrutiny. Executives and editors credited its success to subscriptions driven by their editorial vision, which they said offered a counterbalance to mainstream media, with reports downplaying the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, denying climate change and fearmongering about vaccines.

Patel, a major force behind an effort to undercut the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, made sense for The Epoch Times, an outlet that had grown its audience in part by exposing what it dubbed “Spygate,” a disproven conspiracy theory alleging President Barack Obama had spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign as part of an intricate plot to meddle with the election and tar the incoming president with scandal. In one episode of “Kash’s Corner,” Patel called The Epoch Times’ intricate chart laying out the conspiracy theory, including red strings, “the best one ever created in history.”

In March 2021, Jekielek first interviewed Patel for an “Inside Story of How Spygate Was Uncovered” edition of his show, “American Thought Leaders.” By April, Patel had a show of his own.

A.J. Bauer, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Alabama who studies conservative media, said Patel brought a shared worldview and White House credentials that lent an air of authority to claims that are usually only found on the fringes.

“I think it was circumstance and dovetailing ideology around conspiracism and the notion of a deep state out to get Trump” that landed Patel at The Epoch Times, Bauer said. “And I imagine that Kash — sorry for the bad pun — brought cache.”

Fraud allegations

Patel joined The Epoch Times as it appeared to be among the most successful media upstarts in the U.S., surging at a time while many other outlets were struggling to build an audience or turn a profit.

The company said it was making money through subscriptions and donations, claims that federal prosecutors now say were false.

According to an indictment unsealed in June, Guan, The Epoch Times’ chief financial officer, oversaw a group within the company’s Vietnam office called the “Make Money Online” team. Allegedly, the team used cryptocurrency to buy stolen funds, including debit cards loaded with fraudulent unemployment benefits, at a discount, and then funneled the laundered money into Guan’s and The Epoch Times’ bank accounts. Guan has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

Prosecutors claim the alleged money laundering scheme netted the group some $67 million.

There’s no reason to believe that Patel, Jekielek or anyone else in the newsroom was aware of any alleged fraud.

It’s unclear if or how the FBI was involved in the investigation, whether and how it would be in the future, and how having a former Epoch Times content creator as director of the agency might affect any investigation going forward.

The initial press release noted the charges against Guan were the result of a joint investigation between the Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General and the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, along with “law enforcement partners.” The prosecution is part of an operation by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces focused on “dismantling high-level criminal organizations.” The FBI is a member agency.

A spokesperson for the FBI referred questions about the investigation to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Public affairs chief Nicholas Biase declined to comment.

'Just the beginning'

If Patel offered legitimacy to The Epoch Times’ short-on-substance claims and connections to Trump that culminated in a 2022 Mar-a-Lago interview with the former president, he also brought a firebrand persona who was comfortable courting fringe audiences.

Patel became a frequent guest on Steve Bannon’s “Real America’s Voice” show, where he promoted his books and Trump-themed merch, and made his most controversial statements, including an appearance last year where he imagined what he might do with federal power: “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” he said. He qualified those remarks last year, telling NBC News that he only intended to pursue those who had broken the law.

Things were slower over at “Kash’s Corner,” less self-promotional and more cerebral, where he had more than half an hour to lay out his version of the world. Most shows ran between 30 and 40 minutes.

On the FBI, Patel said it needed “a huge overhaul,” charged its leadership with “going after political targets” and putting “the law second,” and praised three FBI agents who had been stripped of their security clearances and been put on leave for either being at the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 or sharing conspiracy theories about the attack afterward. (Patel’s foundation also provided “grants” of unknown size to those ex-agents.)

“We’ve proven the illegitimacy of the FBI and its actions,” he said in December 2022, falsely citing “Russiagate” and Hunter Biden’s laptop as evidence the FBI has been “completely politicized.”

Later that month, he suggested the FBI was part of a Big Tech conspiracy to censor Americans and promoted a debunked theory that the FBI paid Twitter to censor conservatives as part of “the largest disinformation campaign to rig a presidential election.”

“This is just the beginning, and if anyone thinks that it was a one-off, they are completely wrong,” he said. “What, is the FBI going to come around and say, ‘Now, oh, we were just spending government dollars to help safeguard a nation’? I mean, that’s going to be the epithet they come back with, but we now know the true nature of their corrupt ways.”

Patel often invoked what he labeled a “two-tiered” justice system. “The FBI and DOJ [are] politicizing targets and manufacturing crimes. They’re basically saying, show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,” he said on a 2022 show.

In another 2022 episode, Patel voiced his concerns about what he termed the FBI’s “confidential human source corruption cover-up network.” He claimed the agency used confidential sources during the Jan. 6 riots for political purposes, asking whether rioters had been goaded by agents to commit crimes and questioning the related convictions. Did “those confidential human sources engage people who are not going to conduct criminal activity and convince them to do so? That is the definition of entrapment, which is illegal, and you can’t charge someone who’s been entrapped.”

The belief that confidential FBI sources contributed to the violence on Jan. 6 or that the agency set up rioters is an unfounded, yet persistent one. “Any suggestion that the violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was orchestrated by the FBI is categorically false,” the FBI said in a statement to Politifact this year.

Patel suggested a specific solution: for Congress to use the power of subpoena to uncover crimes and conspiracies via “a Church Commission,” similar to the 1975 congressional investigation into federal intelligence agencies.

“I don’t see how Americans can have any faith in this FBI anymore,” he said in December 2022. “It’s going to take a major overhaul from these guys in Congress when the gavels flipped to conduct some rigorous oversight, but also to retool the FBI and DOJ, so it actually has credibility again. But that’s going to be a multiyear lift.”

As for who should be investigated first, Patel suggested in January that it be Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a physician and immunologist who has become a major target of Covid-era conspiracy theories.

“Fauci, I guess, is the one-word name that you can say is deserving of an entire investigation,” he said.

Trump’s legal woes were a popular subject, too. In multiple episodes last year, Patel repeatedly framed multiple civil and criminal cases against Trump as politically motivated and without merit, including the Stormy Daniels hush money case (“That’s not a crime”), the classified documents case (“When you’re president and you leave, you can take whatever you want”), the E. Jean Carroll case (“Basically, a jury disregards the facts and the law and bases a decision on emotion alone.”) and the federal indictment accusing Trump of conspiring to overturn the election (“The criminalization of thought and free speech.”).

Complicit in nearly every scheme, according to Patel, was the media.

“There’s a whole lot of people out there just thinking, ‘What can I believe?’” Jekielek said in a 2022 show. “It’s hard,” Patel replied. “What they should believe is Epoch Times, but I’m biased.”

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LIED ABOUT GETTING PERMISSION ON NIGERIAN AIRSPACE JSOC ENDANGERED

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RWW

12/05/2024

Kyle Mantyla

* Phillip Nieto @ Mediaite: Kash Patel Threatens to Sue Ex-Pence Aide For Saying On MSNBC He’s Unfit to Lead the FBI

Kash Patel’s legal team threatened Wednesday to sue a former aide to Mike Pence who claimed he was unfit to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Zack Beauchamp @ Vox: I listened to hours of Trump’s FBI pick on Steve Bannon’s podcast. Oh boy.

The overwhelming impression is that Patel is a man whose entire worldview revolves around paranoid conspiracy theories — specifically, conspiracies against both America and Trump, which for him are one and the same. It’s a specific kind of obsession that reminds me of the FBI’s first director: J. Edgar Hoover, a man who infamously abused his power to persecute political enemies.

Mike Baker and Ruth Graham @ The New York Times: Pete Hegseth and His ‘Battle Cry’ for a New Christian Crusade

Before Donald J. Trump picked him to lead the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth spoke often about a medieval military campaign that he saw as a model for today: the Crusades, in which Christian warriors from Western Europe embarked on ruthless missions to wrest control of Jerusalem and other areas under Muslim rule.

David Badash @ The New Civil Rights Movement: Far-Right Influencer at SCOTUS Calls for ‘Trans Ideology’ to Be ‘Erased From the Earth’

As justices on the U.S. Supreme Court were hearing arguments in the Biden administration’s challenge to a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming treatment for transgender minors, far-right influencer, anti-LGBTQ commentator and activist, and Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh was outside the Court attacking what he calls “trans ideology” — and calling for it to be “entirely erased from the earth.”

Jeremy Kohler @ ProPublica: Missouri Voters Enshrined Abortion Rights. GOP Lawmakers Are Already Working to Roll Them Back.

One month after Missouri approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion, legislators have proposed a flurry of bills to tighten abortion access or raise the bar for future amendments driven by voter initiatives.

Warren Throckmorton @ The Throckmorton Initiative: After Doubling Down, Eric Metaxas Apologizes for Attacks on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Relatives

Eric Metaxas offered a guarded apology for his slanderous remarks about the relatives of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. During an interview with Glenn Beck on November 23, Metaxas said 86 of Bonhoeffer’s relatives who criticized Metaxas were “pro-Hamas, Jew-hating lunatics.” In response, family representatives said they were considering legal action.

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Throughout the course of his third bid for the White House, President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly promised to use the full powers of the federal government to prosecute his political enemies. Now, President Joe Biden appears to be taking those threats seriously.

According to a Wednesday report by Politico's Jonathan Martin, Biden is now weighing preemptive pardons for several people Trump has directly targeted, including Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) — who won California's U.S. Senate race in November — and former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who was vice chair of the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.

Martin wrote that Biden was "deeply concerned" about the fate of the people Trump has singled out, particularly after the president-elect nominated Kash Patel to be the next potential FBI director. According to the Hill, Patel has referred to Schiff — who led Trump's first impeachment effort — as a "government gangster," and has accused Cheney of being "the main architect of this disinformation campaign."

"[Cheney] and her band of miscreants suppressed evidence that completely exonerates the Jan. 6 defendants from their ginned-up charge of insurrection," Patel wrote in a May email.

Biden is also reportedly weighing a pardon for Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Martin didn't name any other potential recipients of a preemptive pardon, but Patel is reportedly eyeing both Democrats and Republicans alike for prosecution, including former Attorney General Bill Barr, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper and other former Trump White House staffers who later opposed him publicly, like Sarah Isgur Flores, Alyssa Farah Griffin and Stephanie Grisham.

"If it’s clear by January 19 that [revenge] is his intention, then I would recommend to President Biden that he provide those preemptive pardons to people, because that’s really what our country is going to need next year," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) told WGBH.

Journalist Eleanor Clift recently called on Biden to issue preemptive pardons for Cheney and Schiff, along with former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who also publicly opposed Trump during the 2024 election cycle. Former Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly — who both called Trump a "fascist" — have also been recommended for pardons.

Click here to read Martin's full article for Politico in full.

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Since defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the United States' 2024 presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump has made one controversial administration pick after the next. The most recent is far-right MAGA conspiracy theorist Kash Patel for FBI director — a pick that has drawn scathing criticism from both Democrats and Never Trump conservatives.

Patel has promoted the false, repeatedly debunked claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. And in 2023, he has even called for criminal prosecutions of journalists who reported that President Joe Biden legitimately won.

The New Republic's Timonthy Noah, in a biting article published on December 3, warns that Patel, like Trump, has an "enemies list." And he notes some of the MAGA foes who are on it and could be targeted for retaliation if Patel is confirmed as FBI director and replaces Christopher Wray, who has held that position since 2017.

READ MORE:[Data shows dire election postmortems could soon be in store for GOP: columnist

"Patel doesn't literally call his list, which appears as an appendix in (his 2022 book) 'Government Gangsters,' an enemies list," Noah explains. "More blandly, he calls it 'Members of the Executive Branch Deep State.' But 'deep state,' in the context of Trump World grievance, is no neutral term. In the book, Patel calls the deep state 'a cabal of unelected tyrants' and 'the most dangerous threat to our democracy.'"

Noah adds, "Consider also the book's title, and that in introducing the list, Patel apologizes for omitting 'other corrupt actors of the first order.' It's an enemies list."

Patel's "enemies list," according to Noah, ranges from former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

"More conventionally," Noah observes, "Patel includes on his enemies list the last three Democratic nominees for president: Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton. Former President Barack Obama, for some reason, is left off the list, even though Obama's chief of staff, John Podesta, is on it."

READ MORE:[Mehdi Hasan rips Nikki Haley over Biden jab: 'You hated Trump'

*Read Timothy Noah's full article for The New Republic at this link.

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We speak with journalist Mehdi Hasan, founder and editor-in-chief of Zeteo, about the incoming U.S. administration and President-elect Donald Trump’s picks for key roles, including lawyer Kash Patel to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Trump reportedly considered Patel for FBI deputy director during his first term but dropped the idea after pushback from within his own administration. Hasan describes Patel as a “toady” whose threats against political opponents and journalists should be disqualifying, but that he aligns with Trump’s goals of further politicizing the FBI. “He wants to use it as an instrument of vengeance.”

IFrame Content

AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi, let’s talk about Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to head the FBI. This is Kash Patel speaking to Steve Bannon in his War Room podcast.

KASH PATEL: We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But, yeah, we’re putting you all on notice. And, Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we’re tyrannical. This is why we’re dictators, because we’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is Kash Patel speaking on the Shawn Ryan Show in September.

KASH PATEL: The FBI’s footprint has gotten so frickin’ big, and the biggest problem the FBI has had has come out of its intel shops. I’d break that component out of it. I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopening the next day as a museum of the deep state. And I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops. Go be cops. Go chase down murderers and rapists and drug dealers and violent offenders. What do you need 7,000 people there for? Same thing with DOJ. What are all these people doing here? Looking for their next government promotion. Looking for their next fancy government title. Looking for their parachute out of government. So, while you’re bringing in the right people, you also have to shrink government.

AMY GOODMAN: So, again, that’s Kash Patel. When President Trump wanted to make him deputy director of the FBI in his first administration, the attorney general, Bob [sic] Barr said, “Over my” — Bill Barr said, “Over my dead body.” Mehdi Hasan?

MEHDI HASAN: Yes, he did. Bill Barr, of all people, said the guy was completely unqualified, it was detached from reality to try and put him in the FBI. And he said, “Over my dead body.” Gina Haspel, who was director of the CIA in December 2020 during Trump’s lame duck, when Trump tried to appoint Kash Patel to deputy director of the CIA, she threatened to resign, and Mike Pence had to get involved and block that. So this is not some kind of liberal whining about Kash Patel. Prominent conservatives at the time said, “No way. This guy is completely unqualified.”

:{And you played that clip from the War Room, from the Steve Bannon show. I think that’s from December 2023. He put us on notice. He says in that clip, “We’re putting you on notice.” Well, we’re on notice. In fact, I’ve been warning about Kash Patel since 2022, when I predicted — when I was at MSNBC, and I predicted that Trump would make him FBI director, and he would go after the media. He’s making it very clear. He wants to prosecute journalists. In another time and era, Amy, those words would be chilling.

Those words would disqualify him from the running. But, of course, Republican senators mostly will fall in line. We’ll see if the — you know, the Murkowskis and the Susan Collinses and Mitch McConnell, whether they’ll push back in the way they did on Matt Gaetz. He’s a deeply dangerous nominee. I would argue that clip you played from the Bannon War Room show makes him perhaps the most dangerous nominee so far, because he’s open about the fact that he wants to use the power of the state to crush Donald Trump’s opponents. He’s a sycophant. He’s a bag carrier. He literally wrote a children’s book about King Donald Trump. That’s how sycophantic he is.}:

And I would say to some of the progressives maybe watching your show this morning, Amy Goodman, who say, “Well, you know what? The FBI does need reform. We on the left don’t like the FBI. We think Kash Patel should go break it up,” well, look, you can not like the FBI, for good reason, but the only reason Kash Patel and the Republicans don’t like the FBI is because the FBI investigated Donald Trump over ties to Russia and because the FBI went to Mar-a-Lago and searched his home for stolen classified documents which he was keeping against the law in his home. So, they don’t actually care about reform or bureaucracy or deep state; they care about neutering all institutions that can stand up to Donald Trump and MAGA.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go more deeply into what he said in Bannon’s War Room, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens.” If you could explain more who you think he’s talking about, about Joe Biden rigging presidential elections, “We’re going to come after you,” Mehdi?

MEHDI HASAN: So, Patel is at the core of pretty much every major MAGA conspiracy theory about the deep state, about the election, if you go through the list. I mean, he came to prominence — he was a very junior, as I say, unqualified person. He was working on the House Intelligence Committee with Devin Nunes, the right-wing California congressman. And he came to prominence in going after Robert Mueller, going after the Russian investigation, coming up with this memo that — some of the stuff in this famous Nunes memo turned out to be true, some of it, the inspector general said, “No, not true.” That’s how he caught Trump’s attention. That’s how he ended up in the White House. That’s how he ended up on the National Security Council.

By the way, one of the many people saying he shouldn’t be given this job is John Bolton, his former boss — not exactly a kind of lily-livered liberal — John Bolton saying he should be rejected by the Senate 100 to 0.

But he’s at the core of every conspiracy theory, Amy, whether it’s about, you know, Donald Trump didn’t lose the election, whether it’s January 6th. He testified in a Colorado courtroom over January 6th and the election. The judge said he wasn’t a credible witness. He’s even had the endorsement, I think you mentioned in the intro, of QAnon. In one of the books he wrote, he actually handwrote a QAnon mantra into the book, and they just posted it on social media. By the way, the FBI regards QAnon as a domestic terror threat. Think about the irony, Amy, of putting a person in charge of the FBI who’s actually fine with this group that the FBI thinks is a domestic terror threat. So, he is at the core of all these conspiracies.

When he says he’s going after people — you asked me who he’s talking about — of course he’s talking about the Bidens and Clintons of this world, but actually it’s much more dangerous than that. It’s much broader than that. It’s anyone who they think — who they think is an opponent. I mean, let’s just be very — this is what authoritarianism looks like. I know it’s become fashionable since the election, even on parts of the left, to say, “Well, it was all exaggerated to say that Trump is a fascist threat to the Constitution or authoritarian threat to the media.” No, it’s not exaggerated. These people are saying it out loud, and Trump is appointing them or trying to appoint them to the most senior positions in the United States government and national security apparatus.

AMY GOODMAN: And let’s talk about who he would be replacing, Christopher Wray, whose term doesn’t end for several years, who was appointed by Donald Trump, and why an FBI director has a 10-year term, which goes back to, what, post-Watergate, when a president, Nixon, is trying to deploy his FBI director exactly in the way Kash Patel threatens to do.

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, so, of course —

AMY GOODMAN: So that they would span several terms.

MEHDI HASAN: Well, we know that J. Edgar Hoover was the man who abused more FBI power than any director in the history of the FBI. I think he was in charge — for what? Four decades? Five decades? Astonishing amount of time. No president dared to remove him. And the 10-year terms comes in after that, of course. By the way, I would credit my former MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown, who said appointing Kash Patel to the FBI director’s job would be like appointing a cross between J. Edgar Hoover and Alex Jones, which I think sums up pretty well who Patel is.

But, look, on the 10-year term, what’s interesting, Amy, is, of course, Donald Trump is the great precedent breaker, the great norm buster. When I hear Democrats talking about norms, Trump has already trashed all of them. In Trump one, in Trump term one, he got rid of James Comey, who, of course, he was angry at, even though James Comey, arguably, helped him win the 2016 election. But he got rid of Comey and put in Wray. And that itself was quite unprecedented, only the second time, I believe, an FBI director had been fired and replaced in the middle of their term. He appointed Wray. Then he got upset with Wray. Now he wants to replace Wray.

I would also make a side point to some of the progressives watching at home. Why is it that the FBI director is always a Republican, even under Democratic presidencies? It’s always a Republican. And Democratic presidents always keep on the Republican who the previous Republican appointed, which I just find so ironic.

But now he wants to get rid of Wray, put in Patel, which tells you, again, everything that he wants from the FBI. He wanted to use it as an instrument of vengeance, of score settling, of silencing dissent. He wants to use it to basically intimidate people. And that’s why he’s getting rid of Wray, not because he disagrees with Wray’s politics. Christopher Wray is a Republican who Trump appointed. But in this Trump term, he’s made it very clear what he wants the FBI to be doing.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about another of Trump’s picks. The New Yorker magazine’s Jane Mayer has an explosive piece in the magazine. Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, was forced out of leadership roles at two veterans organizations for misusing funds, sexually harassing women, being repeatedly drunk on the job. According to a whistleblower report, Hegseth once had to be restrained from joining strippers on the stage at a strip club. In another incident, he drunkenly chanted “Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!” at a bar in 2015. Meanwhile, The New York Timesreports Hegseth’s own mother accused him of a mistreating women. In 2018, Penelope Hegseth wrote him an email that read in part, quote, “On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” unquote. The email was sent a year after a woman accused Hegseth of raping her at a California hotel. This is Trump’s pick to head the Defense Department. Your final comments on this, Mehdi Hasan?

MEHDI HASAN: So, Amy, if you had asked me this a few weeks ago, I would have said, “Hegseth is the worst pick of all. You can’t get worse than Hegseth.” And then we got Tulsi Gabbard, and I said, “You can’t get worse than Gabbard.” And then we got RFK Jr., and I said, “You can’t get worse than RFK Jr.” Now we’ve got Kash Patel, and I’m telling you, “You can’t get worse than Kash Patel.” Donald Trump says “hold my beer” every time and keeps producing these nominees.

And look, while we’re focused on Patel, we’ve got more reporting on Hegseth. I mean, it’s astonishing. It’s almost beyond belief. If you were writing a TV show about the Trump years, if it was a Netflix show called The Trump Years, you would say these storylines are just too unrealistic. If you were sitting in the writers’ room, and you said, “You know what? Let’s have a scene where it turns out that Hegseth, the great Christian nationalist, tried to get on stage with strippers. Let’s have his mother write him a letter saying, 'I disown you because of all, you know, your misogyny,'” you would say, “Oh, come on. That’s a little unrealistic. Those are kind of beyond-parody characters.” No, it’s real life. This is the Trump administration. These are the people he’s appointing.

And I think it’s interesting, by the way, the Islamophobia is very worrying on Hegseth’s part, because there was this strain of thinking, even on some parts of the left, that, well, Trump won’t be as militaristic and belligerent as the Democrats. Not true. He’s putting in a guy at Defense Department who has crusader tattoos on his body, who said outrageous things about killing Muslims, supported the Iraq War. He’s going to be in charge of the Pentagon? You know, there’s no way this is going to be a, quote-unquote, antiwar presidency, if Hegseth is at the Pentagon and Marco Rubio is at the State Department. By the way, can you imagine, Amy, if Biden or Obama had a nominee who had been accused of screaming drunkenly “Kill Jews! Kill all Jews!”? It would be the end of the world. But, of course, with Muslims, no one cares, so this will be a minor story in the résumé of Peter Hegseth.

One last point, very quickly, is Hegseth’s mother is attacking him. Elon Musk’s daughter is attacking him. Bill Barr is attacking Kash Patel. Donald Trump was called Adolf Hitler by JD Vance. When people say, “Oh, liberals are deranged about Trump people,” it’s always other Republicans who are actually leading the charge and reminding us how awful these people are.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, it’s other Republicans who would have to approve these —

MEHDI HASAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — appointees, these nominations, unless —

MEHDI HASAN: Many of them will.

AMY GOODMAN: — this is done in a recess appointment. Twenty seconds, Mehdi.

MEHDI HASAN: Many of them will, Amy. They all roll over. They’re intimidated by Trump. A lot of them are scared to go against Trump. And it comes down to, basically, you know, the four who stopped Gaetz: Mitch McConnell, Murkowski, Collins and the new Utah replacement for Mitt Romney whose name I forget. But those four Republicans are basically the ones everyone’s going to look at and say, “Are you going to stand up for the Constitution? Are you going to stand against this unqualified nominee, Kash Patel; this dangerous nominee, Peter Hegseth; RFK Jr., who kids could die because of?” Let’s see.

AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi Hasan, I want to thank you for being with us, editor-in-chief of the new media website Zeteo.

---

an raw 12 24

Donald Trump sparked outrage among his critics with the appointment of Kash Patel as the head of the FBI, and now some are warning Patel to protect himself.

Patel has been seen as a controversial pick, including because of his reportedly unwavering loyalty to the former and incoming president, and because of his purported ties to QAnon.

Morgan Ortagus, a Trump-endorsed candidate for Congress in Tennessee's fifth congressional election who effectively lost the race in 2022 after being removed from the ballot, posted a photo with Patel Saturday.

ALSO READ:Trump allies promise revenge as Dems ram through Biden judges

"A beautiful Sunday lunch with 45/47 and the next ⁦[FBI] Director my friend [Patel]," Ortagus wrote on her social media.

Far-right activist Laura Loomer, who recently spoke out against a dinner guest Trump had, replied to Ortagus.

"I bet it was beautiful… Remember when you went on MSDNC and said 'you didn’t know' if you could ever support Donald Trump as the GOP nominee for President while you were a campaign surrogate for [Jeb Bush]?" Loomer asked. "Remember when you called Trump 'disgusting.'"

Loomer also felt the need to warn Patel about Ortagus.

"I love Kash Patel. He has always been a big supporter of the J6 patriots and even raised money for them," she wrote. "Morgan Ortagus is a snake who is disliked by all of her colleagues at the State Department and she is a traitor to Trump."

Loomer continued:

"Let’s go down memory lane. Morgan was never with Trump. Her twin sister married a Muslim man, which prompted Morgan to attack Donald Trump over his travel ban from Islamic countries, she divorced her first husband and married a rich, politically connected Jew in DC and had her wedding officiated by the ultra-liberal SCOTUS justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg."

Another X user named Teri McCoy, a self-identified "Trump supporter," also flagged a "Snake Alert on Ortagus!!"

An account on X purportedly about the so-called Trump Derangement Syndrome wrote, "Weren’t you for Jeb Bush in 2016 and Nikki Haley in 2024? What a grifter!"

Another popular MAGA X account, Tammie McDonald, said, "Get out of here" with a snake emoji.

an 12 24

President-elect Donald Trump has been drawing vehement criticism from both Democrats and Never Trump conservatives over the more extreme picks for his incoming administration, including former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Trump's choice for national intelligence director), anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Trump's pick to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) and Fox News star Pete Hegseth (the Christian nationalist Trump is proposing for defense secretary).

Now, Trump is drawing even more criticism for choosing far-right conspiracy theorist Kash Patel to replace Christopher Wray as FBI director.

But the New York Times' Peter Baker, in an article published on December 2, stresses that Trump has responded to this criticism of nominees with angry "defiance."

"His first selection for attorney general collapsed in spectacular fashion," Baker explains. "His choice for defense secretary is awash in scandal. His picks for intelligence, health and other posts are being panned. But if anyone thought that President-elect Donald J. Trump might be chastened, he has quickly demonstrated otherwise. Even with so many appointees already under fire, Mr. Trump has doubled down on defiance as he assembles his next administration."

Baker adds, "Rather than turning to more credentialed and respected choices with easier paths to Senate confirmation, Mr. Trump, in rapid-fire fashion, keeps naming more ideological warriors, conspiracy theorists and now even family members to senior government positions."

The Times reporter notes that Trump's "persistence in advancing unconventional appointments underscores" his desire to "surround himself this time with loyalists he can trust to carry out his agenda, including 'retribution' against his perceived enemies."

Attorney Gregg Nunziata, who formerly served as nominations counsel for Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, believes that Trump is going out of his way to provoke GOP senators.

Nunziata told the Times, "By insisting on highly provocative nominees, short on traditional qualifications but long on personal loyalty and zest for confrontation, he seems to be deliberately testing the Senate's capacity and willingness to play its constitutional role as a check on the president."

Former Deputy National Security Adviser Charles M. Kupperman considers Patel an especially frustrating pick.

Kupperman told the Times, "Kash is totally unqualified for this position. He is the dictionary definition of a sycophant. Appointing Kash as FBI director is Trump's ultimate statement that his second term will be driven by retribution. And it is a gross insult to citizens."

*Read Peter Baker's full New York Times article at this link (subscription required).

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an 11 24

One of Donald Trump's staunchest supporters — former chief of staff to the Secretary of Defense and conspiracy theorist Kash Patel — has been nominated by the president-elect to direct the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).

According to a Sunday, December 1 Rolling Stone report, the ex-Trump administration official might just be the MAGA leader's "scariest hire yet."

Per the report, Patel is aiming to "purge the so-called 'Deep State,' and "recently publicly pledged to investigate and prosecute Trump’s enemies in the media and government."

READ MORE:['Quickly rot from within': Expert reveals 3 traits the US shares with declining empires

The New York Times reports that the Trump ally's "former colleagues have questioned his qualifications," such as federal public defender Michael Caruso, who said "Patel shied away from filing motions that he was likely to lose."

Patel also launched a nonprofit, The Kash Foundation, that he says "offers financial help to a range of recipients, including the families of people charged for their" participation in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.

Additionally, Rolling Stone notes, the potential future FBI director "is a hyper-MAGA, vengeance-minded Trump loyalist to the point that even some Trump advisers recognize as an extreme liability — even if those aides and confidants aren’t willing to do much to get in Patel’s way, mostly due to Trump’s protection of the man."

READ MORE:['Literally holding our breath': J6 rioters having 'anxiety' over Trump 'silence' on pardons

*Rolling Stone's full report is available at this link (subscription required). The New York Times' report is here (subscription required).

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an 12 24

Donald Trump Saturday made a move that is being seen as a middle finger to both the Supreme Court and the intelligence community, experts say.

Trump over the weekend announced his appointment of Kash Patel as the director of FBI, leading critics to lash out and causing a pre-emptive strike against Senate Republicans by a top MAGA lawyer who said he would make their political lives hell if they opposed Patel.

Sophia Cai, senior national politics reporter for Axios, said, "Trump's decision to name hardline loyalist Kash Patel to FBI director amounts to a massive middle finger to the intelligence community."

ALSO READ:A dark mystery from America's past could save us from Trump's tyranny

Conservative commentator Charlie Sykes also weighed in on the big picture of the Patel appointment.

"Underappreciated angle to the appointments of Patel, Gaetz, Bondi, et al. Massive Fuq U to institutions … But also a huge FU to the Supreme Court, because Trump doesn’t think they will be a check on his campaign of lawless retribution," he wrote Saturday. "Nice work, John Roberts."

===

mma 10 24

...Amplified at least 190 individual QAnon-promoting accounts, including 14 accounts that he had not promoted before April 30.

Truth Social’s leadership has actively courted QAnon supporters to the platform, and the former president and his allies have associated with and appealed to the QAnon community in other ways as well. For instance, former Trump administration official and Truth Social board member Kash Patel said that “we try to incorporate” QAnon “into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences.” ....

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MMA

Charlie Kirk on new reporting on Trump: “There was an Atlantic article yesterday, which I just kinda rolled my eyes at”

The Atlantic story mentioned Trump's comments on Vanessa Guillén and also more from Trump's former chief of staff John Kelly on Trump praising Hitler's generals

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published 10/23/24

Video

CitationFrom the October 23, 2024, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): So, before I go to — Kash, before, I throw this to you, I want people to understand — expect desperation out of the Democrats right now. Expect AI-doctored footage of Donald Trump allegedly 20 years ago. Fake stories. They are throwing everything they can as Donald Trump's early voting numbers are great, as his odds in the betting markets are ascendant — which, again, is not necessarily my favorite metric, but it definitely gets people worried. Kash, they're gonna throw these fake stories. So here — there's a lot here. There was an Atlantic article yesterday, which I just kinda rolled my eyes at. Kash, what was in the Atlantic article? Tell us the truth. Please take your time. We have plenty of time in the segment.

KASH PATEL (GUEST): Thanks so much, Charlie. It's great to be with you. I'm on the team Trump bus tour in Western Pennsylvania. And I'm really looking forward to Turning Point event tomorrow in my hometown in my home town of Las Vegas.

Look, you're right. They're gonna come out of nonstop, especially the president. And just — the authors of this one are the same authors of the bogus January 6th insurrection narrative, Russiagate, 51 intel letter, and everything in between.

But this one is personally disgusting because when I was chief of staff at the Department of Defense and tragically, we lost Vanessa Guillén to a murder on a military base, who was serving our country bravely, President Trump, when we informed him of that in the Oval Office -- when I mean me, meaning and the secretary of defense and, of course, then-chairman Mark Milley, President Trump wanted to assure that family that their daughter did not die in vain and that he would give them full military honors, full financial assistance, and the honor that she deserved after serving our country being tragically murdered. That was his direction in the Oval Office. And he said if the Department of Defense would not pick up the tab because of some government bureaucracy error, he, Donald Trump, would pick up the tab. That's the type of commander-in-chief I've seen in the Oval Office time and time and time again.

And what The Atlantic did was absolutely disgusting. They said President Trump made up vile comments about Mexican-Americans and that it shouldn't cost this much or that much to bury a fallen soldier. Of course, it was Mark Milley who's responsible for this leak just like so many other lies and the Atlantic went and ran with it.

And to further debunk the lie, not that I — put aside the fact that I was there in the Oval, Vanessa Guillén's mother and her sister personally responded to the Atlantic article and said President Trump has been nothing but gracious, and kind, and generous to her family. And that the radical left-wing is using this hit piece, which is made up, for political fodder, and her own family was personally disgusted by it and refuted this story entirely, but The Atlantic-- excuse me, The Atlantic printed it anyway just like they did their wonderful hit piece on me.

But you're right, Charlie. They're never gonna stop. But this one's even low by those standards. They are desecrating the men and women that wear the cloth of our country to defend our nation, and they are desecrating the fallen just like Kamala Harris and Joe Biden did for the brave 13 warriors who they are responsible for their death from the Afghanistan disaster control.

an 8 24

During his four years in the White House, Donald Trump clashed with a long list of conservative administration officials — from former National Security Adviser John Bolton to ex-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to ex-White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly. Trump, in the end, even fell out with former Vice President Mike Pence and ex-U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr.

Stephanie Grisham, who served as Trump's third White House press secretary, gave Vice President Kamala Harris an enthusiastic endorsement when she spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

But one Republican who had a reputation for being an unquestioning Trump loyalist is attorney Kash Patel.

In an article published on August 26, The Atlantic's Elaina Plott Calabro warns that the 44-year-old Patel is exactly the type of loyalist Trump would choose for his second administration. And she lays out some reasons why Patel's critics, including those on the right, find that prospect so disconcerting.

"Kash Patel was dangerous," Calabro writes. "On this, both Trump appointees and career officials could agree. When Patel was installed as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense just after the 2020 election, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised him not to break the law in order to keep President Donald Trump in power…. When Trump entertained naming Patel deputy director of the FBI, Attorney General Bill Barr confronted the White House chief of staff and said, 'Over my dead body.'"

Calabro adds, "When, in the final weeks of the administration, Trump planned to name Patel deputy director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, the agency's head, threatened to resign."

Patel's critics, according to Calabro, "appeared singularly focused on pleasing Trump."

"What wouldn’t a person like that do, if asked?" Calabro argues. "Most Americans had no idea Patel existed, yet rarely a day passed when administration leaders weren't reminded that he did…. Patel was ultimately denied a role at the pinnacle of the national-security establishment, but Trump has promised to learn from his mistakes. Should he return to the White House, there will be no Milleys, Haspels, or even Barrs to restrain him as he seeks revenge against his political enemies."

Calabro adds, "Instead, there will be Patels — those whose true faith and allegiance belong not to a nation, but to one man. 'Get ready, Kash,' Trump said before a gala of young Republicans this past December. 'Get ready.'"

*Read Elaine Plott Calabro's full article for The Atlantic at this link (subscription required).

===

reawaken grift wacko nazis

ringo only a little worried 11/12/20

1120 holland

...Meanwhile, Trump has decapitated the senior civilian leadership of the Pentagon and much of the intelligence community and replaced them with Trump loyalists, many of whom are conspiratorial nutjobs. We don't know towards what end, but it is a brazenly authoritarian move that's inconsistent with the idea that he's just trying to keep donors' dollars flowing....

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Steve Bannon and Kash Patel tout Trump's second-term retribution plan: "This is just not rhetoric" | Media Matters for America

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12 23 an

Kash Patel, who was a counterterrorism official on former President Donald Trump's National Security Council, made a pledge to lead a "bench" of "all-America patriots" to prosecute journalists if his former boss wins a second term in the White House.

"We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media," Patel said in a recent appearance on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon's podcast. "Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out."

When the New York Times reached out to Patel to clarify his remarks, his spokeswoman, Erica Knight, sent the Times a statement from Patel: "When President Trump takes office in 2025, we will prosecute anyone that broke the law and end the weaponized, two tier system of justice."

Patel's remarks about prosecuting journalists are in line with the former president's statements about media networks critical of his policies. In a November post to his Truth Social account, Trump said the "government should come down hard" on MSNBC and "make them pay" for the network's reporting on the ex-president.

"MSNBC (MSDNC) uses FREE government approved airwaves, and yet it is nothing but a 24 hour hit job on Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party for purposes of ELECTION INTERFERENCE," Trump wrote. "Brian Roberts, its Chairman and CEO, is a slimeball who has been able to get away with these constant attacks for years. It is the world’s biggest political contribution to the Radical Left Democrats who, by the way, are destroying our Country."

Trump has routinely targeted the media, and has referred to journalists as the "enemy of the people" since 2018. That same year, Florida man Cesar Sayoc, who was described as a "Donald Trump superfan," sent 16 pipe bombs to CNN's offices along with multiple prominent Democrats. He was ultimately sentenced to 20 years in prison.

:{In addition to the media, Trump himself has vowed to weaponize the machinery of the federal government against his political enemies if given a second term. The Times reported that Trump particularly wants to direct the Department of Justice to prosecute opponents like President Joe Biden, even promising to appoint a special prosecutor to hound both the president and his family.

Kash Patel, who was a counterterrorism official on former President Donald Trump's National Security Council, made a pledge to lead a "bench" of "all-America patriots" to prosecute journalists if his former boss wins a second term in the White House.}:

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mma 8 23

right-wing media are attacking Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will preside over Donald Trump’s pending criminal case in Washington D.C.

Chutkan was randomly selected to preside over the case. Appointed by former President Obama, she has been described as a “tough Jan. 6 sentencer”of defendants who participated in the insurrection, though she has “avoided some of the most pointed criticisms of Trump that some of her colleagues on the federal bench in D.C. have delivered.”

Media figures on the right have leveled numerous attacks and charges against her, describing her as politically motivated, and calling for her recusal in the case against the former president.

Fox News host Mark Levin described Chutkan as “the worst, radical, left-wing, Obama judge in America”on Fox and Friends, adding that Trump would be indicted for “drinking too much orange juice.”
On his radio show, Levin reiterated his claim and called Chutkan “a whack job.” He then asked, “Do you think Trump will get a fair shot with her? Of course not.” He added, “And so the system is really truly rigged. Really truly rigged.”
On WABC’s Chat with the Mayor, alleged co-conspirator Rudy Giuliani called her “the most inhumane sentencer on the court for January 6 people.” He went on to claim, “This is the Soviet Union, Red China, or Nazi Germany. That judge should recuse herself if she has any ethics.”
Newsmax host Greg Kelly called Chutkan “a bad judge” for Trump’s case and said, “She has major conflicts.”
The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro called Chutkan “a very left-wing judge” and said, “It is certainly fair to point out that Jack Smith is filing in a court in Washington D.C. with probably the most Trump-hating judge in Washington D.C.”
Newsmax host Eric Bolling called Judge Chutkan “a very harsh judge on anything surrounding January 6.”
On her SiriusXM show, Megyn Kellyp**redicted, “This judge is going to hate Trump, and she's not going to dismiss this case on the papers.”
Newsmax host Sebastian Gorka said, “This is their attempt to steal 2024,” and called Chutkan “the worst January 6 judge possible — an Obama appointee who has given the harshest sentences to people who walked through the velvet ropes on January 6.”
Laura Ingraham said she has “doubts about her” and said, “I want to remind you tonight that she worked for Hunter Biden's law firm at one point, Boies and Schiller.”
On Fox Business, Alan Dershowitz and Kash Patel called for Chutkan to recuse herself from Trump’s case, with Derschowitz calling her former law firm “one of the most corrupt firms” and accusing them of being “Democratic hacks.”
Dershowitz also appeared on BlazeTV’s The Glenn Beck Program and asserted that Chutkan “has a very questionable background” and “worked for years for a firm that’s highly questionable.”
On Steve Bannon’s War Room, Patel again called for Chutkan’s recusal, saying, “She’s so entrenched through her past legal representations and family to the Democratic national party and the Hillary Clinton campaign that she could not be a fair, detached … arbiter of facts.”
On Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime, an over-the-shoulder graphic featured an image of Chutkan with the words, “the Obama Punisher,” and host Jesse Watters described her as “an Obama donor.”
Turning Point USA’s Benny Johnson called Chutkan “a very nasty judge” and added, “This judge worked with Hunter Biden at a law firm. This judge should be recused, of course.”
On Newsmax, co-host Bianca de la Garza pointed to the ties between Chutkan’s law firm and the president’s son, saying, “The person who runs it is ahuge donor to the Democratic party.” She predicted that Trump’s team would request a different judge to preside over the case.
On Newsmax’s special coverage of the indictment, Newsmax contributor Joe diGenova said Chutkan will be “very, very bad for Donald Trump” and suggested there’s a risk “that she will not conduct a proper jury selection process” in Trump’s case.
On hisradio show, Fox News host Sean Hannitysaid, “The Obama-appointed judge overseeing this case once worked for the same law firm as Hunter Biden. Is anybody going to call that a conflict of any kind? I’d say that might be a conflict.”

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an 5 23

former FBI field agent and key Republican witness on the House Judiciary Committee’s “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government” may have lied under oath about receiving financial aid from a Donald Trump ally, the Guardian reports.

Garret O’Boyle — described by the Washington Postas "a suspended FBI special agent from the Wichita Resident Agency in Kansas" — was a star witness last Thursday for the “weaponization” subcommittee, a Freedom Caucus brainchild purporting to uncover clear evidence that the U.S. government, “and in particular the Justice Department, has unfairly targeted conservatives,” as NBC News reports.

Per the Guardian, O’Boyle was asked at one point "whether Kash Patel, who held multiple roles in the Trump administration, is helping finance O’Boyle’s legal counsel.”

“Not that I’m aware of,” O’Boyle said, according to a transcript of the exchange.

"The answer has raised eyebrows because, during a previous interview with the House of Representatives’ [weaponization] subcommittee in February, O’Boyle disclosed that his legal fees are being paid by a nonprofit organisation called Fight With Kash, also known as the Kash Foundation and run by Kash Patel," the Guardian reports.

Indeed, a Democratic Staff Report published on March 2 reveals:

During their interviews, Garret O’Boyle and Stephen Friend both confirmed that they ha received money from Patel. Committee Democrats have determined that Patel’s support for them extends beyond that to helping them secure legal counsel and promoting them and their causes.

According to that report, O’Boyle told Democratic Committee staff, “[Patel] asked me how he could help. So I told him a little bit of my situation. And he said that he thinks he could get the nonprofit to help.”

As the Guardian notes, “Lying to Congress carries a penalty of up to five years’ imprisonment.”

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), who asked O’Boyle last week about Patel’s involvement, told the Guardian, “Mr O’Boyle’s answers in the subcommittee hearing on Thursday appear to contradict his previous testimony in the transcribed interview with subcommittee staff. In order to ensure witnesses are truthful when they come before the subcommittee, Chairman Jordan must determine whether or not Mr O’Boyle lied under oath on Thursday.”...

spox distort brave whistleblowers

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an 5 23

united States Representative and House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) scoffed at a reporter's question on Thursday morning about suspended Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Garret O'Boyle, whom The New York Times revealed in March has financial connections to an ally of former President Donald Trump.

O'Boyle is one of several so-called "whistleblowers" scheduled to testify at Thursday's Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing.

"We're talking a lot about in the point of this press conference, the point of the hearing is to talk about how the FBI is politicized, but do you think it's appropriate for some of these whistleblowers, including two who will get your hearing today, to be paid by one of the former president's closest advisors?" the correspondent asked Jordan. "Kash Patel, who actively..." she continued until Jordan abruptly cut her off.

"They got a family. How they supposed to feed their family?" Jordan snapped. "Four hundred and fifty days the FBI has kept these, uh, has kept Mr. O'Boyle in, in limbo where he can't work without pay. He's got four kids. He was selected to come to this special unit they were forming here in Virginia. He moves his family and the day he gets here, the day he gets here, they say, 'Hey, we're suspending your clearance.' And they won't let him get access to his furniture, his clothes, and he's got a two-week-old newborn child.I mean, you gotta be kidding me. Of course, they're gonna, they're gonna do whatever they can to feed their family and I don't fault them for that."

Watch below or at this link.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/eric-trump/hitler-promoting-antisemites-will-speak-trumps-miami-hotel-alongside-eric-trump-lara

ref mma 5 23

the Trump National Doral resort will host two antisemites who have promoted pro-Adolf Hitler propaganda and spread virulently antisemitic conspiracy theories. They will be speaking at an event in Miami alongside numerous Team Trump personalities, including Eric Trump, Lara Trump, and Devin Nunes.

Trump Doral speaker Scott McKay, who has a streaming show on Rumble, has claimed that Jewish people orchestrated 9/11 and were responsible for the assassinations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and William McKinley. He has also said that Jewish people routinely torture children and eat their hearts.

He has praised Hitler for supposedly trying to take down a Jewish banking system and said, “Hitler was actually fighting the same people that we're trying to take down today.”

Trump Doral speaker Charlie Ward, who also streams a show on Rumble, has shared posts praising Hitler for supposedly “warning us” about Judaism; claiming that “VIRUSES are Man (JEW) made”; and attacking the alleged Jewish media for supposedly lying about the Holocaust.

The two are featured speakers in the “ReAwaken America” tour, which is set to stop at Trump’s Miami hotel on May 12 and 13. Scheduled to speak alongside McKay and Ward are numerous members of Trump’s orbit, including: Eric Trump, Lara Trump, former Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro, former national security adviser Michael Flynn,former senior Department of Defense official Kash Patel, former acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker, Truth Social CEO Devin Nunes, and Trump ally Roger Stone.

Numerous other far-right conspiracy theorists will be speaking, including Stella Immanuel, Mel K, Liz Crokin, Ann Vandersteel, Mike Lindell, and Patrick Byrne.

Media outlets have previously noted that the tour, which has been holding events across the country, has also featured QAnon supporters, conspiracy theories, and Christian nationalist rhetoric.

Michael Flynn co-founded the tour and also has a history of antisemitism.He stated on the tour that he wants the United States to “have one religion.” In 2016, he shared -- and then deleted -- a tweet stating “Not anymore, Jews. Not anymore.” And in 2021, he criticized Holocaust victims, stating: “Jesus, how could somebody stand there and just allow these people to do that to them? And then knowing what they knew, how could they get on that train? I would have rather attacked that machine gun nest.”

During a recent appearance on a QAnon program, tour co-founder Clay Clark told viewers that “Eric Trump is a good friend of mine” and said “it's exciting … that Trump's inner circle is now going, they're all reaching out to our tour, to the ReAwaken America tour, to Gen. Flynn, to myself, to Kash Patel. And they're all saying, hey, can we come to the tour?”

Team Trump is hosting and participating in the tour and associating with its Hitler-promoting speakers despite heavy criticism over Trump’s meeting last December with Ye and Nick Fuentes, who have similarly praised Hitler.

The Trump officials’ association with McKay and Ward is part of a larger Republican Party pattern, with numerous officials promoting or speaking alongside antisemites.

Scott McKay claimed Jewish people torture children and eat their hearts and “Hitler was actually fighting the same people that we're trying to take down today”

[pix]From antisemitic commentator Scott McKay's Telegram page.

McKay, who also goes by Patriot Streetfighter, is a speaker at the Trump Doral event. He frequently makes antisemitic comments. Among the many examples:

McKay claimed that Jewish people “built Hitler. … He was created by them” because they needed a catalyst to profit from a military conflict. He also praised Hitler for supposedly attempting to spurn his Jewish creators by trying to break “free of the Rothschilds’ corrupt money-magic fiat system” and create “a banking system for the people and the free world.”
McKay said: “Hitler was actually fighting the same people that we're trying to take down today.”
McKay claimed that 9/11 was perpetrated by “the same group of people that has done a very good job at hiding under the religion of Judaism."
McKay claimed that many Jewish people are hiding “under the cover of this religion called Judaism” so they can “murder children.”
McKay claimed that Jewish people practice “satanism, child sacrifice, bleeding them out, torturing them, consuming them, eating their heart.”
McKay claimed that Jewish people created a banking system “in exchange for the child blood sacrifices.”
McKay claimed that Jewish people were responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing and the assassinations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and William McKinley.

For more on Scott McKay, go here.

Charlie Ward shared posts praising Hitler for “warning us” about Judaism, claiming “VIRUSES are Man (JEW) made”

[pix]

Ward is a speaker at the Trump Doral event. During a November ReAwaken America tour stop in Branson, Missouri, he said: “How many people in here know that more people have been killed by the jab than were killed in the Holocaust? And they're still doing it because nobody can stop them.”

He frequently promotes antisemitism and pro-Hitler content. Among the many examples:

Ward shared a post embedding a speech by Hitler and praising him for “warning us” about Judaism.
Ward promoted a book which claims to show “that the official narrative of the Holocaust cannot be sustained.”
Ward shared a post claiming that “VIRUSES are Man (JEW) made including influenza, Polio, Measles, AIDS so was Covid created as a 'excuse' to vaccinate (contaminate)... .”
Ward shared a post that referenced the antisemitic publication the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: “The vaxxx passports are for you the GOYIM not for the specially selected, some elites and the 33's and above - THE RULES DO NOT APPLY .. You are the EXPERIEMENT NOT THEM - Protocols of ZION.”
Ward shared a post that stated: “On this Memorial Day please remember the sacrifices our soldiers make so that JEWISH DRUG DEALERS can grow Poppy Plants in Afghanistan and control the worldwide Heroin supply.”

For more on Charlie Ward, go here.

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https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/jim-jordan-weaponization-subcommittee-witnesses

ref 2

no lnx ref

Report: Jim Jordan’s “Weaponization” Witnesses Are Conspiracy Theorists With…No Knowledge of Government Wrongdoing

The congressman’s hearings are off to a very embarrassing start.

BY BESS LEVIN

MARCH 3, 2023

One of the most ridiculous things Republicans have done in recent memory—and there are a lot of ridiculous things they’ve done in recent memory—was to create a House subcommittee to investigate the “Weaponization of the Federal Government.” Tasked with probing everything from the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago last year to what really happened on January 6, the panel operates on the assumption that agencies and officials within the federal government have abused their power to silence, punish, and hurt conservatives; chaired by Representative Jim Jordan, the committee has vowed to expose this bias against the right. And hey—if Jordan & Co. have any evidence to support their claims, they should definitely make them public! Unfortunately, at this time it appears they very much do not.

As for the first three witnesses to testify behind closed doors to the newly formed subcommittee, a trio the GOP insists are brave whistleblowers with inside knowledge of a huge bias against conservatives within the government, Jordan may as well have picked up a few random folks at the gas station or Dunkin’ Donuts by his house on the way to work, for all they revealed. Oh, sure, the witnesses definitely thought they had the kind of damning information the committee has promised, but according to The New York Times, their collective testimony seemed to be less based on actual evidence than it was on crackpot conspiracies one can read about online.

Per the Times:

The trio appears to be a group of aggrieved former FBI officials who have trafficked in right-wing conspiracy theories, including about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol…. The roster of witnesses, whose interviews and statements are detailed in a 316-page report compiled by Democrats that was obtained by The New York Times, suggests that Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chairman of the panel, has so far relied on people who do not meet the definition of a whistle-blower and who have engaged in partisan conduct that calls into question their credibility.

“Each endorses an alarming series of conspiracy theories related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, the COVID vaccine, and the validity of the 2020 election,” Democrats wrote in the heavily footnoted report, which cites scores of statements made by the witnesses. “One has called repeatedly for the dismantling of the FBI. Another suggested that it would be better for Americans to die than to have any kind of domestic intelligence program.”

The report focuses on the testimony of George Hill, a retired supervisory intelligence analyst from the bureau’s Boston field office; Stephen Friend, an ex–special agent who worked in the Daytona Beach office; and Garret O’Boyle, a special agent from the Wichita, Kansas, field office who is currently suspended. As the Times notes, Hill has claimed on Twitter that January 6 was a “set up” and part of a “larger #Democrat plan using their enforcement arm, the #FBI.” For his part, Friend, who has also claimed FBI wrongdoing, was suspended after he refused to take part in a SWAT raid of a January 6 suspect who’d been accused of being a member of a right-wing militia group with ties to the Three Percenter movement, and who had posted a video of himself outside the Capitol on January 6 wearing body armor and a gas mask and holding an AR-15-style rifle. Friend also testified about “being asked to surveil a person attending a school board meeting, touching on a claim promoted by Republicans that the government mistreated conservative parents,” as the Times reports. Yet the Democrats’ report found, according to the Times, “Friend conceded during his interview that the man being tracked was a Three Percenter who was under counterterrorism investigation,” and the man was later arrested on charges related to the January 6 attack.

Mr. Friend also engaged with Russian propaganda outlets while he was an FBI employee, the report noted, including being quoted extensively in an article in Sputnik headlined “Under Biden Federal Agencies Turned Into Instrument of Intimidation, FBI Whistleblower Says,” and appearing for an interview with Russia Today…. The report also said that Mr. Hill had embraced a conspiracy theory that an Arizona man named Ray Epps was a federal informant who helped to instigate the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Prominent Republicans—including Mr. Trump—have widely promoted the claim, which Mr. Epps denies and the House Jan. 6 committee determined to be unfounded.

Naturally, O’Boyle also compared COVID-19 vaccine mandates to Nazi genocide, according to the report. Democrats concluded in the report that nothing in O’Boyle’s testimony “suggests misconduct at the FBI” and that Hill had “made multiple claims about the FBI’s handling of criminal investigations into the January 6 Capitol attack, despite having very little personal involvement in those investigations.”

And then, of course, there’s the matter of money. O’Boyle and Friend both testified to the subcommittee that they had received, per the Times, “financial support from Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist and former high-ranking official in the former president’s administration.” (According to Friend, Patel sent him $5,000 basically right after they connected in November 2022.) In a statement to the Times, Patel did not confirm or deny sending the witnesses money, but said, “Whistleblowers who provide credible information exposing government waste, fraud, and abuse serve a critical role for constitutional oversight.”

In their report, Democrats wrote, “Based on this evidence, committee Democrats conclude that there is a strong likelihood that Kash Patel is encouraging the witnesses to continue pursuing their meritless claims, and in fact is using them to help propel his vendetta against the FBI, Justice Department, and Biden administration on behalf of himself and President Trump.”

---

immunity for testimony, bobb refuses

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/kash-patel/

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https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-promises-threaten-every-member-congress-bayonet-if-they-dont-fall-line

...

From the October 27, 2022, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room: Pandemic

STEVE BANNON (HOST): What word of advice would you give to leadership in the House in the next two weeks and then after they take power?

KASH PATEL (GUEST): It's simple. I said, I have no problem going around the country campaigning for you because you care about America First values. And you better not forget the things that you campaigned on: accountability, destroying the two-tiered system of justice, and ending the politicization of law enforcement in our military. Gone are the days where you force individuals who are brave enough to serve this country to choose between faith and a fake China virus jab. These things have to be front and center. Reinstating those law enforcement military personnel that were removed from their positions because they chose faith over a jab that wasn't fully tested.

But what I'm going to remind these people of that we're sending to Washington -- the Laxalts, the Blakes, the J.D.s, and everybody else -- is that you guys, on these committees, with the majority, have to come in andsubpoena everybody and every record and put them out for the American people, not keep them to yourselves. Two, you got to kick all these people off the committees like they did to us. Watermelon head Schiff, Swalwell and company, AOC and the whole squad have no business touching the American Constitution because they have lit it on fire for the last five years. And they will not be permitted to have leadership positions of any kind.

And we will conduct a full scale overhaul of the intelligence and law enforcement communities, whether it's with -- through a Church-like commission or otherwise. Every member of Congress and every senator needs it be known that when they're sworn in on January 1st, they were sent there for these reasons. This is why the American public sent you there. And if they forget, I'm going to come on your show and remind them, by name.

BANNON: No, we're going to do it by bayonet.

===

https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/new-the-coming-collapse-of-donald-50c

no lnx jan 30

The McMaster Plot and Barbara Ledeen

Ginni Thomas’s story takes a turn toward possible sedition in 2018, just as Trump and his team were gearing up for the 2020 election by seeking to ally themselves with pro-Kremlin Ukrainians promising manufactured dirt on the man Trump believed would be his November opponent: Joe Biden.

{Note: All of this is covered in exhaustive detail in the nearly 600-page nonfiction book Proof of Corruption, published by Macmillan in 2020, so I won’t unpack it further here.}:

It was in 2018 that, according to the New York Times, Ginni Thomas conspired with one of the most prominent members of Groundswell, Barbara Ledeen, to formulate a conclusive “enemies list” for Trump to use in targeting opponents outside (but even more so, inside) the federal government. Ledeen is married to Michael Ledeen, the co-author of Michael Flynn’s first book, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies(St. Martin’s / Griffin, 2017).

ABOVE: Barbara Ledeen (second from left) in the U.S. Capitol in 2003.]

Flynn—the former highly controversial intel official (at the DIA) and Trump National Security Advisor, a federal indictee, and now an open insurrectionist—is very close to the Ledeens, and has been for years. Indeed, in May of 2021 Proof published the “lost chapter” of Proof of Corruption, entitled “Flynn and the Ledeens”, which detailed how Flynn turned to the Ledeens in 2016 after Trump ordered him to get Hillary Clinton’s “missing” emails, even if doing so meant conspiring with or paying Russian criminals. Barbara Ledeen’s work with Flynn on this clandestine project—which continued after it was universally known that the Kremlin was waging cyberwar on the United States and using “cut-outs” to dump data it had stolen from federal officials—underscored her willingness to skirt the line of legality in trying to help Trump win a presidential election (and Flynn’s equal willingness in this regard). Indeed, Ledeen ultimately made contact with individuals she believed to be Russian hackers on the “dark web”, and—despite America being in a cyberwar with Russia—sent materials transmitted to her by these “Russians” to Erik Prince. Ledeen has since posted on Facebook, “We owe a lot to Erik Prince.”

That the wife of a Supreme Court Justice would have any professional contact with someone like Barbara Ledeen, let alone secretly conspire with her to draft a “list” of the sort held by the the corrupt, nearly-impeached U.S. president Richard Nixon—who avoided impeachment only by resigning from office—is stunning. But in fact Ginni Thomas’s work with Ledeen appears to have gone much deeper than even this.

At a time when she was a “close friend” of Ginni Thomas, per the Times—and had worked with Thomas on at least one secretive plot (the “enemies list”) intended to aid Trump—Barbara Ledeen acted as a “messenger” in a national security–implicating plot to blackmail the nation’s sitting National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster. The plot mirrored Kremlin intelligence operations, inasmuch as it intended to use a “honey trap” (an attractive woman tasked with seducing the plot’s intended victim) to gain info from McMaster that could be used to extort him into resigning from one of the top national security positions in the U.S. government. Though the criminal plot, as reported by the Times, was run by “a network of conservative activists…[who had] mounted a campaign during the Trump administration to discredit perceived enemies of President Trump inside the government”—precisely the project Ginni Thomas was then working on with the implicated Barbara Ledeen—Ginni Thomas’s name was never brought into reporting on the scheme. This may be for the simple reason that the scheme was never executed; McMaster resigned his job before the unnamed “network of conservative activists” could run their counterintelligence op on him, so that illegal scheme was never the subject of the sprawling federal criminal investigation that would undoubtedly have turned up everyone who was involved in it.

Anyone inclined to think Ginni Thomas was unaware of what “close friend” Barbara Ledeen was doing—as part of a broader gambit (regarding Trump’s enemies) Thomas is now confirmed to have been involved in with Ledeen—would be hard-pressed to maintain that view in light of a second “undercover operation” the Times uncovered, this one also of dubious legality and spearheaded by a Ginni Thomas associate: James O’Keefe. Per the New Yorker, this plot “targeted government employees, including F.B.I. agents, suspected of trying to thwart Trump’s agenda.” The magazine notes that Thomas had given O’Keefe an “Impact Award,” just as she had Mark Meadows.

The Times report notes that the O’Keefe operation was styled as an intelligence plot—a “sting operation” involving “secret surveillance” and “undercover operatives”—which means it mirrors the “warlike” intelligence ops run by the Groundswell group (to which O’Keefe was tied via his association with Ginni Thomas, its chairwoman). Indeed, in a seeming echo of Thomas’s own political obsessions, this second scheme targeted, the Times reports, individuals who likely were on the Thomas-Ledeen-built “enemies list,” as it betrayed the “obsession some of Mr. Trump’s allies had about a shadowy ‘deep state’ trying to blunt his agenda.” There could be no more precise recitation of O’Keefe associate Ginni Thomas’s own post-2016 political obsession.

Anyone who doubts whether it is appropriate to call these operations run by people so close to Ginni Thomas “intelligence” operations must read the New York Times article in full, as it explains (emphasis supplied) that

[c]entral to the effort, according to interviews, was Richard Seddon, a former undercover British spy who was recruited in 2016 by the security contractor Erik Prince to train Project Veritas operatives to infiltrate trade unions, Democratic congressional campaigns and other targets. He ran field operations for Project Veritas until mid-2018.

:{:{}:

Last year, The New York Times reported that Mr. Seddon ran an expansive effort to gain access to the unions and campaigns and led a hiring effort that nearly tripled the number of the group’s operatives, according to interviews and deposition testimony. He trained operatives at the Prince family ranch in Wyoming.

So how high up did these Ledeen- and O’Keefe-involved intelligence operations go? The Times reports that “Ledeen…said she was brought on by someone ‘with access to McMaster’s calendar’”—a telling detail, given the grave national security implications of the minute-by-minute whereabouts of one of the nation’s foremost intelligence officials. The fact that Ledeen has been unwilling to name any of the others who were involved in the plot she participated in raises the real possibility that a top adviser to Trump who ran one of the foremost civilian intelligence-gathering ops in D.C., Ginni Thomas, would have been revealed as at least one of the individuals with knowledge of the operation.

Lest this seem mere inflammatory speculation, consider what the New York Times has to say on who recruited Ledeen to the McMaster operation, as well as Ledeen’s clear unwillingness to reveal that person’s name: “Who initially ordered the operation is unclear. In an interview, Ledeen said ‘someone she trusted’ contacted her to help with the plan. She said she could not remember who.” Ledeen added that her role in the events reported on by the Times was to “pass[ ] [a] message to a man she believed to be a Project Veritas operative during a meeting at the University Club in Washington” (a place it appears Ginni Thomas has frequented).

What sort of meeting in D.C. was it that Ledeen both (a) refused to identify, and (b) saw then–congressional staffers meeting with far-right activists to share intelligence? It’s certainly possible that other groups besides Groundswell answered to this description in 2018, but Ledeen’s involvement in that group, her “close” friendship with its chairwoman, her unwillingness to speak about the provenance of the meeting, and the known activities of Groundswell all suggest that Ginni Thomas’s operation may well have been the original epicenter of the McMaster sting. Much more investigation would be required to confirm this, of course, but it is noteworthy that—consistent with the caution that Ledeen’s Groundswell group displayed in revealing the names of anyone who attended its meetings—Ledeen claimed to the Times (rather improbably) that not only could she not remember who had passed her intelligence about McMaster’s schedule, but that the person she gave that intelligence to had used a “fake name”, so there was no point in repeating it. Would a Project Veritas employee really have used a fake name at a private gathering with friendly congressional staffers like Ledeen? One would be hard-pressed to see why—or, for that matter, why Project Veritas’s founder would’ve been working closely with Groundswell’s longtime chairwoman in 2018 and 2019 but for some reason eschewed her intelligence-gathering operations in 2018—but these too remains unsolved mysteries that no one appears to be looking into at the moment.

We do, however, have some indications about the role Ginni Thomas may have played in the McMaster operation.

In early 2020, the perpetually arch Wonkette attributed McMaster’s ouster to Ginni Thomas and Groundswell, writing that “After Groundswell’s early success [in] getting rid of National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster….[Ginni] Thomas scored a meeting with the president in January 2019, where he ‘listen[ed] quietly as members of the group denounced transgender people and women serving in the military.’” Salon issued a similar verdict, reporting that Groundswell “led a successful effort to oust former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, who [had] replaced [Michael] Flynn.” The unstated implication to be taken from these and other similar reports, in view of reporting on the Project Veritas sting operation against McMaster, is that the operation allegedly intended by Ginni Thomas associate James O’Keefe was “Plan B” to a more conventional lobbying/disinformation action by Thomas and Groundswell.

Additional evidence in this regard comes from reporting by Axios, which dates the beginning of the formalized Ginni Thomas-Barbara Ledeen “hit list” to approximately the middle of 2018, only a matter of weeks after McMaster’s April 9, 2018 resignation (and a matter of days after the last known email regarding the McMaster plot, which the Times reports was inexplicably still a going concern in May, well after its target had left the Trump administration). Times reporting indicates that at that time Ginni Thomas associate James O’Keefe was just beginning what he publicly claimed would be a “series” of undercover operations against “deep state” figures; the list Thomas and Ledeen were then compiling certainly included prime candidates for a project of that sort, and therefore represents a temporal nexus between the two efforts. Just so, Ginni Thomas’s “Crowdsourcers” partnership with O’Keefe reportedly unfolded at some point between mid-2018 and the end of 2019, meaning that it likewise coincided with the “series” of undercover operations against Trump enemies O’Keefe promised.

So was Groundswell’s success in pushing out McMaster one of the inspirations for Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen formalizing their partnership—or even expanding it into new partnerships with associated parties like Project Veritas? Describing the enemies list Groundswell’s leader began producing in 2018, Axios reports (emphasis supplied) that

[b]y the time President Trump instructed [John McEntee], his 29-year-old former body man and new head of presidential personnel to rid his government of anti-Trump officials [in February of 2020], he’d [already] gathered reams of material to support his suspicions.

While Trump’s distrust has only intensified since his [early 2020] impeachment and acquittal, he has long been on the hunt for “bad people” inside the White House and U.S. government, and fresh “pro-Trump” options. Outside advisers have been happy to oblige.

In reporting this story, I have been briefed on, or reviewed, memos and lists the president received since 2018 suggesting whom he should hire and fire. Most of these details have never been published.

A well-connected network of conservative activists with close ties to Trump and top administration officials is quietly helping develop these “Never Trump”/pro-Trump lists, and some sent memos to Trump to shape his views, per sources with direct knowledge. Members of this network include Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Republican Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen.

The big picture: since Trump’s [February 2020] Senate acquittal, aides say the president has crossed a psychological line regarding what he calls the “Deep State.” He feels his government—from Justice to [the] State [Department] to [the] Defense [Department] to [the Department of] Homeland Security—is filled with “snakes.” He wants them fired and replaced ASAP.

This reporting strongly contradicts any notion—pushed exclusively, to this point, by anonymous White House insiders seeking to (for unknown reasons) distance Trump from Ginni Thomas—that Trump saw Thomas as a “wacko” he listened to only out of concern for her husband’s opinion of him. Rather, it suggests that, as the 2020 Trump presidential campaign churned into high gear in February 2020, both Ledeen and Ginni Thomas were deemed critical Trump advisers who could regularly liaison with the White House—in the person of McEntee or with Trump directly—to advance the then-president’s ongoing “war” on the “Deep State.”

It was this war that Trump would frame as being continued in the “protest” he helped orchestrate on January 6, 2021. As he said in his White House Ellipse speech that day, speaking of government employees around the country, “In every single swing state, local officials, state officials…made illegal and unconstitutional changes to election procedures without the mandated approvals by the state legislatures. These changes paved a way for fraud on a scale never seen before. I think we [have to] go a long way outside of our country [to find fraud on this scale].” He called what “they” were doing a matter of “national security”, adding that he’d committed himself—in an imagined second term in office—to “drain[ing] the Washington swamp…[and] clean[ing] up the corruption in our nation’s capital. We’ve done a big job on it, but you think it’s easy? It’s a dirty business. It’s a dirty business. You have a lot of bad people out there [in Washington].” Not long after Ginni Thomas posted on Facebook her support for the armed mob gathered before Trump at the Ellipse, Trump told that mob that it was an unnamed “group of people” who were then trying to “illegally take over our country.”

All of this may explain why, when major media outlets write about Groundswell even in passing, it is referred to as a “network of conservative activists…[with] close ties to Trump and his senior officials.”

The Fallout From Ginni Thomas’s “Groundswell Purge”

Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen’s influence over Trump’s administration, via John McEntee and direct contact with Trump, had more far-reaching an impact than many realize. By pushing Trump to launch a comprehensive sweep of his administration—which effort the president initiated by first rehiring McEntee (who had previously been let go because he couldn’t pass a national security background check)—Thomas and Ledeen helped usher in a new era of the Trump administration, one that would have profound implications for the post-election period that began in November 2020.

As the New York Times reports, the Groundswell-backed purge led to a “freeze on all political appointments across the government” and a new Trump policy under which “cabinet secretaries [were to be told] that the White House would be choosing their deputies from now on.” This latter policy was be in evidence just nine months later, when Trump installed two young and ill-prepared—but unwaveringly loyal—political operatives,Kash Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, as top deputies inside the Pentagon.

Patel thus became the chief of staff for new Secretary of Defense Chris Miller—who wasn’t permitted to choose his own top aide—with Cohen-Watnick becoming Miller’s acting undersecretary for intelligence and security. Both men were in their roles by January 6, when the Pentagon inexplicably failed to relieve the Capitol for nearly four hours, doing so only after the building had already been cleared of the insurrectionists who had intended to occupy it. It is reasonable to ask, now, whetherPatel and Cohen-Watnick would have been in a position to influence the conduct of the United States military on January 6 if Ginni Thomas had not led a clandestine effort to ensure that only unflinchingly loyal Trump acolytes were serving under Trump cabinet members.

As CNN reported at the outset of McEntee’s purge, which extended through Election Day and encompassed the installation of Patel and Cohen-Watnick at the Pentagon,

:{:{}:

Trump has told aides he wants fewer people working for him in the White House and only loyalists installed in key administration positions, several people familiar with the matter say. Trump’s allies have provided him lists—not always solicited—of people they’ve identified as disloyal and of names they say would work better toward advancing his agenda. The lists have been generated over the past three years, but some are being dusted off in the post-impeachment purge.

….

[A]fter hearing for three years from acquaintances and confidants about various people deemed disloyal, [Trump’s] efforts seem to have newfound urgency. Trump told people recently he wants to take action on removing some people who he’s been “warned about,” according to one person who’s spoken to him. Some of the conservative activists who have been working on the effort to compose the lists include Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen.

(Emphasis supplied.)

Most tellingly, however—with respect to the connection between the Groundswell-pushed purge and the Patel and Cohen-Watnick appointments—is this reporting from CNN: “McEntee indicated he plans to first focus his efforts on personnel at the State Department and Defense Department.” As Proof has reported, at the very moment Patel and Cohen-Watnick weredithering at the Pentagon on January 6, a militant associated with Donald Trump’s legal team, Joe Oltmann, was in the State Department lobbying loyalist Trump political appointees to seize voting machines.

It may not be too much to say, therefore, that the insurrectionist government Trump headed on January 6—“insurrectionist” as to its leadership cadre—was one that had been orchestrated by Ginni Thomas over a years-long lobbying effort that involved multiple meetings with President Trump himself. Indeed, in a February 2020 NPR interview, Axios reporter Jonathan Swan indicated that Trump had been an active partner of Thomas’s, rather than merely a passive recipient of her work product. According to Swan, who had by then reviewed never-before-seen administration documents to compile his report, “Over the last 18 months [a period of time ranging from the first Thomas-Ledeen ‘enemies list’ to the hiring of McEntee], the president has been asking for names of people within his government who are disloyal, who are, quote-unquote, ‘Never Trump’ or anti-Trump, or, quote-unquote, ‘the bad people.’

He’s told aides that he feels that there are ‘snakes everywhere,’ quote-unquote” (emphasis supplied). Swan added that Trump was specifically targeting DOJ, the Pentagon, and the Department of Homeland Security, but “also…the White House. He has a network outside the White House, which is comprised of very well-connected conservative activists. One of them in particular is Ginni Thomas, who is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.” Axios even explained that it was a Groundswell memorandum that had first aimed its sights at the then-head of the Presidential Personnel Office, Sean Doocey, whose eventual ouster led to his replacement with none other than John McEntee.

In other words, it now appears that Ginni Thomas didn’t just want to direct Trump’s government-wide purge from outside the government, she wanted to influence who would execute the purge from inside the government. And she was successful in these clandestine efforts.

Swan summarizes his early 2020 findings—issued well under a year before the attack on the Capitol—by observing that “Ginni Thomas has put an extraordinary amount of energy and time into a project of shaping the president’s thinking on the staffing of his government.” Dahlia Lithwick of Slate, one of the most highly respected Court-watchers in U.S. media, would go even farther the following day, writing that Ginni Thomas “is paid to staff up the Trump administration with [her] friends and cronies, even as her husband [Justice Clarence Thomas] sits on cases that involve [Trump] and the agencies she seeks to reshape.”

{Note: As Proof has reported, in addition to the now-infamous Trump plot to install Jeffrey Clark as Attorney General, Oltmann’s lobbying of Trump loyalists in the State Department, and Trump’s installation of Patel and Cohen-Watnick at the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security was critical to the insurrectionbecause Trump’s legal team had tasked Christina Bobb—a former DHS employee—with lobbying her former boss to overturn the 2020 presidential election. And so it was that every Trump administration unit targeted by Ginni Thomas for purging, from DOJ to DHS, became part of the administration’s coup plot.}:

Barbara Ledeen and January 6

At the time Barbara Ledeen was involved in the plot against the nation’s National Security Adviser, she was—incredibly—also a federal employee herself. Specifically, she was a staff member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was then led by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA). Reports indicate that though Ledeem served the Committee generally, she was deemed to be a staffer for Senator Grassley in particular.

Given that Ginni Thomas’s lobbying of President Trump focused on appointments, and that Ledeen was a regular collaborator with Thomas on secretive Groundswell projects, it is deeply concerning to learn that Ledeen was in the “judicial nominations unit” of Grassley’s office up until 2019, whereafter she continued this work (for the same Senate committee) under Trump golfing partner Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

{Note: Just prior to January 6, Ledeen returned to service with Grassley. More on this below.}:

One reason Proof calls this coincidence concerning is because when Donald Trump rushed Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination to a vote virtually on the eve of the November 2020 presidential election, he did so, and openly, with an eye toward cases that might come before that Court in the near term—including post-election cases addressing an issue Trump had had with the conduct of the election since before Election Day: mail-in ballots.

None of these interrelationships and power dynamics would matter much to a probe of the January 6 insurrection were it not the case that the recent article on Chuck Grassley at Proof was continually forced to refer to anonymous persons in the Senate office of Chuck Grassleymaking critical decisions about how to respond to reports Grassley may have been involved in the January 6 coup plot in some way. Proof was forced into this position because only the official spokesman to Grassley, Taylor Foy, would speak to the press for attribution on this issue. Other Grassley staffers refused to speak for attribution, even as they repeatedly made claims to the media that turned out to be untrue.

So who was one of the leading staffers in Chuck Grassley’s office in September 2021, when he faced his toughest questioning yet over his actions on Insurrection Eve?

Barbara Ledeen.

Chuck Grassley and Barbara Ledeen: Two Experienced Republican Operatives with a Very Long History

The questions Grassley faced last September focused on one issue in particular: what did his staffers or others tell him about Trump’s coup scheme prior to January 6? What did he know about the plot, and from whom did he hear it, and when? But a second question—one raised by Grassley staffers’ unproven, self-aggrandizing claims that in September 2021 they had sifted through Grassley’s January 2021 correspondence and found no evidence of wrongdoing—was this one: why would reporters take Grassley’s staffers’ word on this point, when some of the people doing the searching may well have been the same operatives who initially briefed Grassley on Trump’s coup plans?

There is, of course, a necessary (and a far more specific) third question, as well: what role did Barbara Ledeen play in either briefing of Grassley prior to Insurrection Day—during which time she was a staffer for Lindsey Graham but still working for the Senate Judiciary Committee (on which Grassley was the senior Republican)—or in aiding Grassley’s ultimately self-exculpating September 2021 search of his files for potentially incriminating documents?

In answering these three questions, it’s important to first understand that the “purge” project Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen were leading from outside the White House was being led inside the White House, per reporting from CNN, by top Trump adviser Peter Navarro. Navarro was also one of the authors, with Trump attorney John Eastman, of the “Green Bay Sweep” coup plot that in September 2021 Grassley’s staff—including Ledeen—assured the press Grassley knew nothing about.

With this denial, the suggestion must be, therefore, that either Peter Navarro kept from Ledeen his ambitions for January 6 despite them being the central players (with Ginni Thomas) in a massive, government-wide pro-Trump project to eliminate non-loyalists from Trump’s inner circle, or that Ledeen was briefed by Navarro or Eastman about the “Green Bay Sweep” but decided to hide that information from her boss in the United States Senate. Worth noting here, too, is that only two people (out of more than two dozen) who appear to have attended theTrump International Hotel war room on Insurrection Eve felt the need to lie about that attendance and maintain that lie over time: (1)Peter Navarro, and (2) Barbara Ledeen’s close friend, Michael Flynn. While this could be mere coincidence, it could also indicate that two insurrectionists in Ledeen’s orbit fear with great particularity any inquiry into what they were doing on the day Chuck Grassley attempted to remove Vice President Mike Pence from the January 6 equation.

{Note: In identifying these connections, Ginni Thomas’s orbit cannot be forgotten, either. Thomas appears to have been essential in pushing Mark Meadows into Trump’s inner circle, and it is Mark Meadows who, the New York Times reports, led a “band of loyalists…[who] fought to keep Trump in power….[by] taking on an outsize role in pressuring the Justice Department [over the election results], amplifying conspiracy theories and flooding the courts in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.” Trump’s man at DOJ, Jeffrey Clark, has already asserted the Fifth Amendment to protect himself from self-incrimination, as has Eastman, who sent his coup outline to Meadows. So in considering how ignorant Ledeen would have to have been of a plot advanced by those in her orbit, we must also consider how ignorant Thomas would have to have been of a plot likewise advanced by those in her orbit.}:

For his part, Grassley has vacillated on his own degree of knowledge of the coup plot.

As Proof has reported, when Grassley was pressured, in September 2021, on whether Trumpist partisans “approached” him with the Eastman-Navarro coup plot prior to his declaration that he would be in charge of the January 6 joint session—a claim made in the 2021 book Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa—Grassley’s hedging could only be described as epic. “I [was not] ‘approached’ in the situation as you described it”, he replied cagily (emphasis supplied). By leaving the door open, indeed wide open, to the implication that he had been approached about the coup plot in some way other than the precise one Woodward and Costa had detailed, Grassley allowed the implication that he might have been briefed on the plot by either his own staffers (many of whom were connected to Barbara Ledeen via the Senate Judiciary Committee), Judiciary Committee staffers like Ledeen herself, or outside agitators like Thomas. Grassley’s denial of the reporting in Peril appeared to cover only an approach from Trump’s legal team (e.g., Eastman) or administration advisers (e.g., Navarro). All of which only heightens the scrutiny on those Eastman or Navarro might’ve thought to use as interlocutors with Grassley—a list of people that undoubtedly has Thomas and Ledeen at its top.

Recall, now, that in the days leading up to Grassley’s astonishing declaration that Pence would not be at the Capitol on January 6, Ginni Thomas was in contact with John Eastman—her husband’s former law clerk—via the Thomas Clerk World listserv.

In short, if, as Grassley implies, he caught wind of Trump’s coup plot before he took a public action that clearly aimed to advance it, there are no more obvious suspects in the matter of who briefed him on that plot than Barbara Ledeen and Ginni Thomas—which makes it astonishing that thus far it seems neither have been interviewed by the House January 6 Committee. That public records appear to indicate that Grassley rehired Ledeen on January 3, 2021—the day the post-election Congress was sworn in—underscores that he would have been in contact with her in the days leading up to his Insurrection Eve gambit, and also that it was during this period of time that Ledeen would have been in the position of wanting and needing to underscore to Grassley her utility to his staff. Her ready access to Trump’s inner circle, and intelligence regarding its January 6 designs, would surely have been one of her primary chits in this regard.

As indicated above, Ledeen has a very long history of being interested—much like Ginni Thomas is—in clandestine intelligence-gathering, and in the dissemination of such intelligence. That she would have wanted to pass on Eastman and Navarro’s plans to her new (or, rather, both former and “new”) boss Grassley cannot be doubted, if in fact she had access to those plans. Consider the sort of schemes we have seen from Barbara Ledeen in the past:

ABOVE: Just one example of Barbara Ledeen seeking to position herself as an intelligence intermediary between individuals in positions of power and influence.]

On the other end of Ledeen’s second stint as a Grassley staffer, it must be noted that, as the New York Times has reported, Ledeen “retired” from her position with Grassley almost immediately after Grassley’s staff was forced to answer questions about which of them, if any, had briefed the senator about Trump’s coup plot. Given that Ledeen’s first employment with Grassley lasted for seven years, the fact that her second was cut short after only a matter of months is certainly worthy of some additional investigation.

Telling, as well, is Michael Flynn’s confession to federal investigators that Ledeen acted as a “conduit” between Trump and the late Peter W. Smith in the plot to buy stolen documents from Russian hackers during the 2016 presidential campaign. This mirrors Ledeen’s claim of being a “messenger” in the scheme to blackmail Flynn’s successor, H.R. McMaster. So it is that when, two days after hiring Ledeen, Grassley seemed to quote from the Eastman Memo (see below) only to later be cagey about who had acted as a conduit or messenger to him from Eastman’s ring of coup plotters, it would be understandable if the suspicion of federal criminal investigators were to fall on a repeat interlocutor in several criminal schemes: Barbara Ledeen. This is especially so given that Ledeen’s closest political associate, Ginni Thomas, was in contact with Eastman during the period he was drafting his now-infamous memo.

ABOVE: Step 1 in the Eastman coup plot noted the advantage of having Grassley replace Pence as overseer of the January 6 joint session. Grassley thereafter unilaterally announced that he would indeed take on this role.]

There is, too, the broader context of Ledeen’s career—and her husband’s—to consider.

Much as this publication has often said of Trump lawyer Joe diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing, Esquire reports that “there scarcely has been a Republican presidential scandal in the past 40 years that Michael Ledeen hasn’t had a hand in.” The same might be said, in the Trump era, of the Ledeens’ good friend Michael Flynn, or the originator of the Stop the Steal “movement,” longtime Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone. It is Stone who, of all the political operators in Washington, is most associated with the word ratfucking (popularly defined as “political sabotage or dirty tricks, particularly pertaining to elections”). In writing of the Ledeens, Esquire notes that “Michael Ledeen’s family has made ratf[u]cking a generational enterprise.”

Statements from Grassley spokesman Taylor Foy have only further confused the issue.

As reported by a popular Iowa politics website, which was itself working off research done by celebrated independent investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler, the origin of Grassley’s knowledge of the coup plot (below referred to as “the PowerPoint”) seems to have remained deliberately murky even through December of 2021:

Foy’s hair-splitting is telling in too many ways to count. But here are a few indications that this topic is one Chuck Grassley’s office feels a need to dissemble in addressing:

While Grassley may not have chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee from early January 2019 to early January 2021, he was on it, and Ledeen was working for its chairman (Senator Graham) as a means of serving the entire committee—so yes, Ledeen was doing work for Grassley “in the [two] years leading up to January 6.”

Prior to working for Grassley indirectly from 2019 to 2021, Ledeen worked for Grassley directly from 2012 to 2019, making Foy’s attempt to suggest that Sen. Grassley was at a distance from Ledeen disingenuous at best.

Grassley did, in fact, rehire Ledeen 72 hours before the insurrection, so Foy clarifying that Ledeen wasn’t rehired to be part of Grassley’s Judiciary Committee staff—but rather was serving him in some other capacity—goes beyond mere disingenuity, as Foy seeks here to leave the impression that Ledeen wasn’t working for Grassley at all during Insurrection Week. In fact, she was.

That Ledeen’s retirement from the Senate came under circumstances worthy of additional investigation is underscored by Foy’s use of that retirement as a sort of rhetorical “get-out-of-jail-free” card in dealing with reporters. Despite the fact that Ledeen leaving the Senate in precipitous fashion makes the incident more rather than less worthy of investigation, Foy attempts to fashion it as a means for Grassley and his team to avoid significant questions about her.

Given that Foy worked alongside Ledeen for a very long time, his efforts to put distance between himself and her border on the comical: “you’d have to ask her”; “I don’t have her contact information”; “I can’t speak to her [knowledge].” In fact, not only would Foy almost certainly have her contact information (given that she only just recently left Grassley’s office), but he should be able to tell media whether Ledeen exhibited any awareness of “the PowerPoint” during the three quarters of a year—at a minimum—that he worked alongside her in Senator Grassley’s employ.

But Foy’s most telling evasion, bordering on pure deceit, is his last one: “She didn’t work for Senator Grassley at the time.” Foy here takes advantage of the fact that Woodward and Costa’s reporting about the Eastman plot covered a several-week period of time, from mid-December 2020 through Insurrection Day. Ledeen did work for Grassley during part of that time, but not for all of it, which Foy here exploits to imply that she didn’t work for Grassley for any of it.

Conclusion

As a former federal criminal investigator, I was trained to consider the relationships between all parties to a given event, the histories of all parties to an event, and the motives that these histories and relationships may disclose. I’m trained to deem past conduct a possible precedent for future conduct; lies as illuminating as truths; and the opportunity for a malfeasor to misbehave as the obvious and necessary precursor to a finding that they did. With all this in mind, and on all of these grounds, there is simply no doubt that Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen are presently the foremost (if not the only) suspects in the matter of who transmitted to key members of Congress the coup plot John Eastman and Peter Navarro had devised with Donald Trump’s knowledge.

Incredibly, the other chief suspects in this are all connected to Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen by various means: Ali Alexander, a participant in Ginni Thomas’s Groundswell group; Erik Prince, the man who helped train Project Veritas (run by Thomas’s partner James O’Keefe) in intelligence-gathering; Michael Ledeen, Barbara Ledeen’s politically well-connected husband, who has been involved in scandals in every Republican administration since Nixon’s; Michael Flynn, a close friend of the Ledeens, and Michael Ledeen’s co-author;

Mark Meadows, whose Trumpist career was advanced in aggressive terms by Ginni Thomas, in part (but only part) by the awarding of an laurel Thomas devised to celebrate and advertise her favored political instruments; Cleta Mitchell, another participant in Groundswell, and one who also participated directly in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election; John Eastman and Peter Navarro themselves, the former of whom was in contact with Ginni Thomas in the weeks and months before the attack on the Capitol and the latter of whom spearheaded a “purge” effort inside the White House that was masterminded by Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen outside of it; Presidential Personnel Office director and former Trump “body man” John McEntee, who assumed a position for which he was entirely unqualified because of a clandestine disinformation campaign against his predecessor Sean Doocey by—you guessed it—Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen;

Steve Bannon, whose media operation was hopelessly entwined with Thomas and Groundswell and who was himself a privileged guest of Thomas’s secretive group on at least one occasion; and Donald Trump, who met with Thomas on a number of occasions to discuss the very topic at issue here: locating and positioning loyalists in government who would do anything Trump demanded of them. A small number of other tangential figures, like Jeffrey Clark at DOJ, would not have been key liaisons themselves, but were nevertheless somehow located and selected via a murky process run by Trump partisans; Thomas and Ledeen had spent years plucking men like Clark from obscurity for the sake of getting them to do Trump’s bidding, and in the search for those who recruited Clark to participate in a coup plot in December 2020, Thomas and Ledeen would likewise be the prime suspects for any federal criminal investigator.

In short, as the House January 6 Committee seeks to connect three spheres of coup plotting—grassroots activists and political insiders, Congress, and the White House—there is no map of the key players within these spheres in January 2021 that does not have both Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen at or near the center of it. The House January 6 Committee would be wise to subpoena these two women immediately in order to find out what they know as soon as possible. Proof is confident that if such a subpoena is issued, one or both women will take the same tack that their associates already have, either by asserting the Fifth Amendment (like Eastman and Clark), defying their subpoenas (like Meadows and Bannon), fighting document production vociferously (like Flynn and Trump), issuing statements filled with half-truths (like Foy and Navarro), or testifying under circumstances that suggest perjury (Alexander).

It is deeply regrettable that Ginni Thomas’s association with Turning Point USA as an advisory board member led to a false rumor that she directly aided that organization’s leader, Charlie Kirk, in organizing buses to transport Trump voters to Washington on January 6. While Thomas’s indirect involvement at both ends of Kirk’s operation—on the front end she advised it, and on the back end the Turning Point buses were aimed at aiding the efforts of Alexander, a previous participant in her Groundswell group—the fact that Ginni Thomas was not working the phones ordering up buses (a task well below her pay-grade) obscured the fact that she appears to have been involved in January 6 in more complex and troubling ways. It is little wonder that after cheering on the events of January 6 on the morning of Insurrection Day, she thereafter did the bare minimum to justify her conduct, adding a non-apologetic note to her Facebook page before making it invisible to the public, and then sending a private apology to a private listserv regarding private missives none of us have ever seen. There remains no sense that Thomas regrets her role in January 6 or is even willing to speak about it.

All of the foregoing puts in an entirely new light Ginni Thomas’s husband—who, we are assured from those who know them both, she directly lobbies on matters before the Supreme Court—being the only member of the Supreme Court to rule that Donald Trump should be able to keep secret documents related to his contacts with advisers in the run-up to January 6. That Ginni Thomas appears to have been one of Trump’s key advisers in 2019 and 2020, and that during this period she was working hand-in-glove with one of the most notorious election-year “ratfuckers” in the Republican Party, raises the question of whether Clarence Thomas had reason to apprehend (either under his own steam or at his wife’s urging) that Ginni Thomas or her closest associates might well be implicated in January 6 plotting if all of Trump’s presidential records are disclosed to Congress. Unless we assume that Ginni Thomas hid from her husband the nature of her contacts with Trump and her work on Trump’s behalf—which would be impossible, given that Clarence Thomas was present at intimate gatherings with his wife and the former president; it is also not, according to friends of the Thomases, how their marriage has been structured for many decades now—Justice Thomas was aware of his wife’s proximity to coup plotters like John Eastman when the issue of Trump’s records being released to Congress came before the Court.

While the Supreme Court ruling releasing Trump’s records to Congress was an 8-1 decision—meaning that Thomas’s dissent was ultimately immaterial as a practical matter—in the months and years to come other issues touching upon Donald Trump’s ongoing insurrection will come before the Court. One or indeed many more than one may end up as 5-4 decisions favoring the protection of Trump’s borderline seditious conduct. These majority rulings will depend upon the vote of a man who is surely well aware of what his wife did or did not know about the January 6 coup plot in advance.

If House members do not determine what Ginni Thomas knew between now and the presumed Republican takeover of Congress in January 2023, it will be impossible for the case to be made that Clarence Thomas cannot sit on any Supreme Court case that involves Trump or the January 6 insurrection now or in the future. That is how urgent the immediate issuance of federal subpoenas to Barbara Ledeen and Ginni Thomas is.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/trump-official-kash-patel-says-he-and-trump-are-blown-away-acumen-some

no lnx

MARY GRACE (HOST): One of the things that I have loved about following the Q community is that people are accessing open source information. They're not creating conspiracies out of thin air. They're actually uncovering conspiracies that are available through open-source research. For example, a lot of the information that you put on your website ... are documents that many of the Q community have researched and have broken down for the layperson to be able to understand. And they've also made connections between one sort of incident and another. So they've taken some of the Russiagate things and then they tied them into other things that have happened. They're just good researchers, from what I've seen. Is that -- is that your take, maybe, on what you've seen?

KASH PATEL: I've seen on social media, on Trump -- on Truth Social, how good these researchers are and I kind of wish I had some of them when I was doingRussiagate and some of these other things. You know, Devin and I talk regularly and then, you know, I talk with the president all the time as well. And we're just blown away at the amount of acumen some of these people have and how quick they are to -- to grab it and suss through it and sort of thin it down and make it presentable, you know. And it's actually heartening to me to hear that people are going to [Patel's website] and getting the documents from the [INAUDIBLE]. That's the whole point. It's free.

Don't listen to my commentary. Go get the government documents that expose their own corruption, that show their own unethical behavior. From January 6, from Durham, from Russiagate, from Ukraine, impeachment one, whatever. We're going to keep getting those documents and keep putting them out. And that's part of the mission at [Patel's website].It's the education component of our charity, we're a 501(c)(3), is to get this out there.

So I'm glad people are reading it. We're going to keep doing it. And that is -- that is the singular best way on how you effectuate the change that you want in your community. And if it's Q or whatever movement that's getting that information out, I am all for it, every day of the week.

IN THIS ARTICLE

QAnon Conspiracy Theory

Trump official Kash Patel defends signing book with QAnon slogan

09/27/22

How Devin Nunes and Kash Patel appealed to QAnon extremists to build Truth Social’s user base

08/01/22

How True the Vote cultivated relationships with QAnon influencers to target an election software company and serve as a pipeline to law enforcement

09/15/22

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an 8 22

Former President Donald Trump and his inner circle of allies continue to circulate claims that declassified documents were removed from Mar-a-Lago during the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) search of his estate.

In fact, according to HuffPost, former Trump official Kash Patel recently echoed that same argument during an interview with Fox News' Mark Levin.

“In October of 2020, President Trump put out for the world to see, a sweeping declassification order, and he did it via social media — every single Russia-gate doc, every single Hillary-gate doc, everyone,” Patel said on Sunday.

On Oct. 6, 2020, Trump actually did tweet, “I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!”

However, previous remarks debunking that claim are now circulating again on social media. Per HuffPost, later that month Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff under Trump, "conceded in a sworn declaration to a federal court that Trump’s tweet was not an order to declassify or release those records."

In a sworn statement, the former Trump White House chief of staff wrote, “The president indicated to me that his statements on Twitter were no self-executing declassification orders, and do not require the declassification or release of any particular documents."

Meadows added that "the tweets 'related to authority' the president had delegated" to U.S. Attorney General William Barr pertaining to records.

The sworn statement was written after a judge demanded that an explanation be provided on why the former president's tweets appeared to contradict the White House stance on declassifying Russia-related documents.

In addition to recalling Trump's tweets, Patel – who stepped in as acting chief of staff after Meadows' departure — also claimed that he "had witnessed Trump declassify 'whole sets of documents' in December 2020 and January 2021 while Trump was 'on his way out.'”

However, HuffPost notes that he previously said "the administration 'failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings.'” Declassification is not a process that can be completed in secret.

Watch Patel's Fox News appearance below or at this link:...

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https://www.mediamatters.org/john-solomon/kash-patel-said-he-and-john-solomon-are-mission-show-mar-lago-documents-were

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8 22 pretend to help (maralago bs?) but just K$H merch?

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Weeks prior to the Federal Bureau of Investigation' (FBI) search of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, a former official for the U.S. Department of Defense vowed to publish classified documents, a new report reveals.

According to ABC News, Trump loyalist Kash Patel planned to "retrieve classified documents from the National Archives and publish them on his website."

On June 22, Patel appeared on a far-right podcast where he made the remarks. "I've never told anyone this because it just happened," Patel said during the podcast interview. "I'm going to identify every single document that they blocked from being declassified at the National Archives, and we're going to start putting that information out next week."

However, Patel failed to explain how he would be able to legally obtain copies of those records. "White House counsel and company disobeyed a presidential order and implemented federal governmental bureaucracy on the way out to basically send the stash to the National Archives, and now that's where it's at," Patel said.

A report published around the same time also indicated that Trump had penned a letter instructing the National Archives to grant access to concealed administration records. Access to those records was to be granted to Patel along with conservative journalist John Solomon.

In addition to the June 22 interview, Patel had also spoken about classified documents on other occasions insisting Trump had declassified a substantial amount of "Russiagate documents" during his final days in office.

"I know what's there" in the Archives, said Patel. "I can't still talk about them, but the whole process is going to be: Identify the documents, whether it's Russiagate, Hunter Biden, impeachment, Jan 6th -- and put them out."

In wake of the latest report, Erica Knight, a spokesperson for Patel, spoke to ABC News as she insisted that the former DoD official was acting as "a representative on behalf of President Trump to work with the National Archives to get them to disclose information."

"The GSA has their own policies and procedures for how presidential records must be handled," Knight said, "which Patel is in full cooperation with."

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Nine highlights from the Timeline below:

1. :{:{Meadows and Giuliani created a “parallel track” to raise election fraud claims}:

2. Trump campaign staff followed up on “Meadows’ theory” that tens of thousands of “illegal aliens” voted in Arizona

3. Meadows helped introduce President Trump to DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, who was plotting to oust the acting attorney general and use the Justice Department to overturn election results in Georgia

4. Meadows expressed upset, along with Trump, in response to Attorney General Barr’s having told the Associated Press there was no election fraud that could have affected the outcome in the election

5. Meadows made a surprise visit to Georgia where he met with the Secretary of State’s lead elections investigator. Trump called her the next day on Meadow’s suggestion and in the call urged her to find fraud in Fulton County

6. Meadows arranged and participated in the call in which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes”; and during the call Meadows asked the Georgia officials to share voting data even after they told him they could not because it was protected by law

7. In several communications with the Justice Department—in violation of White House and DOJ contacts policies—Meadows pressured the Department to investigate baseless allegations of election fraud

8. Then-Acting Secretary of Defense’s chief of staff Kash Patel says he spoke to Meadows “nonstop” on Jan. 6

9. In his final days in office, Trump hoped to issue a preemptive pardon for Meadows, Giuliani and possibly himself}:

Timeline

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what does it mean when THIS GUY cuts bannon off at knees?

bogus trump ltr releSED from exec priv when trump has never asserted and can't now?

judge tossed case, liar said i have no defense left (4 parts all) , judge said yup.

an 7 22

If you are tired of waiting for Attorney General Merrick Garland to indict Donald Trump for seditious conspiracy, insurrection, obstruction of Congress, or any other crime involving the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, I have some words of consolation: Steve Bannon’s trial for contempt of Congress has begun. If convicted, he will likely go to jail.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t take pleasure in the prospect of anyone doing time, as our penal institutions are shamelessly overcrowded and do little in the way of rehabilitation or deterrence to lower our outrageously high crime rates. But apart from Trump himself, there might not be any other person more deserving of a stint in the pokey than Bannon, the loud-mouthed propagandist and podcaster who led Trump’s 2016 political campaign to victory, and subsequently served as the disgraced ex-President’s chief strategist and senior counselor for nearly eight months in 2017.

The facts of the case against Bannon are straightforward and, from a legal perspective, devastating.

On September 23, 2021, the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol issued a subpoena commanding Bannon to produce documents on October 7 and sit for a sworn deposition on October 14. Bannon defied both requests.

On October 20, the committee voted to hold Bannon in contempt. Three days later, the full House, with the support of nine Republicans and every Democrat, passed a contempt resolution against Bannon and forwarded a request for prosecution to the Department of Justice.

On November 12, a federal grand jury returned a two-count indictment against Bannon for disobeying the subpoena. The first count cites him for refusing to testify, and the second for failing to turn over documents.

Contempt of Congress is a misdemeanor, but a very serious one. Conviction carries a mandatory minimum sentence of thirty days and a maximum of one year in jail. There is no possibility of probation, according to a 2011 federal court ruling interpreting the contempt statute.

The committee set forth its reasons for seeking Bannon’s cooperation in a succinct one-page letter that accompanied the subpoena. The letter reads in part:

“The Select Committee has reason to believe that you have information relevant to understanding important activities that led to and informed the events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. For example, you have been identified as present at the Willard Hotel on January 5, 2021, during an effort to persuade Members of Congress to block the certification of the election the next day, and in relation to other activities on January 6....Moreover, you are quoted as stating, on January 5, 2021 [on Bannon’s ‘War Room’ podcast] that ‘[a]ll hell is going to break loose tomorrow.’ Accordingly, the Select Committee seeks both documents and your deposition testimony regarding these and multiple other matters…”

The subpoena itself lists seventeen categories of records and communications. In addition to the items highlighted in the letter, the list includes all discussions that Bannon had with Trump about the planning, financing, and staging of the events of January 6, and any communications that Bannon had with Trump between November 3, 2020, and January 20, 2021, “concerning efforts to contest the election results or delay or impede the electoral vote.”

The list also includes communications Bannon may have had with any third parties about the insurrection. The subpoena specifically names attorney Boris Epstein, who worked as a strategic adviser on Trump’s 2020 election campaign; Kash Patel, a one-time aide to former GOP Congressman Devin Nunes of California; and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, an intelligence officer who briefly served as the acting Under-Secretary of Defense in 2020.

Initially, Bannon reacted to the subpoena with tough-guy bravado. Following his first court appearance in November, he told a small crowd of supporters and reporters, “This is going to be the misdemeanor from hell for Merrick Garland, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden. Joe Biden ordered Merrick Garland to prosecute me from the White House lawn when he got off Marine One. And . . . we’re going to go on the offense.We’re tired of playing defense. We’re going to go on the offense on this and stand by.”

Bannon might have been emboldened by the fact that contempt of Congress prosecutions arerelatively rare, and because his case was assigned to Federal District Court Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee who was narrowly confirmed by the Senate in 2019. In March, Nichols dismissed a felony obstruction charge brought against a Texas man accused of storming the Capitol.

Nichols, however, has been anything but lenient with Bannon. On June 15, Nichols deniedBannon’s motion to dismiss the case, rejecting his claims of executive privilege and his contention that the select committee was established illegally in violation of House rules.

As Bannon’s July 18 trial date approached, he apparently had a “come-to-Jesus moment” typical of many criminal defendants faced with imminent defeat. In an email sent to committee chairman Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of South Carolina, by one of his lawyers on July 9, Bannon offered to testify after all. The email also cited a rambling letter written by Trump, waiving claims of executive privilege.

Neither Judge Nichols nor the DOJ was swayed by Bannon’s change of position. On July 11, Nichols denied Bannon’s request to postpone his trial to October.

Nichols also ruled that Bannon will not be permitted to argue executive privilege as a defense at trial, and that he will not be allowed to subpoena House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or other members of the select committee to testify. The rulings left attorney David Schoen—who represented Trump in his second impeachment trial and later joined Bannon’s legal team—so exasperated that he remarked in open court, “What’s the point in going to trial if there are no defenses.”

Unlike seditious conspiracy or obstruction cases, contempt of Congress cases do not involve complex issues of intent. All that the prosecution needs to prove is a willful or deliberate intention not to respond to a Congressional subpoena. Evil motives or corrupt purposes need not be shown.

Bannon’s eleventh-hour offer to testify likely won’t save him, either. As the DOJ noted in a recent court filing, Bannon’s crime was committed and became complete in October, when he dodged the committee’s subpoena.

What this means, bottom line, is that Bannon had best hope he isn’t housed with the general population at the infamous D.C. Central Detention Facility, where he will probably serve his sentence. The same goes for former Trump aide Peter Navarro, who has also been indicted for defying a select committee subpoena. Navarro’s trial is set to begin November 17.

And who knows—a victory in the Bannon and Navarro cases might even encourage Garland to find his spine and prosecute Trump for attempting to overthrow what remains of our damaged democracy.

---

https://www.salon.com/**2021/09/2**4/is-kash-patel-the-defense-department-official-subpoenaed-by-jan-6-committee/

no lnx

he Democratic-led select committee charged with investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection has issued its first batch of subpoenas, targeting a spate of Donald Trump associates to uncover more details behind how the insurrection unfolded.

CNN reports that subpoenas were delivered to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former adviser Steve Bannon, former deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and Kash Patel, a former chief of staff to then-acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller.

"The Select Committee is investigating the facts, circumstances, and causes of the January 6th attack and issues relating to the peaceful transfer of power, in order to identify and evaluate lessons learned and to recommend to the House and its relevant committees corrective laws, policies, procedures, rules, or regulations," House Select Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in a statement.

A committee letter specifically outlined why each of the four will be targeted, according to MSNBC. Bannon, it alleged, "[communicated] with then-President Trump on December 30" and "[urged] him to plan for and focus his efforts on January 6." Meadows "engaged in multiple elements of the planning and preparation of efforts to contest the presidential election and delay the counting of electoral votes."

Scavino, the committee added, was reportedly "with the former President on Jan. 5, when he and others were considering how to convince members of Congress not to certify the election for Joe Biden."

And there is "substantial reason" to believe Patel has documents that could reveal the Defense Department's role in "preparing for and responding to the attack on the U.S. Capitol."

:{:{}:

Particular attention has been aimed at Patel, who was this week accused by Fiona Hill, Trump's former top Russia adviser, of "running a secret backchannel to President Trump on Ukraine matters," Axios reports.

According to Politico, Patel's name has been brought up in a number of depositions about Trump's alleged scheme to withhold U.S. military support from Ukraine. It was in this scheme that Trump reportedly sought information from Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky that would damage then-presidential candidate Joe Biden's campaign prospects.

Patel, 41, first rose to prominence for his work as a top staffer on the House Intelligence Committee, serving the efforts of Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., to delegitimize the FBI and the Justice Department during the Trump-Russia probe. Patel helped assemble a separate probe into the origins of the FBI's investigation – a venture the FBI called "extraordinarily reckless" because of its potential to publicize classified information about its own ongoing federal investigation, Politico noted.

Patel later ascended through the ranks to become the National Security Council's senior director for counterterrorism, becoming "increasingly drawn into Trump's battle against an intelligence community," a Washington Post op-ed detailed. There, he helped Trump oust a number of the former president's detractors. "Patel was the action officer," recalled a former top intelligence official to the Post. "He made it happen."

According to Hill's congressional testimony, while on the NSC, Patel grew more involved in U.S.-Ukraine relations, to the point where Trump regarded him as the designated point man on the matter.

Joshua Geltzer, who was in Patel's position earlier during the Trump administration, told Politico that Patel's advisory role would have been way outside Patel's purview.

:{:{}:

"If true, this sort of activity seems wildly outside the scope of anything a counterterrorism senior director at NSC should be spending their time on," Geltzer said. "What's more, it politicizes a piece of the NSC staff that administrations of both parties have worked for decades to keep as apolitical as possible."

Patel, for his part, has denied any wrongdoing from current and past colleagues, telling Axios that he never "communicated with the president on any matters involving Ukraine."

"I pride myself on my record as a dedicated national security professional who is entrusted to handle our nation's most sensitive matters," he said in a subsequent statement. "At no time have I strayed from my mission to protect the homeland in service to President Trump and the National Security Council."

Patel, Bannon, Meadows and Scavino are all expected to appear before the select committee in mid-October.

By JON SKOLNIK

Jon Skolnik is a staff writer at Salon. His work has appeared in Current Affairs, The Baffler, and The New York Daily News.

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one of 1st subpoenas?

...Kash Patel, the chief of staff to Christopher Miller, who was the acting Defense secretary when the Capitol assault took place, met with the committee behind closed doors for around four and a half hours. CBS News was first to spot Patel and his team as they arrived on the Hill and were greeted by a committee staffer. Though Patel did not respond to reporters' questions, he later issued a statement saying he had answered the panel's inquiries to the best of his ability.

"I have always been willing and able to share with the Committee, and the American people, the truth about the events of January 6—including the Department of Defense's preparation for and response to unrest at the Capitol," the statement read, later adding: "The DOD Inspector General, under the Biden Administration, found no wrongdoing in its report on Jan. 6, as I shared with the Committee."

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no lnx few

By Jim Saksa and Chris Marquette

Posted October 14, 2021

Kashyap Patel, a former Defense Department official in the Trump administration who was involved in security planning and responding to the Jan. 6 insurrection, did not appear Thursday for his scheduled deposition before the House select committee investigating Jan. 6.

“He didn’t show up. He’s continuing to engage,” Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a member of the panel, told CQ Roll Call. “We have a limited threshold of patience for that.”

The committee is set to meet later Thursday.

Although Patel didn’t show up for his scheduled deposition, he has been fundraising off the subpoena issued to him and has criticized the panel as “corrupt.”

Stephen Bannon, a former Donald Trump adviser, was also scheduled to appear Thursday, but he has indicated he would not comply with the panel’s investigation. Former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino, the former White House deputy chief of staff for communications, are supposed to testify Friday.

“I’ll tell you the committee is determined that we are going to — even if, you know, like it takes a while to get it to happen,” Kinzinger said. “We’re gonna do everything we can to compel that.”

Later on Thursday, the select committee announced it will refer Bannon for criminal contempt of Congress because he has refused to cooperate with the panel’s subpoenas requesting records and testimony.

The panel will vote to adopt a contempt report regarding Bannon on Oct. 19.

“Mr. Bannon has declined to cooperate with the Select Committee and is instead hiding behind the former President’s insufficient, blanket, and vague statements regarding privileges he has purported to invoke. We reject his position entirely,” Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in a statement. “The Select Committee will not tolerate defiance of our subpoenas, so we must move forward with proceedings to refer Mr. Bannon for criminal contempt. I’ve notified the Select Committee that we will convene for a business meeting Tuesday evening to vote on adopting a contempt report.”

Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Kinzinger are the only two Republicans on the panel and have taken considerable blowback from the GOP for doing so. Even before she joined the committee, Cheney in May was purged from her No. 3 slot in House Republican leadership for speaking out against Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election being stolen from him.

Kinzinger said, “Liz and I have put everything into this committee. ... We’re not gonna be weak on it.”

The committee has said it would refer criminal contempt of Congress charges to the Department of Justice if individuals such as Bannon don’t cooperate. That process could be lengthy, and whether the panel members can get all the information they need for a comprehensive investigation remains to be seen.

Kinzinger said the panel thinks the DOJ will be “very cooperative” and said the department has been thus far.

He added, “If a criminal referral is passed out of the House and signed by the speaker, that is, I think that’s guaranteed to be slated for grand jury. The question is just when.”

Those charged with criminal contempt of Congress can face a fine and up to a year in prison.

The committee would need to adopt a contempt report that includes a resolution recommending the House hold that witness in contempt. If the committee adopts the contempt report, it would then refer the report to the full House; Speaker Nancy Pelosi would then need to certify the report to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who would be responsible for referral to a grand jury.

Some witnesses have been cooperating with the committee, including Jeffrey Rosen, who served as acting attorney general under Trump.

Even with efforts by some to slow or impede the process, Kinzinger said he is hopeful they will get what they need for their investigation.

“We have people that are voluntarily talking to us, you know, and so as we start to build this up, you can kind of triangulate around some of these big people that we’re pulling in,” Kinzinger said. “And so I think we’ll be able to, even with stalls, we’ll be able to get a lot of information — I hope, I mean, but I’ve never been through this before either.”

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https://news.yahoo.com/pro-trump-lawyer-rising-stop-090303115.html

in late 2020, as then-President Donald Trump was waging a multi-front campaign to cling to power, a little-known attorney and self-described former special ops commander began working on Trump’s behalf, badgering senior Justice Department officials in an effort to rope them into the plot.

In the months since Trump’s failed coup attempt, government documents and emails have further revealed the extent of this attorney Kurt Olsen’s behind-the-scenes crusade to try to keep him in power. The twice-impeached former president had clearly taken a shine to Olsen and his work. But since the fallout from the 2020 presidential election, it appears that Olsen’s former colleagues want to distance themselves from him—to the point where his onetime law firm has effectively disowned him and airbrushed him from its history.

Olsen’s recurring appearances in the ongoing Capitol Hill investigations into what led to the MAGA riot on Jan. 6 raise some glaring questions. How did a virtually unknown private attorney and associate of extreme MAGA personalities stumble his way into influencing the functions of the executive branch—to the degree that the most senior DOJ personnel had to concoct plans to fight off his onslaught?

For 18 years, Olsen worked as a partner at Klafter, Olsen & Lesser, a small New York-based law firm he co-founded.But shortly after he signed on to help Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s failed bid to overturn the 2020 election at the Supreme Court, the firm changed its name and registered a new website—without Olsen’s name in the URL—on Feb. 24. Now, where Olsen’s bio used to be, a disclaimer says, “Kurt Olsen is not affiliated in any way with Klafter Lesser LLP.”

Partners at Klafter Lesser did not respond to requests from The Daily Beast for comment. Olsen did not provide comment, either.

Emails released by the House Oversight Committee and reporting by Politico show that after the election, the Maryland attorney rose from relative obscurity in conservative politics to capture the ear of then-President Trump. Despite his access, several lawyers and administration officials intimately involved with the anti-democratic effort did not know or simply couldn’t remember Olsen—a reflection of the disjointed and chaotic state of post-election MAGA politics as different factions pushed competing authoritarian ideas and fought amongst themselves

Out of six knowledgeable Trumpworld sources contacted for this story, several said they hadn’t directly dealt at all with Olsen, though they knew Trump was enamored by the ideas he was selling. One former senior Trump aide said they purposely avoided contact or involvement with Olsen, describing his legal theories as pure “nonsense.”

[Rudy Giuliani’s Law License Suspended Over Election Lie Spree

Predictably, none of that trepidation from Trump administration brass prevented the then-president from embracing Olsen or his fringe legal opinions.

Olsen’s ascent to the heights of MAGA activism began in December 2020 when Paxton put together a Supreme Court case to toss out Joe Biden’s electoral victory in Pennsylvania. The Texas attorney general reached outside his office for help and appointed two special counsels to assist in the case: Lawrence Joseph, a conservative attorney with experience filing briefs at the Supreme Court supportive of conservative causes and figures, and Olsen, whose office sat a few floors down from Joseph’s firm in the same Washington, D.C., office building.

The move placed Olsen, who had little-to-no national profile in conservative politics, at the tip of the spear in the Trump-backed effort to overturn the 2020 election in court. Prior to his legal career, the attorney “served as a Naval Special Warfare Officer assigned to SEAL Team Five”who “has traveled extensively in the Middle East and Far East, primarily as a special operations platoon commander,” according to a since-deleted bio at his former firm.

Paxton’s Supreme Court suit ultimately failed when all nine justices unanimously voted to throw it out on the grounds that the state of Texas lacked the standing to bring the case. Despite the suit’s failure, Olsen’s star continued to rise among the increasingly bizarre world of “Stop the Steal” notables.

Emails sent by Olsen to Justice Department officials, obtained by the New York Times and House Oversight Committee, show that after the Supreme Court tossed the Texas suit, Olsen managed to get in touch with Trump himself to brief him on an effort to revive the case.

At some point after the Texas suit’s failure, Olsen managed to get in touch with the president to pitch him on the idea of having the Justice Department bring a suit “modeled after the Texas action,” which would theoretically sidestep the lack of standing that had doomed the state-led effort.

“The President of the United States has seen this complaint, and he directed me last night to brief AG Rosen in person today to discuss bringing this action,” Olsen wrote in an email to the Justice Department. “I have been instructed to report back to the President this afternoon after this meeting.”

Olsen never got his meeting with Rosen, and the acting attorney general never took up Texas’ quixotic attempt to overturn the election. But, as Politico reported this month, the president’s interest in Olsen’s work grew so intense that in December, Trump himself made a point of bothering Rosen about the 54-page draft complaint that Olsen had been pushing to the highest levels of the federal government.

According to Politico, Rosen recently told Senate investigators that he counseled the then-president that the draft complaint was, at best, a waste of time.

Furthermore, Olsen’s name also appeared on a memo that was hand-delivered to Trump in his very last days in office—a memo that also appeared to include a recommendation on resorting to “martial law if necessary.” When pillow magnate and staunch Trump ally Mike Lindell visited the White House to brief Trump and administration officials and attorneys on his wild claims of Chinese hacking efforts in the 2020 election, Olsen’s name even appeared in a photo of documents Lindell brought to Trump, next to figures like Sidney Powell and Kash Patel, as suggestions for who Trump should appoint to senior positions during his quest to stay in power.

Lindell’s fondness for Olsen continued into the post-Trump era. As Lindell’s “cyber symposium” in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was ongoing last week, Olsen commented on aWashington Times story and was referred to as a member of the MyPillow CEO’s team of lawyers.

Olsen’s reported presence on Lindell’s legal team shows how he isn’t done associating himself with doomed efforts to overturn the 2020 election results or to reinstall Trump. The Aug. 11 Washington Times article in which Olsen is featured is headlined, “Cyber expert says his team can’t prove Mike Lindell’s claims that China hacked election.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/my-pillow/

no lnx pix twt

Internet explodes as Trump meets with 'My Pillow Guy' whose notes reportedly mention 'Insurrection Act' and 'martial law'

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell expands from manufacturing masks to sourcing them after call with Trump

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement January 16, 2021

The internet exploded late Friday afternoon when a highly-respected Washington Post photographer captured on camera notes held by Mike Lindell, the founder and CEO of My Pillow, one of the top advertisers on Fox News and a close confidant of President Donald Trump.

Lindell, according to the White House press pool, "was spotted outside the West Wing at 3 pm. He was on his cell phone at one point as he waited outside. The Marine let him inside at 3:05 pm."

There is always a Marine stationed outside the Oval Office when the President is inside the Oval Office, but not when the President is not there.

The notes appear to mention "martial law," a suggestion to move a dangerous Trump loyalist to the CIA as acting Director, the “Insurrection Act," and something about “foreign interference in the election," as Talking Points Memo reported.

Understandably, the Internet lit up like a Christmas tree, but with countless rumors, jokes, and concern.

All those aside, the question really is, would President Trump, who has less than five days left in office, actually fire the head of the CIA, and why? What would he hope to accomplish, do, or get away with if Gina Haspel were gone?

The other question of course is why would Trump listen to Lindell, a far right conspiracy theorist and religious extremist, but that question is unanswerable.

Here's what some are saying.

CNN analyst, attorney, and former FBI Special Agent:

CNN White House correspondent:

On Mike Lindell's notes: “…TAKEN IMMEDIATELY TO SAVE THE…CONSTITUTION” Names Sidney Powell and Kurt Olsen Says Kash Patel should be moved to “CIA Acting…”

Public advocacy firm:

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ref

'These are dictator moves': Defense officials alarmed as Trump installs more loyalists at the Pentagon

Adam Payne Nov 11, 2020,

President Donald Trump has filled a series of senior defense positions with loyalists, causing alarm among Pentagon officials.

Four defense officials, including Mark Esper, the defense secretary, and James Anderson, the acting undersecretary of defense for policy, have either resigned or been sacked since Trump lost the presidential election.

Anderson was replaced by Anthony Tata, a retired US Army brigadier general who made false claims about President Barack Obama including that he was a "terrorist leader," CNN reported.

"This is scary. It's very unsettling," one defense official told CNN, adding, "These are dictator moves."

Rep. Adam Smith, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said the next few months could be "downright dangerous."

President Donald Trump is continuing to replace senior defense officials with loyalists, creating alarm in the Pentagon that his rapid overhaul of key staffers could undermine national security.

Since Trump fired Secretary of Defense Mark Esper on Monday, three other Defense Department officials have either resigned or been sacked. James Anderson, the acting undersecretary of defense for policy, quit on Tuesday after clashing with the White House over its attempts to insert allies and controversial figures into top Pentagon positions, Politico reported.

Anderson was replaced by retired US Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata, an ally of Trump and a regular guest on Fox News. Tata has made several false and Islamophobic claims about former President Barack Obama in tweets unearthed by CNN, calling him a Muslim and a "terrorist leader" who "normalized Islam for America."

Joseph Kernan, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and Jen Stewart, Esper's chief of staff, also left their posts and werereplaced by Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Kash Patel.Patel will serve as chief of staff to Christopher Miller, now the acting secretary of defense, CNN reported.

Both Cohen-Watnick and Patel are considered fiercely loyal to the outgoing president, The Associated Press reported.

There is reportedly a growing concern in the Pentagon that the flurry of personnel changes could just the beginning and that Trump's decision-making could become more volatile as he continues to refuse to concede the election to President-elect Joe Biden.

:{:{}:

"This is scary. It's very unsettling," a defense official told CNN, adding, "These are dictator moves."

Officials told The Washington Post that Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist could be the next to be dismissed.

Rep. Adam Smith, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday that the "gutting" of the department ought to "alarm" Americans.

"It is hard to overstate just how dangerous high-level turnover at the Department of Defense is during a period of presidential transition," he said. "The top policy professional in the Department resigning the day after the Secretary of Defense was fired could mark the beginning of a process of gutting the DoD — something that should alarm all Americans."

Smith added that "if this is the beginning of a trend — the President either firing or forcing out national security professionals in order to replace them with people perceived as more loyal to him — then the next 70 days will be precarious at best and downright dangerous at worst."

Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal echoed Smith's national-security concerns.

"Trump's Defense Department purge is deeply dangerous to our national security," Blumenthal tweeted, adding that the outgoing president's "personal vendettas & temper tantrums supersede our national security."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-is-on-the-verge-of-repeating-a-historic-disaster-by-pushing-the-wuhan-lab-hoax/

There’s a meme that appears now and then on Facebook and other social media: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”

That’s funny. What’s not is that the Trump administration and its coterie of China-bashers, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and aided by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have recently been dusting off the fake-intelligence playbook Vice President Dick Cheney used in 2002 and 2003 to justify war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. At that time, the administration of President George W. Bush put enormous pressure on the U.S. intelligence community to ratify spurious allegations that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and that his regime had assembled an arsenal of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Fantasy claims they may have been, but they did help to convince many skeptical conservatives and spooked liberals that a unilateral, illegal invasion of Iraq was urgently needed.

This time around, it’s the Trump administration’s reckless charge that Covid-19 — maybe manmade, maybe not, advocates of this conspiracy theory argue — was released perhaps deliberately, perhaps by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city that was the epicenter of the outbreak late last year. It’s a story that has ricocheted around the echo chambers of the far right, from conspiracy-oriented Internet kooks like to semi-respectable media tribunes and radio talk-show hosts to the very highest reaches of the administration itself, including President Trump.

Unlike with Iraq in 2003, the U.S. isn’t planning on going to war with China, at least not yet. But the Trump administration’s zeal in shifting attention from its own bungling of the Covid-19 crisis to China’s alleged culpability in creating a global pandemic only raises tensions precipitously between the planet’s two great powers at a terrible moment. In the process, it essentially ensures that the two countries will be far less likely to cooperate in managing the long-term pandemic or collaboratively working on vaccines and cures. That makes it, as in 2002-2003, a matter of life and death.

Iraq Redux?

Back in 2002, the Bush administration launched an unending campaign of pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to falsify, distort, and cherry-pick intelligence factoids that could be collated into a package linking al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. At the Pentagon, neoconservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up an ad hoc team that eventually took on the name of Office of Special Plans. It was dedicated tofabricating intelligence on Iraq.

Just in case the message didn’t get across, Vice President Cheney made repeated visits to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to badger analysts to come up with something useful. In 2003, in “The Lie Factory,” which I co-authored with Jason Vest for Mother Jones, we reported on how Wolfowitz, Feith, allied Defense Department officials like Harold Rhode, and neoconservative apparatchiks like David Wurmser, then a senior adviser to Iraq-war-touting State Department Undersecretary John Bolton (and now an unofficial advisor to Donald Trump on Iran), actively worked to purge Pentagon and CIA officials who resisted the push to shape or exaggerate intelligence. A year later, veteran spy-watcher James Bamford described the whole episode in excruciating detail in his 2004 book, A Pretext for War.

In 2020, however, President Trump is not just pressuring the intelligence community, or IC. He’s at war with it and has been busy installing unprofessional know-nothings and sycophants in top positions there. His bitter antipathy began even before he was sworn into office, when he repeatedly refused to believe a sober analysis from the IC, including the CIA and FBI, that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had aided and abetted his election. Since then, he’s continually railed and tweeted against what he calls “the deep state.” And he’s assigned his authoritarian attorney general, Bill Barr, to conduct a scorched-earth offensive against the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the FBI, and the Justice Department itself, most recently by dropping charges against admitted liar Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s first national security advisor.

To make sure that the IC doesn’t challenge his wishes and does his bidding, Trump has moved to put his own political operatives in charge at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, created as part of an intelligence reorganization scheme after 9/11. The effort began in February when Trump named U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as acting DNI. A highly partisan, sharp-elbowed politico and spokesman for former National Security Advisor John Bolton, he harbors far-right views and is a Trump loyalist, as well as an acolyte of former Trump aide Steve Bannon. On arriving in Bonn as ambassador, Grenell soon endorsed the rise of Europe’s anti-establishment ultra-right in an interview with Bannon’s Breitbart News.

To bolster Grenell, the administration has called onanother ultra-right crusader, Kash Patel. He has served as Republican Congressman Devin Nunes’s aide in the campaign to discredit the Russia investigation and reportedly acted as a White House backchannel to Ukraine during the effort to stir up an inquiry in Kiev aimed at tarring former Vice President Joe Biden.

Following that, the president re-named Congressman John Ratcliffe of Texas, one of the president’s most enthusiastic defenders during the debate over impeachment, to serve as Grenell’s permanent replacement at ODNI. In 2019, Trump first floated Ratcliffe’s name for the post, but it was shot down days later, thanks to opposition from even Republican members of Congress, not to speak of intelligence professionals and various pundits. Now, he’s back, awaiting likely confirmation.

It remains to be seen whether the Grenell-Ratcliffe tag-team, combined with Trump’s three-year campaign to disparage the intelligence community and intimidate its functionaries, has softened them up enough for the administration’s push to finger China and its labs for creating and spreading Covid-19.

The Wuhan Lab Lies

As is often the case, that campaign began rather quietly and unobtrusively in conservative and right-wing media outlets.

On January 24th, the right-wing Washington Times ran a story entitled “Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” It, in turn, was playing off of a piece that had appeared inLondon’sDaily Mailthe previous day. Written like a science-fiction thriller, that story drew nearly all its (unverified) information from a single source, an Israeli military intelligence China specialist. Soon, it moved from the Washington Times to other American right-wing outlets. Steve Bannon picked it up the next day on his podcast, “War Room: Pandemic,” calling the piece “amazing.” A few days later, the unreliable, gossipy website ZeroHedge ran a (later much-debunked) piece saying that a Chinese scientist bioengineered the virus, purporting even to name the scientist.

A couple of weeks later, Fox News weighed in, laughably citing a Dean Koontz novel, The Eyes of Darkness, about “a Chinese military lab that creates a new virus to potentially use as a biological weapon during wartime.” The day after that, Senator Tom Cotton — appearing on Fox, of course — agreed that China might indeed have created the virus.Then the idea began to go… well, viral. (Soon Cotton was even tweeting that Beijing might possibly have deliberately released the virus.) By late February, the right’s loudest voice, Rush Limbaugh, was on the case, claiming that the virus “is probably a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized.” (A vivid account of how this conspiracy theory spread can be found at the Global Disinformation Index.)

Starting in March, even as they were dismissing the seriousness of Covid-19, both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeatedly insisted on referring to it as the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus,” ignoring criticism that terminology like that was both racist and inflammatory. In late March, Pompeo even managed to scuttle a communiqué from America’s allies in the Group of Seven, or G7, by demanding that they agree to use the term “Wuhan virus.” It didn’t take the president long to start threatening retaliatory action against China for its alleged role in spreading Covid-19, whilehe began comparing the pandemic to the 1941 Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

And all of that was but a prelude to the White House ramping up of pressure on the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to prove that the virus had indeed emerged, whether by design or accident, from either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, a branch of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An April 30th article in the New York Times broke the story that administration officials “have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak,” and that Grenell had made it a “priority.”

Both Trump and Pompeo would, in the meantime, repeatedly assert that they had seen actual “evidence” that the virus had indeed come from a Chinese lab, though Trump pretended that the information was so secret he couldn’t say anything more about it. “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I’m not allowed to tell you that.” Asked during an appearance on ABC’s This Week if the virus had popped out of a lab in Wuhan, Pompeo answered: “There is enormous evidence that that’s where this began.”

On April 30th, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a terse statement,saying that so far it had concluded Covid-19 is “not manmade or genetically modified,” but that they were looking into whether or not it was “the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.” There is, however, no evidence of such an accident, nor did the ODNI cite any.

A Finger on the Scale

The run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003 should be on all our minds today. Then, top officials simply repeated again and again that they believed both Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent ties to al-Qaeda and his nonexistent active nuclear, chemical, andbioweapon programs were realities and assigned intelligence community collectors and analysts to look into them (while paying no attention to their conclusions). Now, Trump and his people are similarly putting their fat fingers on the scale of reality, while making it clear to hopefully intimidated intelligence professionals just what conclusions they want to hear.

Because those professionals know that their careers, salaries, and pensions depend on the continued favor of the politicians who pay them, there is, of course, a tremendous incentive to go along with such demands, shade what IC officials call the “estimate” in the direction the White House wants, or at least keep their mouths shut. That is exactly what happened in 2002 and, given that Grenell, Patel, and Ratcliffe are essentially Trump toadies, the IC officials lower on the totem pole have to be grimly aware of what their latest bosses expect from them.

There was near-instant pushback from scientists, intelligence officials, and China experts about the Trump-Pompeo campaign to finger the Wuhan lab. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the preeminent American scientist and Covid-19 expert, promptly shot it down, saying that the virus had “evolved in nature and then jumped species.” That’s because actual scientists, who study the genome of the virus and its mutations, unanimously agree that it was not generated in a lab.

Among America’s allies — Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand — in what’s called the Five Eyes group, there was an unambiguous conclusion that the virus had been a “naturally occurring” one and had mutated in the course of “human and animal interaction.” Australia, in particular, rejected what appeared to be a fake-intelligence dossier about the Wuhan lab, while German officials in an internal document ridiculed the lab rumors as “a calculated attempt to distract” attention from the Trump administration’s own inept handling of the virus.

Finally, according to Bloomberg News, those studying the issue inside the intelligence community now say that suspicions it emerged from a lab are “largely circumstantial since the U.S. has very little information from the ground to back up the lab-escape theory or any other.” In the end, however, that doesn’t mean top IC officials beholden to the White House won’t tailor their conclusions to fit the Trump-Pompeo narrative.

John McLaughlin, who served as deputy director and then acting director of the CIA during the Bush administration, believes that we are indeed seeing a replay of what happened in Iraq nearly two decades ago. “What it reminds me of is the dispute between the CIA and parts of the Bush administration over whether there was an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda,” he said. “They kept asking the CIA, and we kept coming back and saying, ‘You know, it’s just not there.’”

Whether the tug-of-war between Trump, Pompeo, and the IC is just another passing battle in a more than three-year-old war between the president and the “Deep State” or whether it’s something that could lead to a serious crisis between Washington and Beijing remains to be seen. Ironically enough, in January and February of this year, the IC provided President Trump with more than a dozen clear warnings about the dangers to the United States and national security posed by the coronavirus, following clarion calls from China and the World Health Organization that what was happening in Wuhan could spread worldwide — warnings that Trump either failed to notice, disregarded, or downplayed through March.

Were Donald Trump not so predisposed to see the intelligence community as his enemy, he might have paid more attention back then. Had he done so, there would undoubtedly be many less dead Americans right now and he wouldn’t have had to spend his time in his own lab concocting what might be thought of as batshit excuses for his dereliction of duty.

By the time this affair is over, the invasion of Iraq could look like the good old days.

Bob Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist and TomDispatch regular, is a contributing editor at the Nation and has written for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, the New Republic, and many other magazines. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/new-signs-emerge-that-trumps-controversial-new-intel-chief-is-trying-to-keep-congress-in-the-dark

no lnx

New signs emerge that Trump’s controversial new intel chief is trying to keep Congress in the dark

Written by Cody Fenwick March 10, 2020

Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell was expected to brief lawmakers about election interference on Tuesday, according to CNN, but his office announced at the last minute that he will not be showing up.

He would have joined other top national security officials to deliver the information to Congress. However, other “experts” were sent in his place. Grenell denied to CNN that he had ever intended to show up for the briefing, but the outlet reported that it obtained documents sent to multiple lawmakers’ offices indicating that he would be appearing on Tuesday.

The odd and unexplained turn of events followed a report from Time on Monday that found that the controversial appointee’s office is withholding or delaying a global threat assessment from Congress that “warns that the U.S. remains unprepared for a global pandemic,” citing two officials who have seen the documents.

Grenell has a lot to answer for, and he may be apprehensive about subjecting himself to questions from Congress. He has little background in intelligence work and had been serving as ambassador to Germany before President Donald Trump dropped him into the DNI role. From all appearances, Trump picked him for the position because he was seeking a loyalist; Grenell has previously drawn attention to himself by being a shameless pro-Trump partisan. After Trump picked Grenell to serve in an acting capacity, Trump nominated another loyalist, Rep. John Ratcliffe, whose nomination for the permanent position had previously been stalled when it was reported he had engaged in dubious resume padding. It now appears Trump is trying to force Congress to accept either Ratcliffe or Grenell — both entirely unsuited to the dispassionate position — so that he can politicize the intelligence community’s work in his favor.

The Time report leaves the impression that Trump’s attempt to politicize the intelligence community is already working. It’s not just the threat assessment’s findings about U.S. pandemic preparedness that Trump may prefer to keep hidden — he’s currently coming under fire for a botched response to the coronavirus outbreak. It also seems likely he would want to conceal parts of the assessment that could be seen as undermining key aspects of his foreign policy:

Other dangers flagged in the 2020 report, according to the two sources, include Iran’s return to nuclear enrichment, North Korea’s accelerated launching of missiles and the increasingly urgent national security risks posed by climate change.

…

Trump continues to deny or downplay Russia’s efforts to interfere in U.S. elections through propaganda and disinformation promulgated on bogus social media accounts. The threat assessment has warned for years that “Russia poses a cyber espionage, influence and attack threat to the United States and our allies.”

Trump touts his diplomatic efforts with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, but past intelligence assessments have been skeptical about their effectiveness. This year’s still-unpublished report echoes the 2019 assessments that North Korea “is unlikely to give up all its WMD stockpiles, delivery systems, and production capabilities” and that “North Korean leaders view nuclear arms as critical to regime survival,” according to a former official who was involved in preparing this year’s report.

CNN also noted that Grenell’s appointment as acting DNI came after Trump was reportedly unhappy with the office’s communications to Congress about Russian election interference under DNI Joseph Maguire:

Tuesday’s briefings come almost three weeks after Grenell was controversially named to the top intel job, in the wake of an election security briefing by Pierson that angered Trump because she testified that Russia supports the President’s reelection bid.

In unprepared remarks, Pierson had told members of the House Intelligence Committee in a February 13 briefing that Russia is meddling in the 2020 campaign and intelligence indicated it had once again developed a preference for Trump (as well as Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders).

However, a senior intelligence official denied that Pierson had told lawmakers that Russia was actively aiding Trump’s reelection effort.

Grenell replaced Adm. Joseph Maguire and pushed out his deputy, Andrew Hallman, a longtime CIA officer. An official from the National Security Council who had previously worked to discredit Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian activity, Kash Patel, was named an adviser to Grenell.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trump-names-right-wing-troll-to-lead-intelligence-agencies/

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Trump names right-wing troll to lead intelligence agencies

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon February 21, 2020

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has had a long career in politics, and I’m sure she has many accomplishments that she’s proud of. But I’m afraid she’s going to be remembered for one thing and one thing only: Her declaration that President Trump had “learned his lesson” after his impeachment trial in the Senate. That would have been a ridiculous rationale for voting to acquit any president on the evidence in that case, but saying it about Trump was downright laughable. He has proved that every single day since the trial ended.

Right out of the box he vowed revenge. He attacked Sen. Mitt Romney, the one Republican who voted to convict him in the Senate trial, and then immediately set about firing witnesses who had testified against him, including the twin brother of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, for no apparent reason.

Trump has pushed the Senate Republican majority and the Department of Justice to help him exact his vengeance by investigating professionals who were involved in the Russia and Ukraine investigation. His apparent collusion with Attorney General Bill Barr to interfere in criminal cases has caused a near-insurrection within the Department of Justice.

This week Trump went on a pardon spree, freeing a list of people who had been convicted of corruption, sending yet another obvious message to those inside and outside the justice system that he is unencumbered by the rule of law. It remains to be seen if he will pardon his old pal Roger Stone, now that he’s been sentenced to 40 months in prison. But if he has any fear that Stone has information to trade, you can be sure he’ll do it.

That’s just a partial list of “lessons” Trump has learned since the Senate failed to do its duty, and I’m sure I’m leaving some out. But the announcement on Thursday that Trump will name his ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, as the new acting director of national security may be the most shocking action of recent weeks.

Grenell is one of the most odious Trump toadies in the administration, and that’s really saying something. Like so many others, he came to Trump’s attention as a sharp-tongued Fox News personality. It’s likely that Trump didn’t know much about him other than the fact he was a big fan. That’s all it takes. Truthfully, if he’d known Grenell’s whole story he would like him even more.

Grenell held a few PR flak jobs in the government, working for the likes of John Bolton at the UN, where he was universally reviled.But he is best known as a Twitter troll, just like the president. He quit Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, where he’d been hired as a foreign policy spokesman, after his Twitter feed was revealed to be full of nasty comments. During the 2016 campaign, he got back in the game and really made a name for himself as a crude and vicious Trump supporter.

Needless to say, Trump loved it and gave him the plum job of U.S. ambassador to Berlin, where he immediately alienated everyone in sight. On his very first day on the job, referencing the fact that Trump had withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal, Grenell tweeted that “Germans doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.” Obviously he had no authority to dictate any such thing, and people in Germany were not amused, to say the least. Leaders of two German political parties have called him a “brat” and a “failure” and requested that he be withdrawn. No such luck.

Grenell has gone on to cultivate the far right in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, particularly Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, the “boyish face” of his country’s far-right government. Grenell told Breitbart that he wanted to “empower” Kurz and others like him in Europe, which exceeds the job description of ambassador just a wee bit.

Most recently, he was implicated in the baroque Ukraine scandal, and particularly in the side plot involving Lev Parnas and Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash. Parnas was reportedly instructed (perhaps by Rudy Giuliani) to ask Grenell for a heads-up if the Department of Justice decided to seek Firtash’s extradition to the U.S. Grenell apparently agreed to do it, which was probably illegal.

Grenell’s name has been floating all over the Trump administration for a while, mentioned as a possible national security adviser after Bolton’s departure or a potential secretary of state if Mike Pompeo quits. He has no qualifications for any such posts, other than his personal fealty to Donald Trump.

The professionals in the intelligence community are reportedly very alarmed by Grenell’s appointment, as they should be. The DNI oversees all the U.S. intelligence services and has access to all the most important capabilities and secrets. It is unclear whether Grenell even has a top-level security clearance or could qualify for one.

This appointment was announced as yet another “acting” assignment, which seems odd since an acting DNI, Joseph Maguire, was already in place. (He has filled the job since last August, when Dan Coats departed.) Administration sources have said that Grenell will only serve until Trump nominates someone for the permanent position, which would require Senate confirmation, and won’t resign his position in Germany. So why put in another placeholder?

Late on Thursday, the Washington Post and the New York Times reported the answer: Trump wanted Maguire out immediately because his department had briefed the House Intelligence Committee last week and told members that the Russian government is once again interfering in the presidential campaign on Trump’s behalf. As usual, Trump is livid that members of his administration actually performed their legal and constitutional duties, and is determined to punish those who did. He was especially angry that Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a major villain in Trump World, was given this information.

Aside from Maguire, the second-ranking official in the DNI’s office, longtime intelligence professional Andrew Hallman, also announced his departure, leaving the top echelon without experienced leadership. But never fear, another Trumpian hack is on the way. According to Politico, hyper-partisan henchman Kash Patel, the former aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif.,who played an important role in House Republicans’ attempts to discredit the Russia investigation, will come on board as “senior adviser” to Grenell.

It’s clear that Trump has moved his most dedicated disciples into the DNI’s office in order to prevent any more briefings on Russian interference on his behalf and to ensure that the intelligence community is brought to heel. Between this and Bill Barr’s unlimited mandate to investigate the intelligence on election interference from 2016, one can assume that the purge of anyone Trump considers a threat within the intelligence agencies or the Justice Department is now in full effect.

So in a sense Susan Collins was right. Trump has learned his lesson: Only proven Trump loyalists will run national security and federal law enforcement from now on. What could possibly go wrong?

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

nyt

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Kashyap Patel, Main Author of Secret Memo, Is No Stranger to Quarrels

By Katie Rogers and Matthew Rosenberg

Feb. 2, 2018

WASHINGTON — Kashyap Patel is a lawyer who has sometimes run afoul of the rules.

As a lawyer in Florida, Mr. Patel, 37, entered and then dropped out of a charity bachelor auction featuring some colleagues after a blogger pointed out that his license to practice in the state appeared out of date. In 2016, as a counterterrorism prosecutor for the Justice Department, he was berated by a federal judge who then issued an “Order on Ineptitude” directed at the entire agency. And over the summer, in a trip arranged outside official channels, he traveled to London, where he tried unsuccessfully to meet with Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier that purported to details links between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to multiple people with knowledge of the trip.

After less than a year as a Republican staff member on the House Intelligence Committee, Mr. Patel has found himself in the middle of another controversy. According to congressional sources, he is the primary author of the politically charged memo, released on Friday by the committee chairman, Representative Devin Nunes, over the opposition of the F.B.I. and the intelligence community, that accuses federal officials of bias against President Trump.

Democrats, led by Representative Adam B. Schiff, the ranking minority member on the committee, were scathing in their criticism of both the report and the decision to release it to the public.

“The President’s decision to publicly release a misleading memo attacking DOJ & FBI is a transparent attempt to discredit these institutions and undermine Mueller’s probe,” Mr. Schiff said on Twitter on Friday, referring to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election.

Damon Nelson, the committee’s staff director, said in an emailed statement that no single member was responsible for the memo and that its creation was a “team effort” that involved investigators who had access to source material.

“The clamor to identify ‘an author’ is indicative of an alarming trend by opponents of our investigation,” Mr. Nelson said, “which is to promote spurious allegations against committee embers and staff. They will not impact the committee’s focus and commitment to continue this investigation.”

But he praised Mr. Patel, saying, “We value Kash’s dedication and his contributions to the committee’s oversight efforts.”

Mr. Patel, who did not respond to a request for comment for this article, grew up in Garden City, N.Y., and graduated from the University of Richmond in 2002. He earned a certificate in international law from the University College London Faculty of Laws, according to his Facebook page, and graduated from Pace University’s law school in 2005.

ImageKashyap Patel in a photograph posted in 2014.

Kashyap Patel in a photograph posted in 2014.]

He spent part of his career in the Miami area as a federal public defender in Florida before surprising his co-workers there by taking a job at the Justice Department in 2014, according to his Facebook profile.

In early 2016, during a court appearance in Houston, Mr. Patel found himself in the cross hairs of Judge Lynn N. Hughes of Federal District Court, who became incensed that Mr. Patel had used the internet credentials of another lawyer to give notice that he would be involved in a terrorism case, and then did not like how he was dressed.

“The last thing I need here, Mr. Patel,” the judge said, according to a transcript of the hearing, “is a bureaucrat who flies down here at great expense and causes trouble rather than actually is a productive member of the team.”

After working on counterterrorism cases at the Justice Department, Mr. Patel joined the Intelligence Committee last spring as a senior staff member, and has been at the forefront of Mr. Nunes’s inquiry into whether the F.B.I. and the Justice Department abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Over the summer, Mr. Nunes dispatched Mr. Patel and another member of the committee’s Republican staff to London, where they showed up unannounced at the offices of Mr. Steele, a former British intelligence official.

Told Mr. Steele was not there, Mr. Patel and Douglas E. Presley, a professional staff member, managed to track him down at the offices of his lawyers. There, they said they were seeking only to establish contact with Mr. Steele, but were rebuffed and left without meeting him, according to two people with knowledge of the encounter.

A senior official for the Republican majority on the Intelligence Committee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the matter, said the purpose of the visit had been to make contact with Mr. Steele’s lawyers, not Mr. Steele. Still, the visit was highly unusual and appeared to violate protocol, because they were trying to meet with Mr. Steele outside official channels.

Ordinarily, such a visit would be coordinated through lawyers, conducted with knowledge of the House Democrats, who were not informed and the American Embassy.

In the months since, Mr. Patel has apparently forged connections at the White House. In November, he posted a series of photos to Facebook of him and several friends wearing matching shirts at the White House bowling alley. “The Dons hit the lanes at 1600 Pennsylvania,” Mr. Patel wrote under the photos.

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no lnx wapo

‘You don’t add a bit of value, do you?’: Texas judge berates government lawyers

Undated court photo of United States District Judge, Lynn N. Hughes (Courtesy of Judge Lynn N. Hughes)

By Adam Goldman February 11, 2016

The federal judge was irritated.

“Who is this Patel guy?” he asked prosecutors at a meeting in his chambers at the federal courthouse in Houston to discuss a terrorism case with them and a lawyer for the defendant.

:{:{}:

Ted Imperato, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Houston office, explained that Patel was, in fact, Kashyap Patel, a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s National Security Division in Washington, which oversees terrorism cases. And he noted that he had allowed Patel to use his account login so the Washingtonian could give notice that he would be involved.

“Don’t let those sons of bitches use your account,” said U.S. District Judge Lynn Nettleton Hughes.

“And put that in the record,” he added for the court reporter.

What followed last month — memorialized in a transcript that was unsealed at the request of The Washington Post — was a Texas-size bollocking over proper attire, wasting taxpayer money and spying for the bureaucrats in Washington.

Patel was summarily tossed from the judge’s chambers and Hughes — if anyone doubted his 10-gallon grumpiness — subsequently issued an “Order on Ineptitude” to berate the “pretentious lawyers” at “Main Justice.”

[Read: How a federal judge in Texas berated the Justice Department]

The episode has left those very lawyers in the Justice Department fuming at the rough handling of their colleague, according to a person who declined to speak publicly for fear of adding more fuel to the feud.

Patel declined to comment, as did a Justice Department spokesman who also wouldn’t say whether Patel is still involved with the prosecution.

The case that caused the judicial kerfuffle involves Omar Faraj Saeed al-Hardan, 24, a Palestinian born in Iraq, who was charged with attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State.

The prosecution got off to a bad start almost immediately. At a detention hearing last month, a Department of Homeland Security agent testified that Hardan had wanted to blow up a pair of Houston malls.

:{:{}:

Prosecutors subsequently had to correct that testimony and the FBI later issued an embarrassing news release saying that although Hardan had discussed future targets, “there was never any active or planned plot targeting a specific location in Houston or elsewhere.”

The detention hearing also didn’t pass without Hughes counting what he considered 11 nonessential government employees in his courtroom, according to an account of the proceeding.

[Read transcript: How a federal judge in Texas berated a federal prosecutor]

Hughes, 74, is something of a maverick, known for courtroom outbursts and comments about race that have led some plaintiffs to call on him to recuse himself. At a pretrial conference in a discrimination case involving an Indian American, for instance, he discussed “Adolf Hitler’s use of swastikas, the origin of Caucasians and the futility of diversity programs at universities,” according to a report in the Texas Observer.

The plaintiff, Jitendra Shah, asked an appeals court to remove Hughes for bias. In his defense, Hughes wrote that “the court’s asserted hostility to Indians would surprise its immigrant or first-generation Indian doctors, friends, law clerk, and interns.”

The appeals court dismissed Shah’s petition.

“He has a contrarian streak,” said Brian Owsley, a former magistrate judge in the Southern District of Texas.

In another recent terrorism case in Houston, prosecutors asked Hughes to overturn a magistrate’s decision to place under house arrest a terrorism suspect who had headed to Syria to fight but returned to the United States.

“A man devoted to become a martyr would not turn around,” said Hughes, who upheld the magistrate’s decision.

Other remarks at the hearing also raised eyebrows. After a prosecutor mentioned the killings of two American journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, Hughes responded, “The Americans went into territory [the Islamic State] controlled. No. An American who voluntarily subjects himself to the authority of beheading theological fanatical murderers, that is not against America any more than somebody who robs you in Paris.”

Patel arrived in Houston on Jan. 28 after flying from Tajikstan via London. As soon as he entered the judge’s chambers, Hughes pounced.

“What is your role in this?” he asked.

“I’m a member of the trial team from the counterterrorism section,” Patel responded.

“You’re not a member of the trial team,” the judge said. “It’s been going on for a month or so and you haven’t been here, have you?”

Hughes was just getting warmed up.

“And where is your tie? Where is your suit?” he asked.

“My apologies, sir,” Patel replied. “I had to change my flight overnight. I was overseas for work, and I just flew in an hour ago, and I didn’t have all my .?.?.”

“What did you wear on the plane?” the judge pressed.

“I wore this, sir” he explained. “This is all I had.”

“Why didn’t you wear a suit?”

“I didn’t have one with me overseas. I just flew in from Central Asia, sir, about an hour ago.”

Hughes then told Patel to go get his passport so he could examine it. He apparently wanted to see the stamps that would verify that Patel had been in Tajikistan.

“If you want to be a lawyer, dress like a lawyer,” the judge said.

“I will, sir,” Patel said.

“Act like a lawyer.”

Hughes wasn’t finished. He wanted to know how Patel would contribute to the case “other than being a spy for a bunch of other people.”

He also noted that plenty of government lawyers were in the nearby offices of the U.S. attorney.

“So, what is the utility to me and to the people of America to have you fly down here at their expense, eat at their expense and stay at their expense when there are plenty of capable people over there, in this room plus over there?” Hughes said “You’re just one more nonessential employee from Washington. .?.?. You don’t add a bit of value, do you?”

And with that, he told Patel, “You may be excused.”

When word of the hearing reached Patel’s bosses in Washington, they apparently tried to get a transcript of the session, but with some difficulty. Their efforts provoked another rebuke from Hughes, who issued his “Order on Ineptitude” — now being passed around legal circles like a deliciously illicit piece of literature.

Hughes thundered, “If the pretentious lawyers from ‘main’ Justice knew what they were doing — or had the humility to ask for help from the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Texas — it would not have taken three days, seven telephone calls, three voicemail messages, and one snippy electronic message for them to indirectly ask the court for assistance in ordering a transcript.”

Indeed, it wasn’t hard to get one. With the help of no lawyers, this reporter called the judge’s secretary and asked that the transcript be unsealed. The next day, the judge issued an order to do so, but with some redactions, and a copy was promptly provided to The Post.

Ellen Nakashima and Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/devin-nunes-staffer-gave-ukraine-related-information-to-trump-while-holding-a-senior-counterterrorism-role-at-nsc-report/

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How a Devin Nunes aide was deeply involved in the push for Trump to exploit Ukraine: report

Written by Alex Henderson October 23, 2019

With President Donald Trump now facing an impeachment inquiry in the U.S. House of Representatives because of the Ukraine scandal, Rep. Devin Nunes of California continues to be an aggressive defender of the president — insisting that Trump did nothing wrong during his now-famous July 25 phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And according to a report by journalist Natasha Bertrand for Politico, one of Nunes’ top staffers did a lot to promote Trump’s belief that “Ukraine was brimming with corruption and interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Democrats.”

The staffer is Kashyap Patel, who joined the National Security Council’s International Organizations and Alliances directorate in February. Bertrand reports that according to recent testimony by Fiona Hill (formerly a senior director of European and Russian affairs under Trump), Patel was so involved in Ukraine-related activities earlier this year that Trump thought he was in charge of Ukraine policy for the NSC. An anonymous source described by Bertrand as someone with “direct knowledge of (Hill’s) recent deposition” described her Patel-related testimony to Politico.

Previously, Bertrand reports, Democrats on Capitol Hill were aware of Patel because of his efforts to discredit former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. And because of Patel’s efforts to influence Trump on Ukraine, according to Bertrand, House Democrats involved in the impeachment inquiry now have “yet another name to add to their witness list.”

Patel, according to Bertrand, was “promoted to a senior counterterrorism role” on the NEC’s International Organizations and Alliances board around the time of Trump’s July 25 conversation with Zelensky. Bertrand also reports that Patel’s name has come up “in connection with the shadow foreign policy campaign Trump allegedly directed in an effort to extract political favors from” Zelensky.

Counterterrorism expert Joshua Geltzer told Politico that the type of work in Ukraine that Hill described Patel as doing “seems wildly outside the scope of anything a counterterrorism senior director at NSC should be spending their time on. What’s more, it politicizes a piece of the NSC staff that administrations of both parties have worked for decades to keep as apolitical as possible.”

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https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/23/nunes-protege-ukraine-trump-055837

BERTRAND

10/23/2019 02:05 PM EDT

A protégé of Republican Rep. Devin Nunes was among those passing negative information about Ukraine to President Donald Trump earlier this year, fueling the president’s belief that Ukraine was brimming with corruption and interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Democrats.

Kashyap Patel, a longtime Nunes staffer who joined the White House in February, was so involved in the issue that at one point Trump thought he was in charge of Ukraine policy for the National Security Council,according to congressional testimony by Fiona Hill, the former senior director for European and Russian Affairs whose portfolio included Ukraine.

Story Continued Below

Hill’s testimony was described to POLITICO by a person with direct knowledge of her recent deposition, and who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the closed-door hearing. Hill declined to comment.

Story Continued Below

Several White House officials raised alarms internally about Trump undermining the U.S.’ official policy of support for Ukraine in exchange for political favors, with former national security adviser John Bolton instructing Hill to inform White House lawyers about backchannel efforts he compared to a “drug deal.”

The official who replaced Hill in early September, Tim Morrison, formally held the Ukraine portfolio at the NSC. Testimony before House lawmakers has depicted Morrison, a Bolton acolyte, as similarly unnerved by Trump’s desire to withhold all assistance from Ukraine. Morrison also kept the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, William Taylor, abreast of developments inside the White House.

But Patel’s involvement demonstrates that the president had at least some support for the scheme from within the NSC, and has given House impeachment investigators yet another name to add to their witness list—a name they are already familiar with, given Patel’s previous work in Congress to discredit the Russia investigation.

Patel joined the National Security Council’s International Organizations and Alliances directorate in February and was promoted to a senior counterterrorism role around the same time as Trump’s fateful call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which he urged the newly elected leader to investigate Biden and “get to the bottom of” Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.

The type of Ukraine work Patel was doing that Hill described would not be within his purview as a senior counterterrorism adviser, said Joshua Geltzer, who held Patel’s position early on in the Trump administration.

Story Continued Below

“If true, this sort of activity seems wildly outside the scope of anything a counterterrorism senior director at NSC should be spending their time on,” Geltzer said. “What’s more, it politicizes a piece of the NSC staff that administrations of both parties have worked for decades to keep as apolitical as possible.”

Patel’s name has been brought up in several recent depositions, according to another person with direct knowledge of the interviews, in connection with the shadow foreign policy campaign Trump allegedly directed in an effort to extract political favors from the newly elected Zelensky.

On Tuesday, Taylor — who remains the acting ambassador in Kiev — gave lawmakers one of the most detailed timelines to date of how Trump and his allies sought to leverage American military and diplomatic might to coerce Zelensky into a coordinated campaign to damage Joe Biden, Trump’s chief political rival. Taylor testified that he was told that Trump wanted to withhold security assistance to Ukraine unless Zelensky agreed to announce an investigation into Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company on whose board Biden’s son Hunter served.

Democrats have been especially interested in Patel’s role in the Ukraine scandal given his intensive work as Nunes’ top staffer on the House Intelligence Committee to discredit the FBI and DOJ officials investigating Russia’s election interference.

As the chairman of that committee, Nunes stepped aside from the panel’s Russia investigation in April 2017 and launched a separate inquiry into the origins of the FBI’s counterintelligence probe, which had zeroed in on four Trump campaign aides’ interactions with Russians during the election.

The findings of that parallel investigation were outlined in a 3.5-page memo that Patel, who also served as the panel’s senior counsel, helped write, despite warnings by the Justice Department that its release would be “extraordinarily reckless” because it included classified information and could harm ongoing investigations.

The memo alleges that the FBI used intelligence passed to them by the former British spy Christopher Steele to bolster the bureau’s application for a surveillance warrant targeting an early Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. It accused the FBI of omitting “the role of the” Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign in paying Steele for his research on the Trump campaign, and led Trump to accuse DOJ and FBI leaders of politicizing “the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans.”

Story Continued BelowDemocrats, meanwhile, accused Nunes and the Republicans of politicizing law enforcement and the Russia investigation in an effort to shield the president.

Prior to that, Patel circulated an internal memo urging Nunes to hold top DOJ and FBI officials in contempt for failing to turn over documents related to the warrant process undertaken during the transition period.

He also traveled to London in 2017—without the knowledge of the U.S. embassy, the British government, or Adam Schiff, then the committee’s ranking member—in search of Steele, whose lawyer denied Patel access to his client.

Patel’s ascension to the NSC staff earlier this year—and particularly his promotion to a senior counterterrorism role that was created for him within the directorate, according to a former official familiar with the matter—raised eyebrows among some in the NSC who didn’t believe he was experienced enough for the role, despite a two-year stint from 2014-2016 as a counterterrorism prosecutor at the Justice Department.

His “unique access” to the West Wing, and the ease with which he has been able to interact directly with the president without NSC leadership’s involvement, has also struck some as unusual,the former official said.

Nahal Toosi contributed reporting.

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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/nov/18/white-house-analyst-kashyap-patel-files-lawsuit-ag/

by Rowan Scarborough - The Washington Times - Monday, November 18, 2019

:{:{}:

A White House analyst filed a defamation lawsuit Monday against Politico and a reporter for two stories the complaint says falsely accused the analyst of hijacking Ukraine policy-making and intervening with President Trump.

Kashyap “Kash” Patel, a former investigator for Rep. Devin Nunes and now a National Security Council staffer, also says in his suit that Rep. Adam B. Schiff orchestrated press leaks against him.

The lawsuit seeks $25 million in damages and names Politico owner Robert L. Allbritton and reporter Natasha Bertrand.

Brad Dayspring, Politico’s vice president of communications and marketing, issued a statement to The Washington Times: “This lawsuit is high on bombast and low on merit. It is unserious and is a public relations tactic designed to intimidate journalists and media organizations from doing their job.”

The Democrats’ push to impeach Mr. Trump is centered on Ukraine foreign policy.

Linking Mr. Patel to Ukraine ensnares a former close aide to Mr. Nunes, California Republican and the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Mr. Patel helped write the House Intelligence Committee’s 2018 report that exonerated Mr. Trump in the Russia election investigation.

The two Politico stories stemmed from closed-door depositions by two NSC staffers — Fiona Hill, a former senior adviser and European and Russian affairs specialist, and Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, director of European affairs.

The articles, based on leaks and released transcripts, said Mr. Patel went outside his NSC lane and funneled Ukraine material to Mr. Trump. Upon the transcripts’ public release, Mr. Patel said such contact never happened.

Mr. Schiff of California, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is leading the Democrats’ impeachment drive.

Democrats sayMr. Trump committed bribery by holding up military aid to Ukraine until Kyiv opened investigations into the 2016 campaign and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden and his son Hunter Biden.

Republicans reject that charge, saying a phone call transcript of Mr. Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shows no quid pro quo. They say the aid was held up from early July to early September for unrelated reasons....

Search Results

Web resultTestimony: Nunes acolyte misrepresented himself to Trump as ...

https://www.politico.com › news › 2019/10/30 › nunes-acolyte-misreprese...

Oct 30, 2019 - Kash Patel (right) with White House Social Media Director Dan Scavino. ... believed at the time that Kashyap Patel, a longtime Nunes staffer who joined the ... expertise, was actually the NSC's top Ukraine expert instead of Vindman. ... the time, NSC senior director for European and Russian affairs Fiona Hill.

Missing: mueller ‎| ‎Must include: ‎mueller

New testimony links Rep. Devin Nunes to Trump's Ukraine ...

https://washingtonpress.com › 2019/10/30 › new-testimony-links-rep-devi...

Oct 30, 2019 - Devin Nunes to Trump's Ukraine scandal through Mueller memo author ... However, NSC staff diverted the Colonel from meeting with Trump, and the ... Former House Intelligence Committee Counsel Kashyap Patel, who served ... Advisor (NSA) John Bolton, as well as former NSC Russia expert Fiona Hill, ...

White House analyst Kashyap Patel files lawsuit against ...

https://www.washingtontimes.com › news › nov › white-house-analyst-kas...

6 days ago - Linking Mr. Patel to Ukraine ensnares a former close aide to Mr. Nunes, California Republican and the ranking member of the House ...

Actual NSC Ukraine expert shut out of meetings to make room ...

https://www.dailykos.com › story › 2019/10/30 ›

Actual NSC Ukraine expert shut out of meetings to make room for Devin Nunes' fake expert. Oct 30, 2019 9:58am Pacific Daylight Time by Mark Sumner, Daily Kos Staff ... was that Nunes staffer Kashyap Patel had already “misrepresented” himself to Trump as ... documents to help Nunes undermine the Russia investigation.

Missing: mueller ‎| ‎Must include: ‎mueller

How a Devin Nunes aide was deeply involved in the push for ...

https://www.alternet.org › News & Politics

Oct 23, 2019 - The staffer is Kashyap Patel, who joined the National Security Council's ... this year that Trump thought he was in charge of Ukraine policy for the NSC. ... to discredit former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. ... Counterterrorism expert Joshua Geltzer told Politico that the type of work in ...

New testimony links Rep. Devin Nunes to Trump's Ukraine scandal ...

https://www.democraticunderground.com › ...

Oct 31, 2019 - 18 posts - ‎17 authors

However, NSC staff diverted the Colonel from meeting with Trump, and ... Former House Intelligence Committee Counsel Kashyap Patel, who served as an aide to Rep. Nunes (R-CA) and has no experience or expertise in Ukrainian affairs, .... documents to help Nunes undermine the Russia investigation.

Devin Nunes Billed Taxpayers $63,000 for a Jaunt to Europe ...

https://www.emptywheel.net › 2019/11/21 › devin-nunes-bills-taxpayers-6...

3 days ago - Devin Nunes in 2018, Parnas' lawyer Ed MacMahon told The Daily ... from NSC; the role of Parnas' lawyer, Ed MacMahon (who seems to ... While I'm sure Swan has a reason to invoke Nunes' efforts to undercut Mueller, the trip actually ... a respected Russian expert, Christopher Steele, shared information ...

Day 1014 | What The Fuck Just Happened Today?

https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com › 2019/10/30 › day-1014

Oct 30, 2019 - READ: Ukraine Specialist Catherine Croft's written testimony. ... Security Council's top Ukraine expert testified that a Devin Nunes associate ... Alexander Vindman told lawmakers that Kashyap Patel circumvented NSC process to provide ... 5/ Trump's pick for ambassador to Russia told the Senate Foreign ...

Trump–Ukraine scandal - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Trump–Ukraine_scandal

The Trump–Ukraine scandal is an ongoing political scandal in the United States. It revolves ... White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said one reason why Trump ... that Ukrainians framed Russia for hacking into the DNC computer system. ..... Kashyap Patel was a national security aide for the House Intelligence ...

Trump impeachment: Indian-American official named as ...

https://www.outlookindia.com › newsscroll › trump-impeachment-indiana...

3 days ago - Patel, who is the senior director of counter terrorism in the NSC, is a political appointee ... that Patel had misrepresented his expertise on Ukraine to the president. ... As an aide to Trump''s vociferous supporter Nunes, Patel raised ... Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who ultimately did not find such collusion.

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