LIBBY EMMONS: Kash Patel is the storm the FBI deserves

If Patel had done nothing but show the courage to reveal the framing of a president by his own intelligence agents – perhaps the greatest crime against democracy in American history – that would be enough.

If Patel had done nothing but show the courage to reveal the framing of a president by his own intelligence agents – perhaps the greatest crime against democracy in American history – that would be enough.

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Kash Patel is facing a confirmation hearing in the Senate on Thursday. It is vital that he pass it; not for his own sake, nor only for the sake of the nation, but for the sake of basic accountability. Patel’s critics call him an outsider. Good. They call him “unqualified,” by which they mean “not part of the club.” Good. They fear that he will weaponize the justice system against those who have abused it in the name of Leftism. Good. He is the storm the FBI deserves. Let me explain why.

In June 2021, a father went to a school board meeting in Loudoun County, VA. to demand accountability for the rape of his daughter in a high school girls' bathroom. The student guilty of the rape was a boy who wore girls' clothes and was allowed, due to gender policy, to use the girls' bathroom. During his statements, he was dragged out of the meeting by security. This incident was the basis for the National School Boards Association to reach out to Biden's Department of Justice and ask for investigations into parents who protest everything from gender neutral bathrooms, to erotic reading material, to school closures due to Covid lockdowns, to mask mandates. And the Biden administration complied. Garland reached out to the FBI and told them to use the same tools they use to investigate domestic terrorists to investigate parents. The FBI complied. As Ohio's Jim Jordan said, the Biden administration used "counterterrorism and criminal tools against parents exercising their First Amendment rights at school board meetings." Patel would never have let that happen.

February 2023 saw an FBI whistleblower reveal that an FBI Richmond field office had decided that Catholics who attended Latin mass were considered a threat. They were being classified as domestic extremists. Per the investigation from the House Judiciary Committee, again headed by Jordan, there was no basis for the bias they showed toward traditional Catholics. In fact, the assessment was begun based on one investigation of one guy. "The basis for the Richmond memorandum relied on a single investigation in the Richmond Field Office’s area of responsibility in which the subject 'self-described' as a 'radical-traditionalist Catholic' (RTC). However, FBI employees could not define the meaning of an RTC when preparing, editing, or reviewing the memorandum. Even so, this single investigation became the basis for an FBI-wide memorandum warning about the dangers of 'radical' Catholics," the House Judiciary noted. Even so, it was on this scant basis that the FBI interviewed a priest and choir director at a Richmond church during the investigation of a parishioner. The FBI Richmond office worked with other FBI offices in Milwaukee, Portland, and Los Angeles. They also based their determination on radical left sources such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, and left-leaning publications Salon and The Atlantic. It's plain to anyone that these are not good reasons to conflate Catholicism with extremism. Patel would never have let this happen.

After Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk in 2022, Matt Taibbi gained access to what was called the Twitter files and published them on the platform. He revealed that the FBI was part of the advance cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which used evidence gained from the younger Biden's abandoned laptop to show that the family, including then-Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, was involved in shady foreign business deals and influence peddling of the family name. In fact, the laptop, which was left behind by Biden at a Delaware repair shop, had been handed over to the FBI by the owner of that repair shop in 2019. The FBI sat on it and did nothing. But the owner had made a copy for himself and delivered it to Rudy Giuliani. The New York Post broke the details ahead of the presidential election that year and immediately, both Twitter and Facebook censored the story. The Biden campaign said it was Russian disinformation, and they said it with confidence, despite the fact that there was no indication that the material was false. Mainstream media outlets collectively ran articles about why they would not report on the story or the findings from the Post. It was over a year before any of them acknowledged that they were wrong. Twitter owner Jack Dorsey and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg were hauled before Congress. They had no choice but to apologize for their major, election-interfering screw up. But none of this had happened by chance.

Taibbi showed that there had been extensive communication between the FBI and the social media platforms. In fact, they'd even all gotten together for a little pow-wow in Aspen just a few months before the election. At that meeting, the FBI discussed with the reps from the social media platforms how to discern Russian disinfo from real information. As an example, in their hypothetical, they used a potential laptop purported to be from Hunter Biden. You can almost hear the FBI guys making their case. "Oh let's say, just as a for instance, you hear tell of some kind of Hunter Biden laptop floating around. Something like that would be Russian disinfo, so you should probably suppress it." They had primed the social media execs so well that when the real thing did show up—which the FBI knew was real all along because they had it in their possession the entire time—the execs felt very smart about saying that it was all a big sham. Patel would not use the authority of the FBI to suppress and censor free speech online simply to help his preferred presidential candidate. He would not violate the First Amendment just to aid an election.

On Biden's first day in office in 2021, he issued a requirement to all federal agencies to implement DEI in their hiring practices. The FBI, under Christopher Wray, then hired a Chief Diversity Officer. "From that time forward, we understand that the FBI has struggled with attracting enough qualified applicants from all desired target groups to sustain its mission. This is likely due to the FBI re-focusing its recruitment efforts on DEI statistics," the House Judiciary revealed in May 2024. This was not only a problem for Congress, but for retired FBI Special Agents and Analysts who wrote a report detailing the "alarming trends" in the FBI. It read: "The law enforcement and intelligence capabilities of the FBI are degrading because the FBI is no longer hiring 'the best and brightest' candidates to fill the position of Special Agent of the FBI. An increasing number of lower quality candidates—described by one source as 'bread crumbs' because they were rejected by other federal law enforcement agencies—are applying to become FBI Special Agents; and the FBI is selecting those candidates to become FBI Special Agents because they satisfy the FBI's priority to meet Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) mandates." That's a problem, and it's not one that the FBI would face under Patel's leadership. Instead, as he has previously attested, his hiring directives would be based on merit and ability, not race and sex, neither of which should ever be factors in selecting qualified candidates for any law enforcement position.

Contrast this with Kash Patel and the argument for him becomes irrefutable. It was Patel who broke the FISA abuse scandal in 2016, through the Nunes Memo, which revealed that both the Department of Justice under Barack Obama and the FBI had surveilled the Trump campaign. As Rep. Henry Clay said at the time, "The Inspector General’s report confirms that the Obama-era FBI abused the FISA process to target and spy on President Trump’s 2016 election campaign. We should all be alarmed at the abuse of authority and manipulation of probable cause to obtain FISA warrants and wrongfully target American citizens. This is a poor reflection on the standards of evidence expected from one of our nation’s most well-established law enforcement organizations. The IG report is an objective look at facts surrounding misuse of the FISA process. The ensuing criminal investigation will further address the motives and intent of bad actors within the Obama-era FBI. Those responsible should be held to account. The watchers should note that the American people are watching. We, the People, are paying attention and we will not tolerate purposeful, targeted violation of our 4th Amendment protections."

While Patel has been accomplished in his career, this may have been the pinnacle to date. He revealed, in painstaking detail, how Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in 2016 hired an opposition research firm to get dirt on Trump which then fabricated a dossier alleging that Trump had worked with the Russians to steal the presidential election that year. The FISA warrants obtained by the Obama administration to spy on the Trump campaign's Carter Page were based entirely on what was known as the Steele dossier. Christopher Steele was an FBI source who was fired for disclosing to the press that he was an FBI asset. Not only was FISA misused by the FBI, but an FBI asset was actively engaged in tampering with a US presidential election in an attempt to benefit the Democrat Party. 

If Patel had done nothing but show the courage to reveal the framing of a president by his own intelligence agents – perhaps the greatest crime against democracy in American history – that would be enough. And if he is confirmed, that will be only the beginning. The FBI serves at the pleasure of the Department of Justice, and justice is overdue. Kash Patel is the man to administer it. The Senate should confirm him as soon as possible.


Image: Title: Patel FBI
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