Kash Patel's "Government Gangsters" was tied up for publication in massive amounts of red tape with the Department of Defense. Patel was Pentagon Chief of Staff under the Trump administration. The book has now been released with Post Hill Press.
After spying on the Trump campaign and on a sitting president, it seemed like the FBI had no more lines it could cross. Then, in August 2022, the FBI did something it had never done before. They raided the home of a former president of the United States and a man who could well run for the presidency again. I know better than anyone just how deeply the FBI has been politicized and corrupted. But even so, the Mar-a-Lago raid shocked me.
The raid was approved by none other than Attorney General Merrick Garland himself. The White House publicly denied having any involvement, but that’s not how these things work in Washington—and it’s certainly not possible in this case. There is absolutely no way that the White House Counsel wasn’t fully engaged beforehand with the FBI and DoJ about raiding the home of the president’s former and potentially future opponent. In fact, not only did they know, but subsequent reporting on uncovered documents showed that the Biden White House authorized the recission of executive privilege so that presidential documents protected by this longstanding privilege could be grabbed by the FBI. In fact, the White House Counsel’s office was proactively emailing the National Archives and Records Administration, along with other government officials, who were engaging with the FBI and DoJ to prepare for the raid.
The Mar-a-Lago raid makes Watergate look like the teacup ride at Disney World. Instead of the sitting president having political cronies break into the offices of his opponent, his administration had the tax-payer-funded FBI violate longstanding precedent, which protected the constitutional privileges of the executive branch, by busting into the personal residence of his predecessor and political opponent.
Amazingly, the FBI and the DoJ at first made no attempt to explain themselves. Days after the raid, Attorney General Merrick Garland finally held a press conference, arriving an hour late while looking like he was in a hostage video. In his remarks, he didn’t acknowledge that vast swaths of the American people—Republicans, Independents, and even many Democrats—felt like the FBI had crossed the Rubicon. Instead, he attacked people who criticized the FBI and the DoJ. It’s as if he had no ability to understand why anybody would doubt the motives of federal law enforcement, despite everything he, his predecessors, and other senior leaders in the bureaucracy had done over recent years to completely undermine public trust in our institutions.
Attorney General Garland’s message was clear: They weren’t wrong for committing an egregious and unprecedented mafia-style mob invasion against their political opponent. We were in the wrong for questioning them. It was just like how they attacked us during Russia Gate. Ultimately, it was a threat. He was attempting to disqualify President Trump from ever running again while sending a message to the American people that if they can do this to a former president, they can do it to anybody, so you’d better shut up and get in line.
The alleged rationale for the Mar-a-Lago raid was that President Trump had boxes of documents that were “marked classified.” Only later did the corrupt authorities and media shills start to say that Trump had “extremely sensitive” intelligence. If that’s the case, why did they wait nearly two years to get the documents? Additionally, the judge signed the search warrant on a Friday, but the FBI took a holiday over the weekend until Monday to execute. How could they possibly wait those extra days if the materials were “extremely sensitive?” This is not how an apolitical investigation works. All of this was another excuse to implement a two- tiered system of justice.
The truth is that Trump was the most transparent president in his- tory. Toward the end of his term he declassified whole sets of documents, including every single document relating to Russia Gate and to the Hillary Clinton email scandal. In fact, as president, he had the unilateral authority to declassify absolutely anything he wanted. When a president
says something is declassified, it is declassified. That’s it. The Supreme Court even ruled that the president has this authority in the 1988 case Navy v. Egan. That is why I believe the FBI should come up with double zeros on this raid.
In fact, the legal precedent and federal case law is overwhelming that the president has the power to declassify and/or keep records at will. When former president Bill Clinton was caught hiding recordings from his presidency in his sock drawer, a watchdog group filed a lawsuit to force the National Archives to retrieve the recordings. In that case, a US district judge ruled that the archives had no authority to seize such records and that “the decision to segregate personal materials from Presidential records is made by the President, during the President’s term and in his sole discretion.” The judge went on saying that attempting to seize records directly from a former president is “unfounded, contrary to the [Presidential Records Act’s] express terms, and contrary to traditional principles of administrative law.” 26 Clinton still has his recordings to this day, for all we know sitting in the same sock drawer. Why hasn’t the DoJ applied this legal standard to Trump? It is a two-tiered system of justice.
Further, Trump isn’t even hiding the documents he held at Mar-a-Lago. Before the raid, Trump let the Department of Justice in to see the records. In June 2022—two months before the raid—government agents came in to look at the boxes and asked that the president put an extra lock on the room where they were kept. President Trump personally met those agents at Mar-a-Lago, showed them the documents, and complied with their request to add another lock. Ironically, that was the very same lock the FBI went on to break during their raid.
Few details provide more proof that this was a politically motivated raid than the fact that the Justice Department had to go judge shopping in order to find an extremely partisan magistrate who would approve the search warrant. Jurisdiction, as is justice, in all cases is supposed to be blind. The magistrate judges who have the authority to approve such warrants work in rotation. Yet the Department of Justice waited until one particular judge was reviewing cases in order to request their warrant—a judge by the name of Bruce E. Reinhart, whose last day on rotation was the very Friday the FBI phoned it in. I mean that literally. The FBI couldn’t even be bothered to show up to court. Instead, in an egregious violation of protocol, they used Zuckerberg’s WhatsApp to phone in their warrant request, possibly transmitting classified and confidential information using the platform.
The FBI selected Reinhart on purpose. Judge Reinhart is an Obama donor. Before he was a judge, he represented infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s pilots and his scheduler. And just weeks before approving the search warrant, the judge had to recuse himself in Trump’s lawsuit against Hillary Clinton for spreading the Russia collusion hoax.27 It is a violation of impartiality that this judge wouldn’t recuse himself when it came to the search warrant. He is a partisan, and the DoJ knew that before they asked him to approve the raid.
Purposefully choosing a biased magistrate wasn’t the only partisan action the FBI took. Mar-a-Lago is in Florida. If the FBI had legitimate concerns, they would have used FBI agents from the local jurisdiction to conduct their operations. Yet FBI bigwigs didn’t choose a local FBI raid party. Instead, they chose a corrupt and politicized Washington-based team, just like they have in every major FBI scandal in recent memory. How corrupt? It’s the same crew of DoJ officials and FBI agents that ran Russia Gate, the same officials conducting the faux investigation of Hunter Biden, the same officials involved in the January 6th inquiry, the same officials mixed up in the FBI-driven plan to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, and the same officials who work in the very division under investigation by Special Counsel John Durham for political bias, corruption, and abuses of power.
To name just a couple connections specifically, Brian Auten, the FBI agent who reportedly ran cover for the Bidens by falsely labeling the Hunter Biden laptop as disinformation and who hid exculpatory evidence from the FISA Court on the Trump spying operation, is a supervisor in the division that handled the Mar-a-Lago raid. Timothy Thibault, who worked with Auten at the FBI on the Hunter Biden disinformation campaign, was also central in the Washington field office. Thibault traveled with none other than Bruce and Nellie Ohr—the DoJ director and Fusion GPS employee who were central nodes of the Russia Gate conspiracy—to the Czech Republic in 2016 as part of their anti-Trump campaign. FBI Director Wray knew his presence on the Mar-a-Lago raid team would be so embarrassing that he reassigned Thibault only days before the raid so that the rabid partisan wouldn’t be on the team during the operation itself—only during the preparation.28 When Thibault’s presence and history was made known, he was forced to resign in embarrassment and was walked out of the FBI building. All said and done, the agents who planned and conducted the Mar-a-Lago raid are literally the FBI’s political government gangsters armed with guns and badges.
Ultimately, the same DoJ and FBI officials who committed Russia Gate used judge shopping and highly politicized agents and lawyers in order to implement a two-tiered system of justice. But it’s not just the dishonesty of these corrupt bureaucrats that matters. It’s also who they fail to investigate. The Mar-a-Lago raid was spurred after the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the agency that keeps presidential records, referred their concerns about Trump’s handling of allegedly classified documents to the Department of Justice.
The same then head of the NARA when the decision was made to refer Trump to the DoJ, a Hillary supporter, never referred Hillary Clinton to the DoJ for her verifiably proven mishandling of classified documents. In fact, when it came to Hillary Clinton intentionally moving classified information (in explicit violation of federal statute, I would add), James Comey essentially changed the law by saying they wouldn’t prosecute her. In fact, the FBI let Clinton’s lawyer keep a thumb drive with the classified material in his office and approved of the safe the lawyers used to store the information.29 Despite that precedent, the FBI raided Trump’s home, presumably with plans to gain evidence to prosecute him. Adding insult to injury, after James Comey illegitimately exonerated Clinton for her unlawful handling of classified information, he publicly admitted to leaking classified documents to the press. So where are the raids on Clinton’s home? Where’s the prosecution of Comey? I hate to be a broken record, but it bears repeating: it’s all a two-tiered system of justice.
At the root, the Mar-a-Lago raid wasn’t solely about classified documents. It was another show. Undoubtedly knowing that the public would be aghast at what they did, the FBI ran a January 6th committee-style disinformation campaign, mobilizing Hollywood, allies in Congress like Adam Schiff, and the media to gin up ridiculous fears about Trump, like he was secretly hiding the nuclear codes. In the end, the political establishment wanted the image of doors being knocked down, guns blazing, and leaked photo splashes from the DoJ with “top secret” cover sheets strewn across the floor so that the American public would think to themselves, “Wow, Trump must have really done something terrible to be raided by the FBI.”
Their big show was just another attempt to craft a political narrative to discredit Trump and prevent him and the America First movement he represents from having power ever again. In that, the raid was just like every other attack the Deep State has conducted on Trump. The FBI spied on the Trump campaign not because it was colluding with Russia, but because opening an FBI investigation would tarnish Trump’s reputation. The investigation was meant to sow doubt in people’s minds: if the FBI thought President Trump needed to be spied on, maybe he really was that bad. The same thing happened with the two impeachments of Trump. Democrats knew that Trump didn’t do anything worthy of impeachment. They knew they didn’t have the votes to actually convict him and that it was all a huge disinformation campaign, just like Hunter’s laptop. They did it all so that they can say that Trump has been impeached twice, so it would be illegitimate to ever vote for him again.
While the political hit job was one of the goals of the raid, there was a more sinister purpose as well. When President Trump declassified all documents related to Russia Gate and Hillary’s email scandal, the FBI collectively shit itself. Only about 60 percent of the documents that Devin and I discovered have been released to the public, and the ones that haven’t are even worse than people could imagine. I know, because I’ve read them all. Yet after Trump left office, the federal bureaucracy kept throwing up roadblocks to stop the release of these documents, claiming incorrectly that the executive is bound by ever-changing rules and regulations invented by the executive bureaucracy. This is an example of Deep State insubordination at its finest—in their minds, everyone, even the president, is supposed to be subservient to unelected bureaucrats. They violated the very chain of command they swore to uphold to prevent accountability from happening.
I believe that, fearing that their roadblocks might fail, the FBI conducted the Mar-a-Lago raid in part to get those Russia Gate documents and other materials back under lock and key. By raiding Mar-a-Lago, the FBI can now use one of their old plays and claim that everything taken is now part of an active investigation, including the Russia Gate docs. That means they will refuse to release to the public what the president explicitly ordered to be released when he was in office. Just like the Mueller Special Counsel, the Mar-a-Lago raid is another way the DoJ and FBI are trying desperately to cover their corrupt actions.
If you need any more proof of this, look at what happened after the raid. The DoJ released the affidavit the FBI used to get the search warrant. That affidavit was so heavily redacted that only two names appeared in it: Donald Trump and the lead investigator for Russia Gate—me. It’s effectively impossible to read the affidavit they released because they redacted so much information. Yet they made sure not to redact my name so that I would be smeared in public. Worse, as a result of their selective, politicized release, I yet again received death threats. The people who executed the Russia Gate scandal were taking their revenge on one of the main people who exposed their lies in an attempt to scare me and anyone else who would dare to contradict them. But it won’t work. The truth will get out. We won’t stop fighting. The House has a lot of work to do now that the gavels have flipped.
