Confirm Patel, Capsize the FBI
Deroy Murdock /
Kash Patel, President reelect Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI chief, heads into Senate confirmation hearings next week. His critics will warn ominously that Patel would turn the FBI upside down.
As well he should.
The FBI’s decent, diligent field agents might be the people most betrayed by their bosses in Washington, D.C. The bureau’s leftist command clique has abused its infinite police powers to oppress Trump and his advisers, supporters, and those who jeopardize liberal priorities.
For nine years, top FBI officials have perpetrated the inappropriate, the illegal, and the unconstitutional:
- The FBI spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign, starting with advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.
- The FBI lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to secure a wiretap warrant against Page. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith doctored an email from another FBI official that identified Page as a CIA informant. He faked that record to state that Page was not an intelligence source. His fraud heaped unwarranted suspicion on Page’s travels to Russia. That bamboozled the FISC judges into approving the FBI’s espionage against Page and, thus, Trump’s 2016 campaign.
- In a stinging letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote that “the Steele Dossier was pushed by the FBI to be included in the Intelligence Community Assessment about Russian meddling in the 2016 election, despite concerns over its lack of verification.” Grassley’s Dec. 9 missive continued: “This is some of the most egregious, Orwellian conduct I’ve witnessed in my nearly 50 years in the Congress.”
These illegal outrages—which launched the three-year Russia hoax—were Watergate without the break-in.
- Former FBI chief James Comey pampered Hillary Rodham Clinton, despite her wholesale Espionage Act violations in the server-gate scandal. Comey recommended no prosecution of the former secretary of state despite her illegal possession of 2,113 classified documents on her do-it-yourself home computer server and other devices. She also feloniously destroyed evidence under U.S. House subpoena—not least her mobile devices, which Clinton aide Justin Cooper reportedly demolished with a hammer.
Comey wrote the first draft of his speech exonerating Clinton on May 2, 2016, two months before the FBI questioned her that July 2—but not under oath. Comey did not participate in that interrogation, although Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson attended as “Hillary’s attorneys.” Never mind that these two witnessed her crimes. Comey also invited Mills and Samuelson to surrender their laptops and promised that the FBI would inspect and then destroy them.
- The FBI swindled Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, into an in-office interrogation. Andrew McCabe discouraged Flynn from having his attorneys present while FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka questioned him at the White House on Jan. 24, 2017. That violated at least the spirit of Flynn’s Miranda rights, accelerated his early ouster from his post, and eased his prosecution related to his discussions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition. Flynn had every right to have such conversations.
- The FBI’s April 9, 2018, raid on the office and residence of Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, and the April 28, 2021, breach of Trump counsel Rudolph “Rudy” Giuliani’s office completely violated the once-sacred principle of attorney-client privilege. The FBI’s Jan. 25, 2019, raid on Trump strategist Roger Stone’s Fort Lauderdale, Fla., home was an unnecessary, two-dozen-man SWAT-style operation against a nonviolent first-time suspect, then age 67. Stone said the assault included “17 vehicles with their lights going” and “two amphibious units with frogmen” in a neighboring canal. This needless stunt seemed custom-tailored for the CNN crew that just happened to be there at 6 a.m.
- Grassley accused the FBI of a “mule-headed war against transparency,” including “silence in response to my requests that you protect whistleblowers.”
The Iowa senator added: “As just one example, on November 30, 2018, I wrote you about the reported raid of a former FBI whistleblower’s home relating to Uranium One.” In that scandal, Clinton, then secretary of state, stood by as Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation, Rosatom, bought Canada’s Uranium One and its assets, including 20% of America’s uranium supply. Surely by total coincidence, as “Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer discovered, “shareholders involved in this transaction had transferred approximately $145 million to the Clinton Foundation or its initiatives.”
- The FBI fooled Big Tech companies into spiking The New York Post’s expose on Hunter Biden’s “Laptop from Hell” in October 2020. Mission accomplished: That cover-up scuttled Trump’s reelection. In this censorship-industrial complex, a team of 80 FBI agents twisted the arms of social-media executives to suppress stories and deplatform Americans who rejected Biden administration policy.
- The FBI spied on Latin Mass Catholics as a supposed public-safety threat.
- The Justice Department designated parents’ rights activists as domestic terrorists. The FBI then surveilled moms and dads for complaining to local school boards about mask mandates, critical race theory, and gendermania.
- “Under the leadership of Christopher Wray, the FBI illegally raided my home, without cause, worked diligently on illegally impeaching and indicting me, and has done everything else to interfere with the success and future of America,” Trump said via Truth Social on Dec. 11.
According to Grassley’s letter to Wray, during the FBI’s “unprecedented raid” on August 8, 2022,” roughly 30 armed agents entered the home of a former president of the United States, with full authorization to use lethal force if needed to execute its warrant, and even searched the former first lady’s clothing drawers.”
“No such raid took place at Hillary Clinton’s premises, even though she and her staff mishandled highly classified information while using a nongovernment server after repeated warnings from State Department security personnel it was a security risk, and despite the fact her associates destroyed potentially incriminating evidence,” Grassley noted. “No such raid occurred on the home of President Biden, even though his records were consciously divided up, some stored at his home in a garage next to his Corvette … . A double standard in a nation that rightly boasts that ’justice is blind’ is no standard at all.”
If confirmed, Patel should release all documents related to Trump’s authorization of up to 20,000 National Guardsmen to maintain order on Jan. 6, 2021. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, both Democrats, rejected Trump’s offer. “To be clear, the District of Columbia is not requesting other federal law enforcement personnel and discourages any additional deployment,” Bowser wrote in a Jan. 5, 2021, stand-down letter to Pentagon officials.
Rather than Trump-enforced domestic tranquillity, a political meltdown erupted, and these top Democrats denied Trump the control rods to prevent or quickly cool it.
Even worse, Democrats then spun around and blamed Trump for ordering the very attack on the U.S. Capitol that he tried to forestall.
Releasing the records that vindicate Trump—and confirm the approval of these National Guardsman, which Patel observed in the Oval Office—would go a long way to correct the bald-faced lies and “January 6!” chants that Democrats have screamed for four years.
The incoming Republican Senate should confirm Patel swiftly, so he can flip the FBI 180 degrees from its current police-state status and dislodge the crooks and thugs who infest its top echelons.
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