Trump’s Anti-Deep State FBI Pick Kash Patel Got Swept Up By… Trump’s Deep State

As a non-fan, non-supporter of Donald Trump, I don’t have much left after discovering a disturbing number of my fellow Americans prefer fascism to liberty. But I still have these things I will forever hold near and dear to my heart: schadenfreude and irony.

And, if you’re like me, you get both of these things here. Kash Patel — a man who managed to ascend the government ladder with alacrity thanks to his undying support of Donald Trump during his last presidential term — is currently Trump’s pick to head the FBI.

Not only is Patel a loyalist, he’s also one of those guys who thinks anything bad said about Trump by government officials must be the result of a pernicious “deep state” conspiracy. Here’s some recent reporting on Patel’s “deep state” hallucinations from the Washington Post.

Next week, Cassidy Hutchinson will turn 28. The New Jersey native graduated from Christopher Newport University in Virginia five years ago. She interned briefly on Capitol Hill before taking a job at the White House, earning a write-up in the college newspaper. She worked in the Trump administration for a little over two years.

This, according to Kash Patel, earns Hutchinson a spot as one of 60 “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State.” Should he be confirmed to run the FBI, as President-elect Donald Trump desires, Hutchinson and those 59 others could find that their stints as government employees, however brief, earned them federal criminal investigations. Not because they compromised the public trust, but because they ran afoul of Trump — or Patel.

Sixty people! All Deep Statists! Allegedly! Astoundingly, many of the people populating Patel’s “deep state” list worked for Trump during his first term but made the mistake of questioning moves made by Trump or (far more importantly) Patel during his meteoric rise through the government ranks thanks to his willingness to bend a knee, kiss the ring, lick the boot… whatever was needed to make Trump feel good and make Patel feel better about his future employment opportunities.

Not that this will change anything, as I’m sure both Patel and Trump will find some way to talk around this, but Patel was targeted by the “deep state” headed by Trump when Trump told the DOJ to go after journalists and their sources following a long string of unflattering leaks.

Targeting journalists and their sources was obviously a constitutional problem. But trying to locate the sources of leaks meant targeting government employees and officials too. And that meant Kash Patel was targeted, despite his constant obsequiousness.

An apparent leak investigation years ago that swept up Patel’s Google account information fueled some of his anger toward the Justice Department and FBI in recent years.

Last fall, Patel sued Trump’s prior top DOJ and FBI appointees, including Director Christopher Wray, for unfairly obtaining his data in 2017.

Subpoena paperwork that Patel made public in the lawsuit indicate Justice Department prosecutors working with a federal grand jury in Washington, DC, sought Patel’s Google and Google Voice records from an almost 20-month period in 2016 and 2017.

In his complaint, he says he learned five years after the subpoena that the Justice Department had sought his communications from Google.

Somehow, this act didn’t prevent Trump from picking Patel to head the FBI. And, also (somehow), it didn’t prevent Patel from accepting this offer, despite his apparent antipathy towards the FBI and DOJ. Maybe Patel thinks he can clean it up by heading it up. But that doesn’t explain why he feels no animosity towards the man who made this all happen: Donald Trump.

Trump and Patel aside, the more disturbing fact is what the Inspector General uncovered during the office’s investigation of these leak investigations. More damage was done to trust in the federal government and the First Amendment rights of journalists than to Kash Patel’s career hopes. This is from the summary of the IG’s report [PDF]:

[We] found that the Department complied with some but not all of the then applicable provisions of the News Media Policy in the compulsory process it issued. Specifically, as detailed above, we found that the Department failed to convene the News Media Review Committee to consider the authorization requests in the three investigations; the Department did not obtain the required DNI certification in one investigation and we were unable to determine whether the Department provided the DNI certification it obtained in another investigation to the Attorney General for his consideration; and the Department did not obtain the Attorney General’s express authorization for the NDOs in any of the three investigations.

Given the important interests at stake, we were troubled that these failures occurred, particularly given that only a few years had elapsed since the Department substantially overhauled its News Media Policy in 2014 and 2015 following serious criticisms concerning the Department’s efforts to obtain communications records of members of the news media. In our judgment, the Department’s deviation from its own requirements indicates a troubling disparity between, on the one hand, the regard expressed in Department policy for the role of the news media in American democracy and, on the other hand, the Department’s commitment to complying with the limits and requirements that it intended to safeguard that very role.

In other words, the DOJ promised to make changes after being caught doing this sort of thing during the Obama Administration. And changes were made, but no one in the FBI or DOJ felt compelled to respect the new rules. So, the same thing happened again, only under a president with a much more antagonistic relationship with the press, as well as a far more limited tolerance for leaks that generated negative press.

Everything old was new again. With Trump taking office again and the DOJ still having done little to right the wrongs of the past, it seems unlikely the next four years won’t generate more questionable investigations that threaten the rights and freedoms of journalists. And, if Trump gets his way, the FBI will be headed by someone who has shrugged off his own targeting by Trump’s DOJ (give or take a lawsuit) apparently in hopes of being hired by the same man who once considered him a threat to his presidency. And there’s no better loyalty that the loyalty of someone who’s already been under the thumb of the person he plans to serve. That person — Kash Patel — knows his place. And he knows exactly what he needs to do to use these same powers against anyone he or his ultimate employer feel just aren’t loyal enough.