Former Trump administration official and Justice Department prosecutor Kash Patel is calling for the disbanding of the FBI’s District of Columbia field office, arguing that officials serving there have turned the U.S. into a “police state.”
Patel — who served as senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council under former President Donald Trump and a terrorism prosecutor at the DOJ under former President Barack Obama — is pained to see how political the DOJ has become in recent years.
The attorney is perhaps best known for uncovering that the Democratic National Committee and the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign funded the infamous Steele dossier used to help justify the FBI spying on Trump’s campaign over alleged collusion with Russia.
Patel was senior counsel for the House Intelligence Committee under then-Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes of California at the time.
His central role in the investigation that revealed all of this was powerfully addressed in the 2020 documentary film “The Plot Against the President,” directed by Amanda Milius.
Patel wrote a bestselling children’s book on the events in simple allegorical form in “The Plot Against the King,” released in the spring, and last week released a sequel, “The Plot Against the King: 2,000 Mules.”
In a Tuesday interview with The Western Journal, Patel lamented the current state of the FBI, at least in the upper echelons.
“It used to be that everybody that wore the badge and the gun executed the mission of law enforcement without bias or partisan politics or corruption,” he said.
“But Russiagate showed us those days ended under the [James] Comey and [Robert] Mueller administrations at the FBI, and they make J. Edgar Hoover look like Garfield. These guys are more vicious and more evil than that man ever was, and we’re going to need a Church-style commission to fix it,” Patel said.
A bipartisan select committee under Chairman Sen. Frank Church of Idaho was established in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s to investigate alleged illicit spying by federal government agencies — including the FBI and the CIA — on American citizens.
“Intelligence agencies have undermined the constitutional rights of citizens,” the final report published in 1976 concluded, “primarily because checks and balances designed by the framers of the Constitution to assure accountability have not been applied.”
Patel argued that in recent years, unchecked “government gangsters” have taken over agencies like the FBI and are committing abuses again. He pointed to Comey, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, former FBI attorney Lisa Page and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe as examples.
“They break the law and they lie about it to the world because their arrogance is that we are saving everyone and going to get Trump, as if that were the definition of what the FBI is supposed to be doing,” Patel added.
Strzok texted Page in August 2016 about an “insurance policy” they had discussed in “Andy’s office” in case Trump was elected. The “insurance policy” referred to the Russia probe and “Andy” to McCabe, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“That’s what a police state does,” Patel contended regarding the FBI’s conduct, “and that’s what this Washington behemoth headquarters has become — a police state under the leaderships of Chris Wray and James Comey and Andy McCabe. And the police state can never exist in any form in this country.”
Patel believes the D.C. field office needs to be gutted.
“What should happen is the Washington behemoth office headquarters should be disbanded and those agents sent back to the field across America because that’s what investigative agents are supposed to be doing — investigating crimes, not manufacturing them in the swamp that is D.C.,” he said.
Patel referenced FBI whistleblower agent Steve Friend, who filed a complaint with DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz this month about being pulled off his work involving child sexual exploitation crimes to conduct FBI SWAT raids on Jan. 6 defendants accused of misdemeanor violations.
“That is outrageous,” Patel said. “What parent in America isn’t going to want to change that structure? And the only way to change that structure is to destroy the Washington behemoth headquarters and leave a very small cadre behind and put everyone back to work in the field and get rid of the corrupt government gangsters.”
He also took a shot at the more than 50 former intelligence community officials, like former CIA directors Michael Hayden, John Brennan and Leon Panetta, who signed on to a letter in October 2020 concluding that documents contained on a laptop said to belong to Hunter Biden had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
In the spring, the liberal Washington Post and New York Times reported that the documents obtained from the laptop really belonged to Hunter Biden.
The computer contains information about the first son’s overseas and domestic business dealings, which President Joe Biden allegedly had some knowledge of and perhaps benefitted financially from.
The Post reported that the FBI seized the laptop from a Delaware computer repair shop in December 2019. The store owner had created a copy of the hard drive and eight months later gave it to Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani after the FBI failed to act on the information it contains. Giuliani then provided a copy to the New York Post.
“Talk about something that tectonically shifts the future outcome of this country based on a false pretense. Hunter Biden’s laptop is prima facie evidence of crimes by Hunter Biden — fraud, criminal, otherwise,” Patel said.
“And you had 51 former intelligence officials come out — including a CIA director, a secretary of defense and a former director of the [National Security Agency] — come out and say Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation when they knew that was false. But they did it to get Trump,” he added.
“Michael Hayden, one of the most disgusting of all, the former director of the CIA, former director of the National Security Agency, came out recently and said, ‘I was glad to participate in a farce because it helped defeat Donald Trump,'” Patel said.
Hayden told New York magazine this month that he’s “perfectly fine” with his decision to sign the letter positing that Hunter Biden’s laptop was likely Russian disinformation.
“It looked like disinformation. … It would be nice if we didn’t have to do anything or say anything, but the Russians were doing so much,” he said.
Patel believes November’s midterm elections are key to reining in federal agency abuses. He said Republicans must take the House and the Senate.
“The two-tier system of justice that has been put on full display by the registered police state and these goons in government — corrupt government gangsters, as I call them — must be brought to an end,” Patel said.
“The Democrats have shown us the power of Congress and the subpoena authority they have,” he continued. “We must do the same to them for a righteous purpose based on true and factual information — not what they have done, which is a police state purpose to target political enemies.”
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