Kash Patel’s Hunt for a ‘Deep State’ Conspiracy Against Trump Wrecked Careers and Turned Judges Against the Justice Department
FBI Director Kash Patel’s obsession with uncovering a “deep state” plot against Donald Trump has, over the past year, hardened into a defining feature of the Justice Department under Trump 2.0—one built not on evidence but on the president’s list of enemies. Patel calls it “the grand conspiracy case.” Career investigators who examined his purported evidence found nothing of the kind.
The New York Times reports:
It was an investigation long sought by Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, and it was announced not in court papers, but through a haze of cigar smoke on Joe Rogan’s podcast in early June of last year.
Mr. Patel’s prized criminal inquiry, known as “the grand conspiracy case,” sought to tie together actions by a group of people that President Trump blamed for various investigations into him, going back to the examination of possible ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, and extending into events surrounding the 2020 election and the criminal prosecutions of Mr. Trump in 2023 and 2024. In the view of Mr. Trump and his supporters, there was a “deep state” cabal that had sought across multiple administrations and agencies to bring him down. …
To Mr. Patel, those documents, found in government burn bags — large brown paper bags with red and white stripes used to store papers designated for destruction — justified a sweeping investigation of former officials. To the former officials and the career investigators who looked at the evidence, the papers in the burn bags were nothing like a smoking gun.
An FBI director announcing a criminal investigation of the president’s enemies on a podcast, built on the contents of trash bags marked for destruction, is a grotesque inversion of how law enforcement is supposed to work. The point was never to follow evidence to a charge; it was to manufacture a charge to fit a predetermined list of targets. That the effort largely failed in court is no consolation: the damage to the department’s independence, and to the people whose careers were destroyed along the way, is already done.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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