How Kash Patel Became a Useful Idiot for Vladimir Putin

With Donald Trump tapping Kash Patel, the MAGA provocateur, conspiracy theory monger, and grifter, to be FBI director, it’s time to revisit the Trump-Russia scandal. I know many folks think this is old news. The matter was long ago swept under the rug. Yet the basic facts remain incontrovertible: Vladimir Putin attacked the 2016 election with a covert hack-and-leak operation to help Trump win, and Trump aided and abetted that assault by denying it was underway—thus providing cover to a foreign adversary subverting American democracy—while seeking to exploit it. As president, Trump continued the cover-up by echoing and affirming Putin’s phony professions of innocence. Despite the clear evidence, Trump has gotten away with this act of profound betrayal. Patel is a big reason for that.

As an aide to then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Patel led an investigation after the 2016 election of the FBI’s probe of the Kremlin’s attack and contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. It’s important to remember that there were two different components of that probe. The bureau was looking at the Russian operation—which entailed hacking Democratic officials and operatives and then publicly disseminating through WikiLeaks internal memos and private emails to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign—and it was also examining ties between the Trump crew and Russians. This inquiry was triggered when the bureau learned that a Trump foreign policy adviser named George Papadopoulos supposedly told a senior Australian diplomat he had been informed that Russia could secretly assist the Trump campaign by releasing derogatory information on Clinton. After that, the FBI began looking at Trump associates with connections in Russia. One lead for the investigators was a campaign adviser named Carter Page, a business consultant who had mucked about in Russia for years and who made a trip to Moscow in July 2016 and met with Russian officials.

With Page of interest to the investigators, the bureau sought and received a secret surveillance warrant—in government parlance, a FISA warrant—to spy on Page. Here’s where things get tricky. The FBI used what became known as the Steele dossier in its applications for a series of FISA warrants for Page. This was the now infamous collection of private memos produced by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele that contained a host of unproven accusations about Trump-Russia links. (Remember the golden showers?) As a Justice Department inspector general later concluded, the FBI erred in using this document to justify its request for the FISA warrant on Page and screwed up in other disturbing ways in obtaining these warrants. That is, Page’s civil rights were violated. (Interest declared: I was the first reporter to reveal the existence of the Steele dossier—with an article in Mother Jones that appeared on October 31, 2016. But I did not publish the unsubstantiated memos.)

Now pay close attention to follow Nunes and Patel’s dodgy sleight of hand. They contended (loudly) that the FBI misconduct regarding its use of the Steele dossier and the Page warrants meant that the entire Trump-Russia investigation was a witch hunt and that all talk of the Russian attack mounted to boost Trump was a hoax. And as some Trump critics and journalists raised the notion that the Trump campaign might have colluded with Putin’s operation, Patel and other Trump defenders used the Steele dossier mess-up to counter that accusation and to contend that the entire matter was nothing but a phony Democratic dirty trick. (Steele had written his memos as a consultant to an opposition research firm paid by a law firm working for the Clinton campaign.)

In a brilliant stroke of disinformation, Trump, Nunes, Patel, and others falsely asserted that it had been the Steele memos that had prompted the FBI to launch its Trump-Russia investigation—called Crossfire Hurricane—meaning the inquiry, based on a purportedly fraudulent document that was a product of a Democratic oppo initiative, was utterly illegitimate and illegal. The real scandal, they insisted, was not Moscow clandestinely helping Trump win the White House and Trump accepting and assisting that effort, but rather the Deep State fabricating this so-called scandal.

In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, The Truth, and Our Battle for Democracy, Patel claims credit for “breaking open the biggest criminal conspiracy by government officials since Watergate — Russia Gate.” He repeatedly boasts that by exposing this supposed scandal—the Deep State concocting a bogus investigation to sabotage Trump—he helped save American democracy. He also asserts over and over that the FBI’s Russian investigation was predicated on the Steele dossier, which he alleges was purposefully manufactured as part of a conspiracy against Trump—“a political hit job”—run by Democrats, the FBI, the “fake news mafia,” and the Deep State.

What Patel did from the start was to engineer a wonderful deflection to defend and protect Trump. He created a false narrative in which the FBI’s misuse of the Steele dossier delegitimized Crossfire Hurricane and proved the whole investigation was baseless and a criminal conspiracy against Trump—and nothing else mattered. This is the cover story that Trump and his acolytes have been deploying for years.

Patel’s book makes almost no mention of the actual Russian attack on the 2016 election. Absent is any reference to the material stolen by Moscow’s hackers and leaked to hurt Clinton and aid Trump. (The worst leaking began right after the “grab-’em-by-the-pussy” video came out.) Nor does he acknowledge that Trump and his team repeatedly issued false denials and covered for Putin. He doesn’t include the meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 between Trump’s senior aides and a Russian emissary who they were informed was part of a secret Kremlin operation to assist the Trump campaign. WikiLeaks does not appear in these pages.

Patel ignores Trump’s own secret efforts during the campaign to score a huge real estate deal in Moscow—and his company’s attempt to obtain assistance from Putin’s office. Not surprisingly, he leaves out the Justice Department IG’s finding that the FBI’s initiation of Crossfire Hurricane was not based on the Steele document and not the product of “political bias or improper motivation.” It was legitimate. Also missing from the book is the key fact that John Durham, a special counsel handpicked by Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate and advance the Patel-promoted conspiracy theory that the Deep State illegally whipped up the Russia “hoax” to destroy Trump, flopped and found no massive criminal plot or significant and widespread wrongdoing.

No, all that counts is the Steele dossier and the Page FISA warrants. In Patel’s world, the various government reports that confirmed that Russia waged information warfare to boost Trump do not exist. Most notably, there’s not a hint in his book that in 2020, the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, released a bipartisan 966-page report that detailed the Russian assault, stating it was designed to help elect Trump and that the “Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia, and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.” That is, the Trump campaign helped the Russians.

This report disclosed that Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign chair for months during 2016, repeatedly held covert meetings with a former business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik, who was a Russian intelligence officer, and “sought to secretly share internal Campaign information” with him. The committee put it bluntly: “Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.” Moreover, the committee reported it had “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to [Russian intelligence’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” And the committee said it had uncovered “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was connected “to the hack-and-leak operations.” The report’s discussion of that information, though, was redacted.

Trump’s top campaign adviser clandestinely huddling with a Russian intelligence officer who was possibly involved in Moscow’s attack—that sure smells like collusion. At the least, it’s a real, honest-to-God scandal. The committee’s conclusion: Manafort posed a “grave counterintelligence threat.” (Manafort was imprisoned in 2018 for committing fraud and money laundering. Trump pardoned him in late 2020.)

Manafort does not appear anywhere in Patel’s book. Not a single sentence. (Here’s a suggestion for members of the Senate Judiciary Committee: Should Patel make it to a confirmation hearing, ask him if he read the Senate Intelligence Committee report and if he accepts its findings. If he says he hasn’t, he’s not a serious nominee for this job.)

For eight years, Patel has been engaged in Soviet-style revisionism. Create a sham story and airbrush out the truth. He bears much credit for concocting the fraudulent tale that Trump and MAGA have used for years to hide a truth they can’t handle: Trump was elected with covert Russian assistance, and, if the campaign didn’t collude directly with the Russians, Trump and his gang winked at this attack on America and joined Putin in the cover-up. In part thanks to Patel, this has never become the dominant narrative.

Put simply, Patel has been a useful idiot for Putin.

Given that Patel, a QAnon supporter who has peddled the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and championed the ridiculous idea that the January 6 riot Trump incited was sparked by “strange agitators” and federal agents, has sued his critics for defamation, let me be explicit: By calling him a useful idiot I’m not suggesting he has been a Russian asset or in cahoots with Russian operatives. But his effort to help Trump escape the treasonous stench of the Trump-Russia scandal by promoting a misleading account of this affair has been of tremendous value to Moscow. Patel essentially created a false alibi for Trump and a distraction that took the heat off Trump and Russia. And he has vowed to seek revenge against those Deep State schemers who he claims illegally plotted against Trump by investigating the Russia matter. In the distorted view of reality Patel pushes, they are the wrongdoers in this episode, not Trump and not Putin. Patel hasn’t stopped selling this bunk. Yesterday, he sent out an email solicitation for the foundation he operates—under the subject heading “The Deep State can not be trusted”—that opened with this exclamation: “Remember Russia Gate? Fraud!”

One component of the FBI’s mission is to counter Russian espionage and covert actions aimed at the United States. Is this a mission Patel can take on? There are few MAGA advocates who have done more than him to help Trump and Putin dodge accountability for their devious misdeeds of 2016. Placing Patel in charge of the FBI could be akin to putting it in the hands of a mole. One can imagine the joy within the Kremlin prompted by the prospect of Patel leading this critically important agency. The Russians certainly would have reason to call him “our man in the bureau.”

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

Donald Trump’s cavalcade of eff-you appointments has generated numerous idiotic comments—from the picks, from Trump and his team, and from their MAGA cheerleaders. One of the most amusing remarks came from Pete Hegseth, the Fox host and alleged sexual assaulter with no experience running a large organization whom Trump selected to be secretary of defense. At the center of the case against Hegseth has been an email his mother sent him that the New York Times published. Writing her son while he was in the middle of a contentious divorce, she accused him of being a longtime abuser of women. She declared, “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.” (After the story came out, she recanted, as many a mother would.) Despite the emergence of the email and other allegations of drunken misconduct, harassment, and inept management of the nonprofit veterans groups he once ran, Hegseth vowed to fight on and, naturally, blamed the media. In a Wall Street Journal column, he proclaimed, "The press is peddling anonymous story after anonymous story, all meant to smear me and tear me down."

Anonymous stories? It was his own mother’s email. Nothing anonymous there. By the way, when Mama Hegseth went on Fox (where else?) and tried to do damage control by insisting her son had cleaned up his act since she wrote that email, she noted that she was reluctant to testify on his behalf in a confirmation hearing. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement. But who could blame her? Imagine the questions she would get.

Another problematic Trump appointee took a powder this week. Chad Chronister, a Florida sheriff and son-in-law of a Trump donor once convicted of bribery (whom Trump pardoned), was selected to head the Drug Enforcement Administration. Yet he, too, was unqualified for the post. And it didn’t help when MAGA-ites learned that he had arrested a pastor who violated a lockdown ordinance during the Covid pandemic. Removing himself from consideration, Chronister said, “Over the past several days, as the gravity of this very important responsibility set in, I’ve concluded that I must respectfully withdraw from consideration.”

Say what? It was only after he accepted Trump’s appointment that he realized that leading the DEA was serious business? Here was another sign that Trump’s transition has been a clown show.

Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon, who runs the Texas-based Right Response Ministries, said the quiet part aloud during his podcast: “Judaism, by nature, in its ideology and its religion is, I believe, parasitical. And yes, I’m using the word parasitical.”

Webbon, whom my colleague Kiera Butler recently wrote about in her great piece on the so-called TheoBros, is a dumbass-comment-machine. He has called for executing women who make false charges of sexual assault, taking the right to vote away from women, and shooting and killing migrants trying to cross the border. Now he’s echoing Hitler, who infamously wrote, “[The Jew] is and remains the eternal parasite, a parasite that spreads more and more like a harmful bacillus.” As you might have guessed, Webbon is a Trump supporter and wants to use Trump’s second stint in the White House to turn the United States into a Christian nation.

In another competitive week, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the leading artificial intelligence entity and developer of ChatGPT, placed first. Talking about Elon Musk, the manic and dangerous disinformation-peddling tycoon who used more than $200 million or so of his own fortune to help elect Donald Trump and become his BFF (for now), Altman remarked, “I believe, pretty strongly, that Elon will do the right thing. It would be profoundly un-American to use political power, to the degree that Elon has it, to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses. I don’t think people would tolerate that and I don’t think Elon would do it."

Has Altman not been paying attention? Musk, who owns X, has turned that social media platform into a cesspool of right-wing conspiracy theories, MAGA propaganda, and racist swill to advance his alt-right, pro-Trump political agenda. He has purchased enough influence with Trump to be awarded an advisory commission tasked to propose severe cuts in government that would undermine the power of the federal regulators Musk often rails against. Musk has already used his power as the richest guy in the nation to unfairly obtain political power. Does Altman believe he won’t continue to do so? If Altman is sincere—as opposed to sucking up to Musk—then we really ought to question his ability to oversee the risky business of birthing AI. No winner of this contest ought to be in charge of AI.

The issue on the role of voter ignorance and media fragmentation in the recent presidential election sent many readers to their keyboards.

Sheilah Fish emailed this suggestion:

Social media and Fox determined the results of this election with distortions, etc. We need a national program that will label all TV and social media as to its truthfulness and leanings. Unless we have this democracy is over. Please get a dialogue going about this, and bills that we need to promote.

Sorry, Sheilah, but a big problem with this would be who does the labeling? The government? That’s not going to fly. It would probably violate the First Amendment. And remember the Republicans have even opposed US government efforts to counter foreign disinformation, presumably because foreign disinformation in recent years has overlapped with MAGA talking points. I don’t think we’re going to get a dialogue going on this.

Mairi Maloney scolded me for an aside about the definition of neoliberalism:

Do you really not know what neoliberalism is? Or were you just being facetious? In case you really don't know, let me educate you with an excerpt from my 1995 master's thesis:

“While liberal harkens back to the individualism of John Locke and Adam Smith and the nineteenth century emphasis on free trade, when combined with the prefix, neo, it refers to economic policies designed to reduce the role of the state and increase the role of the (international) market in the allocation of resources. This is done through the privatization of public activity and cuts in social spending, along with the deregulation of private and foreign activity and the promotion of market solutions to social problems.” 

Neoliberal economic policies have been a priority for the right for many decades. I think you do know that. So, why would you make that comment ("whatever that may be") in reference to neoliberalism?

Alas, I was being glib. This was a sly (too-sly?) reference to the fact that many folks toss around that term without being specific about what it means, and it often comes across as a catch-all phrase for anything they do not like.

Mike Warner proposed a visual reference for thinking about the fractured media ecosystem:

I'm picturing a kind of information pyramid that captures all the lurid detail that needs communicating. At the bottom is the most detailed, the kind of thing people are currently tuning out because it's so commonplace and tiring. Middle layers can be somewhat amalgamated chunks of truth that are still detailed but also categorized. The key thought I had is the very top layer or two. This would take the form of a clean and non-dense info-graphic, like a decent marketeer's PowerPoint slide, or one of those memes that has lived for a decade or more. As the bottom layer evolves by the minute and middle layers get updated on a regular basis, this top layer evolves much less frequently. And it's simple enough to blast ad-fucking-nauseam into every communications medium known to man, including into those channels where fact-less information usually resides. Make it so ubiquitous that everyone "picks it up" to re-post and otherwise talk about, even if only to attack it. Make it un-ignorable.

The challenge is who gets to create and maintain the top layer. That said, we (the anti-Trumpers) have done a relatively decent job so far of ubiquitizing (new word!) "Project 2025" as a concept (not just a lengthy pdf file). So maybe there's hope.

I like the idea of having basic and easy-to-convey themes to disseminate over and over. Trump is good at this: Build the wall. Mass deportation. Lower prices. Etc. The Dems did have some success with using Project 2025 to represent far-right extremism. Just not enough. But cooking up phrases and ideas that will catch fire is tough, and success is like winning the politics lottery. Still, Democrats, progressives, and anti-Trumpers need to try.

Perry Gross liked the new feature I introduced in the last issue: Accomplice Watch:

Great idea. This gets at Timothy Snyder's observation "do not obey in advance." Getting ready for the firehose. 

Thanks, Perry. If anyone spots a good candidate for Accomplice Watch, please email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

Linda Jack wrote to share a quote from Ulysses Grant she found relevant. This is what he said during a trip to Ireland in 1879:

If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon…but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.

Joseph Rachel had a question:

Who is feeding Trump the names of the people he is picking for his clown cabinet? He is not aware enough to come up with all of these by himself. His father-in-laws…Fox News people…Donors.

I think Joseph answers his own questions. Given these selections—people in his family, people he watches on TV, people who give him money—it seems that indeed Trump himself is picking them. They reflect his world: They are loyalists devoted to his Big Lie(s). Experience and qualifications are far down the list. Looks as if Trump is calling these shots.

Not surprising, readers had strong reactions to the issue that questioned whether Democrats are fighting fiercely enough after the election.

Philip Ratcliff wrote:

It was nauseating to watch Biden's and Harris's behavior towards Trump after the election. They bent over backwards to show how nice they were. Maybe they set the tone for the Dems during the lame duck period. Two recent votes in Congress again remind us that the Democrats are one branch of the Property Party, as Ralph Nader used to say. Only 19 Democratic senators voted against sending $20 billion more of weapons to Israel. In the House, 15 Dems voted for a bill that would allow the Treasury Secretary to designate nonprofit groups as terrorism supporters and strip them of their tax-exempt status. 

A reader named Debbbeee emailed:

We have to fight back and bring independents along with us. But most of my Democratic colleagues are tired, depressed, and need a break from the anxiety provoked by the drawn-out prospect of Trump's win. And with the doom spelled out so clearly, we feel semi-paralyzed. It's like sitting shiva. However, the time will come (sooner than later) when we will rise again and fight harder than ever for the democracy we were always trying to improve. It's a tough sell right now.

Cheryl Geyerman had a different take:

Do you think the Democratic leaders—or any in Congress—just don’t want to succeed? I don’t follow everything AOC says or does, but even she seems muted. Adam Schiff, my senator-elect, seems curiously quiet. What can we do? Is everyone just too old or compromised in some way to speak out? 

Short answer: No. I don’t believe Democrats do not want to succeed. I do think that too often they do not know how to fight fiercely enough—or even fully grasp the value of such combat. They are up against a party that has embraced a wannabe authoritarian who tried to overturn a legitimate election and incited political violence. It is not hyperbole to note that this is an existential crisis for American democracy. That merits a change in tactics and strategy. Yet there are no signs yet that this lesson has been learned. The dust is settling after the election, it’s holiday season, and Democrats are still processing. They may rise to the challenge. But those of you now fretting about the lack (so far) of a rising are not wrong to do so. 

“All this stuff going on is getting me down.”
“Moxie, you have to compartmentalize. Look at me. I try to keep my work life separate from the rest of my life.”
“I don’t have a work life.”
“Oh yeah, that may be the problem.”