Another Stupid Lie From Kash Patel About the Trump-Russia Scandal

FBI Director Kash Patel testifies to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee on March 25. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP

The more stupid a lie, the more desperate the liar. This general rule was illuminated last week by none other than Kash Patel, the director of the FBI.

I need to vent for a moment: I’m getting sick and tired of having to debunk Patel’s low-quality and unsophisticated disinformation. After Joe Rogan hosted Patel on his podcast in May and Patel spewed his worn-out falsehoods about the Trump-Russia scandal, I felt obliged to write a lengthy “Dear Joe” open letter that showed how Patel had repeatedly bamboozled Rogan. (Rogan did not reply.) But that was just Patel blabbing on a podcast. More recently, he has used his official position to advance the phony claim that all talk of Russia’s attack on the 2016 election and the assistance Trump provided the Kremlin by denying this assault occurred is a hoax. Worse, he has pushed unsubstantiated propaganda—perhaps based on Russian disinformation— that contends the whole Russia controversy was a diabolical scheme orchestrated by Hillary Clinton.

On Thursday, Patel tweeted from his official FBI account that the bureau “uncovered” a classified annex to the Durham report “buried in a back room at the FBI. It revealed a highly classified piece of the Durham report: evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.” He added, “The Russia hoax was a disgrace that President Trump and our country should’ve never been put through.”

There is much falsity in this.

As you might recall, the Durham report was produced by special counsel John Durham, who in 2019 was appointed by then-Attorney General William Barr to examine the origins of the FBI investigation that probed Moscow’s interference in the 2016 campaign and the contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. Durham, Donald Trump and his crew fervently hoped, was going to prove that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, former CIA director John Brennan, former FBI director Jim Comey, and other Deep Staters had conspired to cook up the Russia scandal to sabotage Trump. Within MAGA, it was widely assumed that Durham would get the goods, smash this cabal, and lock up all these wrongdoers.

After four years of toil, Durham’s investigation was a whiff. He initiated three criminal cases that had little to do with the notion that such a nefarious plan had been mounted. Two of his targets, indicted for having allegedly lied to FBI agents about non-essential matters, were acquitted. An FBI lawyer pleaded guilty to altering an email that was part of the process to obtain a surveillance warrant on a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser named Carter Page.

In his final report, Durham, looking for whatever sins he could pin on the FBI, concluded that the bureau erred by opening a full investigation instead of a preliminary investigation when it launched its Russia probe—hardly a major infraction. He found that the bureau’s investigation had been influenced by “confirmation bias” but was not caused by political bias. In other words, the Russia investigation—which had its problems, including improperly citing the Steele dossier in the application for that Page warrant—had been legit, not a conspiracy to demolish Trump. It was no hoax and no witch hunt. Sorry, MAGA.

So why have we returned to Durham’s embarrassing failure to prove Deep State skullduggery? His final report—looking to salvage what he could of MAGA’s conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation—referred to the “Clinton Plan intelligence.” That is the claim that during the 2016 campaign, Clinton approved a scheme to “vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.” The source of this allegation, however, was iffy: Russian intelligence that US intelligence agencies got their mitts on.

It's a bit complicated. The gist is that the Clinton campaign in July 2016 decided to engineer a phony scandal tying Trump to Russia and that the FBI then did its bidding. Hence, the Russia investigation was initiated. But the evidence for this claim came from Russian intelligence memos based on material the Russians apparently had stolen, via computer hacks, from Democrats. These memos had been snagged in 2016 by a Dutch spy service that subsequently shared this trove with US intelligence. But a big question for the US spies at the time was whether these Russian memos were solid analyses of hacked material, misrepresentations, or outright fabrications. In his final report, Durham himself said that the documents underlying this claim might be a “fabrication.”

Still, Durham put this conspiracy theory into play by including it in his report and provided fodder to MAGA conspiracy theorists looking to discredit the Russia investigation on behalf of Dear Leader.

It didn’t matter that the claim itself didn’t make a lot of sense. By the time Clinton had supposedly given the orders for this plot, it was public knowledge that Russia had hacked the Democratic Party and leaked stolen emails to hurt the Clinton campaign, that Trump had a long history of spouting friendly comments about Vladimir Putin and had business connections in Russia, and that the Trump campaign had curiously and adamantly denied that Russia was interfering in the US election (seemingly providing cover for the Kremlin). It would have been quite natural—and not at all inappropriate—for any candidate in Clinton’s position to decide to push a narrative about Trump and Russia. Moreover, there was no evidence—Durham found none—that the supposed “Clinton Plan” triggered the FBI investigation, the origin of which has been well documented.

Case closed? Not for Trump, Patel, and the rest of MAGA.

What was supposedly new last week was that Patel helped make public a previously classified 29-page annex to the Durham report that delved deeper into the “Clinton Plan.” This annex detailed the Russian intelligence and the supposed hacked emails of Democrats on which the Russian analyses were based. Look at all this, the MAGA crowd exclaimed. It shows there was a Clinton conspiracy!

News flash: It does not. By the way, the annex was not buried. It had been classified because it contained sensitive information about intelligence sources. Moreover, this was not news.

In September 2020, John Ratcliffe, Trump’s current CIA director who was then director of national intelligence, declassified information from this annex noting that US intelligence in late July 2016 “obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians' hacking of the Democratic National Committee.” But Ratcliffe at that time added this important point: “The [intelligence community] does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.” That is, the spies couldn’t determine whether what they got from the Russians was accurate.

The declassified annex, contrary to Patel’s claim (which has been echoed by Trump and much of MAGA media), doesn’t contradict this. In fact, this annex discloses additional reasons to suspect that material underlying the “Clinton Plan”—which includes emails from Democratic policy advocates and advisers to the Clinton campaign—was spurious. Some intelligence analysts, the annex states, had concluded it was possible the Russians “might have fabricated or altered purported U.S. emails” that were cited as evidence of this plot. Durham also notes in the annex that his office had searched for exact duplicates of these emails and had failed to find any—suggesting these emails were not real. (The people who supposedly sent these emails denied doing so.)

In this annex, Durham acknowledges that his investigators assessed that the two emails at the heart of this conspiracy theory were “a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian hacking” of American think tanks, including the Open Society Foundations (founded by billionaire philanthropist George Soros) and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Composite” was an interesting word choice for Durham, who was doing his best to keep this bunk alive, for these emails, if composites, could also be considered fabrications. After all, someone had to do the compositing.

Look at the Patel tweet I cited above. The FBI director posted it in response to a tweet from right-wing journalist John Solomon, who posted one of those two emails and declared, “This is the smoking gun evidence inside Durham annex. If it is authenticated by further investigation, it means liberal mega donor George Soros’ team knew the whole Clinton plan for Russiagate hoax four days before FBI opened up probe. And so did Obama, Brennan, and Comey.”

Here's where the bullshit really kicks in. Solomon proclaimed this is a “smoking gun” if it is “authenticated.” Durham strived mightily to investigate and confirm that this email was real. He could not do so. In fact, his team ended up believing it was likely a composite—that is, a fake.

So this is what we got: An email that was probably fabricated by the Russians cited by Solomon as a smoking gun of an evil Obama conspiracy, and the FBI director amplifying Solomon’s rigged assessment and holding it up as proof the entire Russia investigation was a hoax. These guys are lacking in basic reader comprehension skills. And the FBI chief is exploiting what is likely Russian disinformation (or inaccurate Russian intelligence) for a political purpose.

At the end of the annex, Durham sums up this matter:

In short, neither the Office [of the special counsel] nor [redacted] have been able to determine definitively whether the purported Clinton campaign plan [redacted] was entirely genuine, partially true, a composite pulled from multiple sources, exaggerated in certain respects, or fabricated in its entirety.

This was Durham’s bottom line: Who the hell knows? How’s that for a smoking gun?

This episode shows how brazen the Trump gang is when it comes to weaponizing and mischaracterizing intelligence for the benefit of its autocratic leader. This is a key mission for Trump’s intelligence officials. In recent weeks, we’ve seen related efforts from Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to discredit the intelligence assessment publicly released in early January 2017 that stated Putin attacked the 2016 campaign to help Trump.

Both of them are manipulating intelligence and endeavoring to cover up the original sin of Trump’s presidency. Ratcliffe released a report that claimed that the production of that assessment did not follow all the guidelines for such intelligence products. Yet this report did not challenge the assessment’s fundamental findings. Gabbard went further, disseminating a memo that alleged that Obama after the 2016 election deliberately ordered this assessment to include false conclusions to subvert Trump and his presidency. She called for a criminal investigation and decried Obama and his national security aides for having committed “treason”—a charge that Trump repeated. Yet the intelligence she released as purported evidence of this foul conspiracy was utterly unrelated to the assessment’s finding (which was confirmed by subsequent investigations). Gabbard, the nation’s top intelligence officer, orchestrated a bogus report to establish a predicate for a criminal probe targeting Trump’s critics.

These are dangerous actions. The men and women in charge of US national security are cooking the books to rewrite history and persecute the president’s critics and political foes. They are not protecting the public; they are serving him. This is what happens in an authoritarian regime.

Patel has been at this game for years. As a staffer for the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 and 2018, he pushed the idea that the Russia inquiry was a hoax and the real scandal was the Steele dossier and the Page warrant. He was correct that the FBI had inappropriately obtained that warrant using the Steele memos and violated the civil liberties of that onetime foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign. (This was the only instance of a mishandled warrant in the Russia investigation.) 

But Patel and other Trump devotees have used that error and a series of conspiracy theories to distract attention from the basic facts: Putin ran a covert operation to influence the 2016 election in part to help Trump attain the White House, and Trump aided and abetted the Kremlin by denying Russia was assaulting American democracy. Patel has gone so far as to declare there was no Russian intervention at all in 2016—even though the GOP-led House committee he worked for concluded there had been Russian interference.

Trump has put hacks into the most important posts in the US government, and they’re spending their time pursuing not the nation’s enemies but Trump’s. They’re not enhancing national security; they’re seeking vengeance. With each new stunt they pull to erase the Russia stench on Trump’s first victory, they show us they are useful idiots for both Trump and Putin. There are no smoking guns to prove their fever dreams of Deep State treachery. The only smoking gun that exists in this caper confirms that Patel, Gabbard, and Ratcliffe are perverting US intelligence and law enforcement to create a hoax of their own.

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

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CNN reported last week that in June Elon Musk, even though he was feuding with Donald Trump at the time (and suggesting Trump would be incriminated if the Epstein files were released), donated $15 million to political action committees that support Trump and Republican congressional candidates. This was a sliver compared to the $290 million Musk gifted to the Trump cause during the 2024 campaign, and the contributions came before he stomped off last month and formed his own political party—the America Party. Can we assume that there will be no more Musk riches for the GOP?

Meanwhile, Dan Friedman and I recently reported that another Big Tech overlord, Peter Thiel, a Musk buddy, is back in the political giving game. In late 2023 he vowed not to make any donations in the 2024 cycle. Thiel, a libertarian-minded fellow who in 2009 wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” was apparently disappointed that his previous support of Trump did not lead to the rise of a techno-libertarian state that allows tech firms and the robber-barons of today to do whatever they damn please.

But after sitting out the last election, Thiel has returned to the GOP givers list, donating at least $850,000 this year to finance Republican incumbents attempting to retain their party’s control of the House in next year’s midterm elections. In a recent—and bizarre—interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Thiel revealed what might be some of the reasons for his renewed support of the GOP. He indicated he was worried about “woke” AI and feared the rise of an Antichrist who would gain power by scaring people about the potential harm of new technologies and the dangers of climate change. He suggested that environmental activist Greta Thunberg might play this role. It was hard to tell if he was joking.

As Friedman and I noted, Thiel also has a more pedestrian reason to throw money at the Republicans. Palantir, his software and data company, is making hundreds of millions of dollars—maybe more—through contracts with the Trump administration, including one to assist ongoing efforts of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to remove undocumented immigrants using a platform to track migrants’ movements in real time. And Democrats have raised questions about Palantir’s various contracts. Should they gain control of either house of Congress, they will be able to turn those questions into subpoenas for investigations of Palantir—which Thiel presumably would want to avoid. For more on this, see our article.

Opus. The Bear is my favorite show at the moment, as I slowly absorb its most recent season. One reason for my affection is that each character in this series is so deeply drawn and so well realized by the assigned actor. The cast is an impressive collection of artists performing at the top of their craft. I want to see what each of them does in other venues. And that’s how I came to Opus, a film streaming on HBO Max, starring Ayo Edebiri, who in The Bear plays Sydney Adamu, a young talented sous chef trying to collaborate with intense chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White). She does an amazing job in this role, with evocative facial expressions (those eyebrows!) and dead-on dialogue delivery. When I saw she was starring in Opus…well, that was all I needed to know.

In this film, Edebiri is Ariel Ecton, a young journalist at a Rolling Stone-like magazine who’s dying to sink her teeth into her first big story. Oddly, when Alfred Moretti, a 1990s pop superstar and long-time recluse (who’s something of a blend of Prince and Bowie), releases his first album in 30 years, she’s one of six people invited to a remote compound he runs in rural Utah for an exclusive listening party. The group includes her boss at the magazine, a talk show host, a paparazza, an influencer, and a radio shock jock. Everyone is tickled pink to be part of this event which marks the return of a global sensation. When they arrive, they find that Moretti has forged a cult with followers who all dress in bright blue garb. (Yes, Prince had purple.) But only Ariel is disturbed by the weirdness. The others are just too pleased to be anointed by Moretti.

It's an intriguing set-up. But then Opus turns into a horror film. It’s a bit reminiscent of The Menu, in which Ralph Fiennes plays a world-famous chef who invites a group of celebs, swells, and food critics to an exclusive meal on a lovely island—and then the night takes a lethal turn. And it also reminded me of Sinners, which had such a great start before becoming a vampire flick. But the horror of Opus is not that entertaining and, ultimately, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Moretti (John Malkovich) supposedly has a reason for the slaughter that ensues, but I didn’t find it convincing. The film also has a tough assignment. Moretti is one of the great musicians of modern times, but the Moretti tunes we hear—written for the movie by veteran hitmaker Nile Rodgers (“Le Freak”) and The-Dream—are good but not stupendous.

Edebiri does the best she can as the one sane person in this story. Her eyes widen with each realization she’s in deep shit. But she doesn’t get to do much of what she does in The Bear—engage fully in dramatic tension with other high-caliber actors. The script doesn’t provide enough opportunities for that. But she is provided the chance to emote lots of fear. Unfortunately, there’s no major face-off with Malkovich until the final minutes, and it’s not enough of pay-off. No fault of hers, this film did not showcase her talents. My prediction is that Edebiri will be a leading actor of her generation, and there are grander opuses in her future.

“In My Room,” Catherine Campbell. Brian Wilson heard musical worlds in his head, and his genius was being able to translate them into our world. Consequently, many of the songs he wrote and produced for the Beach Boys and his solo career do not lend themselves to covers. Why listen to someone else’s interpretation of “Good Vibrations”? But I was entranced when I came across Catherine Campbell’s version of “In My Room,” which Wilson wrote with producer Gary Usher. Campbell released this cover three months before the legendary musician died at the age of 82. It’s moody and adds a dreamy darkness to this tune about solitude. I wasn’t familiar with Campbell, a Chattanooga-based musician who describes herself on her website as “a soft-spoken singer/songwriter and indie rock practitioner with a writerly focus on pulling the listener into a romantic world a little apart from hard reality.” She achieved that on this track.