Dear Joe Rogan, Kash Patel Played You
By: Mother Jones
This is an excerpt from a fairly long article.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Discussing his effort as a congressional investigator to uncover FBI malfeasance related to the Page surveillance, Patel told you, "What I had unearthed was the biggest political criminal scheme ever perpetuated by portions of the FBI leadership and other people in the intelligence community in coordination [with the media]."
Sounds like hype to me. But you be the judge.
Patel, Trump, and others have beat the drum about the FBI's misuse of the Steele dossier to draw attention from Putin's assault on the 2016 election and Trump's complicity. They claim that there is nothing to the Russia "witch hunt" or "hoax"—and that the entire fuss was kicked off by the Steele dossier, which was a Democratic dirty trick. That is, the Dems orchestrated the entire "Russia, Russia, Russia" business with the Steele documents.
That's not true. Who says so? Many sources. We can start with Horowitz. His report concluded, "We found that Crossfire Hurricane was opened for an authorized investigative purpose and with sufficient factual predication." It also found no "documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced…[the] decision to open Crossfire Hurricane." In fact, his report noted that the Steele dossier had nothing to do with the FBI's launch of the Russia investigation. That inquiry began after the FBI learned that another Trump campaign foreign policy adviser named George Papadopoulos had told an Australian diplomat that the Trump team had been informed that Moscow could assist it by anonymously releasing information damaging for Clinton.
So it wasn't a political witch hunt engineered by the Dems. You know who else says this? Special counsel John Durham, who was appointed in 2019 by then-Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the Russian investigation.
Durham found flaws in the probe, but he concluded that the FBI inquiry "could have been opened more appropriately as an assessment or preliminary investigation" and not a "full investigation," as it had been. In other words, the bureau did not improperly launch this investigation but assigned it the wrong level of seriousness. Durham, too, did not report uncovering any "political bias" regarding the FBI's investigation, though he did assail the bureau for "confirmation bias."
Now let's look not at the investigation but the thing itself: what happened in 2016. Several government investigations have concluded that Russia mounted a covert operation to hack and leak Democratic emails and other materials to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Trump.
Trump and Patel, though, deny this. In a recent documentary, Patel said that the the FBI and the rest of the US intelligence community that investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election "knew it didn't exist." For his participation in this documentary, Patel was paid $25,000 by a Ukrainian-American-Russian filmmaker who has worked on a Russian propaganda project financed by Putin's presidential office. Joe, I wish you had asked Patel about that payment. Maybe you can next time he's on. Here are the details.
It's rather odd that Patel would deny Russia clandestinely intervened in the 2016 election. When he was investigating what he calls "Russiagate," he was a Republican staffer on the GOP-run House intelligence committee, which in March 2018 released a report on the Russian attack that opened with this line: "In 2015, Russia began engaging in a covert influence campaign aimed at the U.S. presidential election. The Russian government, at the direction of President Vladimir Putin, sought to sow discord in American society and undermine our faith In the democratic process." Yet Patel won't acknowledge even the existence of this Russian operation. Joe, why is that? Why isn't he—or you—pissed off that Russia messed with our election? Why is the FBI director covering for Putin?
I know you like to get to the bottom of things. In this case, that would mean spending time with the 966-page report released by the Senate intelligence committee in 2020. This is the most comprehensive account of what Russia did in 2016—and it's bipartisan. In fact, Republican Marco Rubio, now Trump's secretary of state, was chair of the committee when the report was released. He and other Republicans on the panel endorsed its findings. So it ain't Democratic spin or a phony narrative cooked up by the liberal press and Deep State that hates Trump.
There's a lot of mind-blowing stuff in this report. But here are the basics:
The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow's intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process…
While [Russian military intelligence] and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump's electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. 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.
You and your listeners ought to give those passages a good read. The committee—including such Republicans as Rubio, Tom Cotton, and John Cornyn—was saying the Russian assault was real and that Trump assisted Putin by echoing Moscow's denial. What's more, these Republicans were confirming that Trump had been indifferent to an attack on the United States by a foreign adversary and had even sought to exploit it.
Oh boy. I ask you, Joe: What's worse—the FBI screwing up one FISA application or Trump helping Russia subvert an election for his own benefit? Is it a close call?
I'm guessing that about now you are thinking, "Well, what about all that talk of collusion?" Democrats and some in the media did spend a lot of time claiming that Trump colluded with Russia in this attack. Special counsel Robert Mueller, reported that he found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump's campaign and Russia. But his report did detail extensive contacts between the campaign and Russian operatives who tried to influence the election. As Mueller testified to Congress, "We did not address 'collusion,' which is not a legal term." Trump and his loyalists seized on the absence of criminal charges to claim full exoneration. That was spin.
On the issue of collusion, Joe, I would, once more, direct you to that lengthy GOP-backed bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report. Its many revelations include the disclosure that Manafort, when he was chair of Trump's 2016 campaign, covertly met with a former business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik whom the committee characterized as a "Russian intelligence officer," and he handed over inside campaign information.
Check out this line from the report: "Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services." Trump's top campaign aide hobnobbing with Russian intelligence. Isn't that scandalous? Why does that not interest Patel?
The committee noted it had "obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the [Russian intelligence's] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election." That's big: Trump's campaign chief was in close contact with a Russian intelligence officer who might have been tied to Putin's covert attack on the 2016 campaign to help elect Trump. Moreover, the report reveals that the committee found "two pieces of information" that "raise the possibility" that Manafort himself was connected "to the hack-and-leak operations." Might one call this collusion?
This was not the only possible collusion. Several government investigations, include the Senate intelligence committee's, confirmed that in June 2016, top officials of the Trump campaign—Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner—met in Trump Tower with a Russian intermediary after being informed she was bringing them dirt on Clinton as part of a secret Russian government effort to help Trump. The information she handed over was apparently not useful. But by agreeing to this meeting, the Trump campaign signaled to Moscow it was just fine with Russia mucking about in the election. Collusion? I dunno. But it's certainly getting cozy with an enemy.
And consider this: After that Trump Tower meeting, when the news broke that Russians had hacked into Democratic Party computers and 20,000 pages of the pilfered material was leaked right before the party's convention to hurt the Clinton campaign, Trump Jr. and Manafort publicly insisted that Russia had nothing to do with it. They had been informed Moscow was scheming to covertly boost Trump. Yet here they were backing up Putin's assertion that Russia had nothing to do with the the hack-and-leak operation. They were lying to protect Russia. Collusion? If not, perhaps complicity?
Joe, if you've gotten this far, you're probably tiring from all these details. I know this whole affair can seem convoluted. But for my money, it remains damn important. It's the original sin of the Trump presidencies. And I wonder why the current FBI director, whose brief includes countering Russian covert actions targeting the United States, doesn't seem to care that Putin screwed with an American election.
Patel calls Russiagate "the disinformation seed that started it all." In a way, I agree. Trump's betrayal in 2016 helped him reach the White House. Remember when WikiLeaks released John Podesta's emails, which were hacked by Russian ops, to draw attention from Trump's "grab 'em' by the pussy" video? During the final weeks of the campaign, the dissemination of those swiped emails generated a ton of negative news stories for Clinton, which certainly contributed to her ultimate defeat.
Over the past nine years Trump and loyalists like Patel have done their mightiest to cover up Trump's foul deed—his aiding of the Russian attack—pushing a competing narrative that lets Putin and Russia off scot-free.
During the podcast with Patel, you appeared to accept his version of all this at face value and expressed outrage at the FBI's misuse of the Steele dossier: "It's so crazy," you said, "that someone could do something like that and a whole enormous group of people could do something like that with no repercussions….You were part of something that was one of the biggest scandals in political history. But because it was targeted toward Trump people look the other way."
And you blasted the left:
The disturbing thing to me is how people on the left are willing to look the other way….If the federal government is doing this, and they're doing this to someone you consider an enemy, what's to stop them from doing this against your candidate. This is unprecedented behavior that is tolerated and coordinated with the media. That's dangerous for the country. But people are so ideologically captured. They're so locked into their party. By any means necessary. We gotta get Trump out. And they push that narrative so hard that they're willing to do a very un-American thing.
I wonder if you can take a critical look at your embrace of Patel's self-serving narrative and at the Trump gang's unrelenting effort to hide Trump's involvement in Russia's assault on the United States. I know that might be tough to do. But I would love to see you have Patel back on the show after you read through those reports I cited above. He sure can sound convincing—unless you know the facts.
Tags
Who is online
237 visitors
The seeded article is about twice as long as what I seeded here. I tried to post the most salient part of it.
It has , by now, long been right wing dogma that Trump was the "victim" of a dirty campaign in 2016 and in the early stages of his presidency.
To the best of my knowledge , nowhere in the Senate Intelligence Committees definitive explanation of Russias interference in that election does the report suggest Trump was a "victim".
I love that that the left continues to beat the dead Russian collusion hoax, it just makes them look as gullible as we all think many of them are.
The rest is just bullshit to mislead the ignorant.
LOL. The ignorant ones are those who believe Trumps bullshit about this.
Russia interfered in the 2016 election and Trump and his campaign encouraged them all the way.
Interesting to note that even Congress has stated that Russia was not influenced by Trump to disrupt those elections.
Why do you keep posting such falsehoods?
LOL. Russia started it and Trump jumped on the bandwagon. That is hardly a controversial conclusion.
That's a lie with no basis in fact, what I wrote is 100% verifiable, yours is opinion produced by ardent TDS sufferers.
The facts. Clinton illegally paid for information from a foreign spy. The product was given to the FBI who covered up the source from the fisa judge when applying for warrants to spy on the trump campaign.
After the spying was revealed, , democratic congressmen schiff lied to the public and claimed the unverified dossier was never used by the government as a basis to spy on Americans.
The democratic conspiracy was more dishonest, more far reaching and much worse than anything trump did with Russia.
The worst thing that became revealed about all this was the Trump campaign willingly and enthusiastically accepting a Russian invitation to a meeting where "dirt" on Hillary Clinton was to be handed over to the Trump campaign by an enemy of the United States.
Dishonorable mentions go to Trump's constant lying about his business interest with Russia, Roger Stones involvement with the timing of the Wikileaks disclosures (with Trumps knowledge by the way) and Trumps encouragement to Russia to hack Clintons computer system.
So, John, in your mind having an "enemy" offer you free information is worse than actually hiring a foreign agent to work with Russian intelligence to get dirt on your opponent. IE one candidate actively sought and paid for dirt where another did not.