David Corn's Blog, page 7

At RFK Jr.-Led Environmental Group, Insiders Questioned How He Spent $67 Million

On July 10, 2020, Terry Tamminen wrote a letter to the board chair of Waterkeeper Alliance, the clean-water group founded and led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to say that he wanted out.

Tamminen, a veteran, highly-regarded environmentalist and co-founder and longtime board member of the organization, had become concerned about the outfit’s finances—so worried that he was tendering his resignation. At issue was at least $67 million that Kennedy’s group had received and passed along over the previous six years—an eye-popping amount for a non-profit that prior to this influx of money had annual revenues of about $4 million, according to its tax filings. Tamminen noted in his letter that he had repeatedly asked Kennedy and other top WKA officials for an explanation regarding these funds—the source of the money and its ultimate use—and had received no satisfying response. He wrote that either there was “no proper documentation” covering this large flow of funds or such documentation was being “withheld” by Kennedy and the staff.

Tamminen had come across a situation that had raised questions among staff at WKA and people within the group’s orbit about the organization and Kennedy’s handling of tens of millions of dollars. His letter was prompted by a legal complaint that claimed WKA had “funneled millions of dollars to the Bahamas” to assist Louis Bacon, a hedge-fund billionaire, in his purported effort to “destroy and damage” Peter Nygård, a Canadian fashion mogul, who owned an estate next to Bacon’s on the island nation. The complaint, filed in a lawsuit brought by Nygård against Bacon, alleged that WKA had engaged in “illegal and/or improper activities” to benefit Bacon, a major financial backer of WKA. It also claimed Kennedy had “carried out illegal and improper activities to further [Bacon’s] scheme to damage [Nygård’s] business and property at the direction of, under the supervision of, at the request of or on behalf of [Bacon].”

“Where did that money go? The whole thing stunk. It was obvious they were hiding something. They have never provided good answers.”

Tamminen’s letter suggested that he was concerned about possible misconduct at Waterkeeper Alliance, a network of hundreds of organizations across the globe that protect bodies of water, and that he worried that Kennedy was not being straightforward about the matter. The Nygård complaint was ultimately dismissed. But with Kennedy, an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist, tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to run the massive Department of Health and Human Services, this episode—involving millions of dollars—could shed light on his managerial experience and competence.

A Mother Jones investigation has found that charities associated with Bacon, the co-founder and CEO of Moore Capital Management, did contribute at least $63 million to WKA and that these funds were subsequently sent by WKA to Save the Bays, a small environmental group that Bacon, Kennedy, and others had started in the Bahamas and that filed multiple environmental suits against Nygård.

This money flow occurred at the same time Bacon was involved in a bitter feud with Nygård. The two owned adjacent estates in Lyford Cay, a posh community for the super-rich in the Bahamas, and a property dispute—they shared a driveway—had evolved into wild combat costing each millions of dollars. And Save the Bays and its lawyer had become involved in Bacon’s battle with Nygård.

Some WKA staff and associates considered these large transfers of funds to Save the Bays unusual and wondered how this modest outfit was absorbing and spending tens of millions of dollars. For them, it was a sign of Kennedy’s autocratic management of WKA. “You couldn’t really ask questions about this,” a former staffer says. “There was a cult of Bobby.”

Through 2023, the amount of money routed through Kennedy’s organization to finance what was described in its tax records as a program in the Caribbean totaled $79 million. A WKA trustee replying on behalf of the group to queries from Mother Jones maintains this money financed environmental-related litigation mounted by Save the Bays in the Bahamas. Former WKA staff say this is a tremendously high figure for such cases and assert there was no sufficient public documentation that this funding was appropriately handled. “Where did that money go?” asks Bob Shavelson, a former founding WKA board member. “The whole thing stunk. It was obvious they were hiding something. They have never provided good answers.”

Tamminen’s queries about WKA’s finances in 2020 were triggered by a news report about the years-long feud between Bacon and Nygård. Their titanic battle had come to involve multiple lawsuits in varying jurisdictions, private investigators, gang members, phony websites, an allegation of a murder plot targeting Bacon, charges of harassment, political intrigue, secret recordings, and accusations of sexual assault against Nygård.

Eventually, Nygård ended up being convicted in Canada last year of sexual assault and sentenced to 11 years in prison, while still facing trials for sex crimes and other charges in Montreal, Winnipeg, and New York. And Bacon won a defamation case against Nygård and a $203 million judgment, but in November that award was tossed out.

Tamminen had spotted a story about the complaint Nygård had filed on April 30, 2020, in a New York federal court alleging that Bacon and others had engaged in a pattern of illegal conduct for years to defame him and destroy his fashion brand. Nygård listed a host of people and organizations supposedly involved or knowledgable of this alleged scheme, including Waterkeeper Alliance, Kennedy, and Fred Smith, a Bahamian lawyer and co-founder and board member of Save the Bays, the group that Kennedy and Bacon had helped to start. (Smith was also a member of Waterkeeper Alliance.) Launched in 2013, Save the Bays had sued Nygård for dredging and other activity that, the group contended, had despoiled Clifton Bay, which Nygård’s gaudy and palatial estate overlooked.

There is “no way you can spend $79 million on this type of litigation. You can buy a whole ecosystem for that amount of money… Without details, there’s no way you can explain these numbers.”

Nygård’s complaint stated that Save the Bays had relied “heavily on funding and support from Waterkeeper Alliance.” The filing also cited a 2010 Denver Post story in which Kennedy had praised Bacon, noting he was the “single largest supporter” of the Waterkeeper Alliance. A lawyer who has worked with WKA describes Bacon as “one of Bobby’s rich-guy friends.”

After reading about this complaint, Tamminen wondered about WKA and Kennedy’s connection to the Nygård-Bacon face-off. According to his resignation letter, on July 2, 2020, Tamminen emailed Mary Beth Postman, the deputy director of WKA, and asked, “Did we run any litigation funding for this case through WKA? Some rumors flying around, but I don’t recall anything like that on our 990s.” He was referring to the annual tax return that nonprofits must file. WKA’s public 990s indicated that tens of millions of dollars had been sent to the Caribbean without detailing what they financed. A onetime WKA associate says, “This looked totally smelly.”

According to Tamminen’s resignation letter, he soon spoke with Kennedy and asked for records related to this funding, and Kennedy, was “unable to provide the documents (or a verbal explanation).”

Afterward Postman informed Tamminen that the WKA had a “fiscal sponsorship agreement” to support work in the Bahamas. This meant WKA was receiving, as a pass-through, money for the Bahamian group. Acting as a pass-through is a common practice for nonprofits, but they can only do this to support charitable activity, usually a project in sync with their own missions. They can charge a percentage of the funds for this service, often in the 7-to-14-percent range, and, according to the WKA trustee who replied to queries from Mother Jones, the organization did receive a cut. The trustee would not say how much.

Tamminen pressed Marc Yaggi, the CEO of WKA, for documentation and details on the source of the millions sent to the Bahamas, the recipients of those funds, and how this money was spent. “We can’t be funneling millions of dollars (3X our own budget as shown on 990s) to [nongovernmental organizations] without full transparency about how the money is being spent and an unambiguous contract with those recipients about what is allowable and, specifically, what is not,” he wrote in his resignation letter.

Finally, according to the letter, Tamminen was sent a spreadsheet from WKA trustee William Wachtel indicating that the majority of the more than $67 million in question went to the Coalition to Protect Clifton Bay, an earlier name for Save the Bays, and “an invoice for reimbursement by WKA from lawyers involved in the [Nygård-Bacon] litigation…in the amount of $1,752,193” for a three-month period in 2020.

Tamminen deemed this reply insufficient. At this point, he threw up his hands and decided to quit, noting in his letter, “I have a fiduciary responsibility to understand the organization’s finances” and stating that because Kennedy and his staff had not provided adequate documentation he could not perform this basic task.

Tamminen declined to comment.

In response to a long list of questions sent to Kennedy by Mother Jones about WKA forwarding money to the Bahamas, RFK Jr. texted, “The coverage on me from mother John’s [sic] has been consistently hostile and inaccurate. MJ was once a counter culture journal that spoke truth to power It now seems to be yet another propaganda bullhorn for the DS Regime.” (Might “DS Regime” refer to a Deep State Regime?) Asked if this text was his full response to the list of queries, Kennedy did not reply.

Tamminen’s letters, Shavelson says, was a “damning piece of evidence.” His resignation drew attention within WKA and its large network of local Waterkeeper groups to a curious question: Why had Kennedy’s organization passed along so much money to the Bahamas? “We didn’t really know who was giving us this money,” a former staffer says.

The WKA’s 990s show that through 2023, the total amount that passed through what the group called its Central America/Caribbean program was $79 million. On the 990s available to the public, the name of the recipient of those funds were redacted. (This is unusual; grantees tend to be identified.) A former WKA staffer says that the recipient listed on the 990s was the law firm of Fred Smith, the Bahamian lawyer who, with Kennedy and Bacon, helped organize Save the Bays and who was associated with Bacon’s wide-ranging fight against Nygård. That battle included a lawsuit charging Nygård with sex crimes.

WKA staff and associates of the Waterkeeper Alliance were suspicious of this funding arrangement. The amount of money going to Save the Bays was “off-kilter,” a former WKA staffer says. “It was disproportionate to the size of the program. They had an office that was maybe 400-square-feet with one full-time staffer and some part-timers. We did not know the source of the money going down there.”

Save the Bays has run a radio show and a youth education program. Its website is no longer operational, and the phone number listed on its Facebook page is out of service. “I’ve never heard of that amount of money being spent on that type of litigation,” Shavelson says.

“This money was orders of magnitude greater than anything in my experience in my 30 years of practice as an environmental lawyer,” says Daniel Cooper, the founding partner of Sycamore Law, a firm that specializes in filing environmental enforcement cases for grassroots nonprofits. (He was not involved in the Save the Bays litigation.)

The former WKA staffer adds that “there was a very closed loop on that money, with Bobby involved.” Some staffers at the time questioned whether some of the funds going to the Bahamas were being used for the ongoing conflict between Bacon and Nygård beyond the environmental lawsuits Save the Bays had filed regarding Nygård.

A key issue was the source of the funding. A review conducted by Mother Jones of charitable organizations associated with Bacon—Moore Charitable Foundation, Belvedere Charitable Foundation, and Bessemer Trust—shows that these entities donated a hefty amount, nearly $63 million, to the Waterkeeper Alliance from 2014 through 2023. (Unlike the Moore and Belvedere foundations, the Bessemer Trust, a multifamily office that oversees more than $200 billion for endowments, families, and foundations, is not controlled by Bacon. But Bacon’s contributions to its Bessemer Giving Fund closely matched the contributions it sent to WKA.)

The WKA trustee confirms that the Bacon donations to WKA were the source of the funds that Kennedy’s outfit passed to Save the Bays. If so, that means Bacon was sending money to WKA—a group for whom he was a major supporter—that Kennedy’s organization, after taking a cut, was forwarding to a group that Bacon, Kennedy, Smith and others had formed, which subsequently filed lawsuits against Bacon’s archnemesis.

For years prior to Tamminen enquiring about WKA’s activity in the Bahamas, Save the Bays had been a controversial organization on the island nation and had prompted questions about its funding and relationship to Bacon. During a 2016 television interview, Fred Smith refused to acknowledge that Bacon was a major financial supporter of Save the Bays. “It is often used as some measure of criticism against us,” he said. When the host suggested that Bacon had used Save the Bays “to get at Peter Nygård…to discredit Peter Nygård,” Smith replied, “Louis Bacon doesn’t need Save the Bays to do what you are suggesting.” In this interview, Smith said, “I have never been paid by Save the Bays… I’m a director of Save the Bays.” (About that time, Minister of Education Jerome Fitzgerald claimed Save the Bays, through its environmental lawsuits, was trying to destabilize and “overthrow” the Progressive Liberal Party government—a charge Smith denied in this interview. Nygård, a PLP supporter, once bragged he had donated $5 million to party.)

After Tamminen’s resignation caused a fuss for WKA, the law firm run by WKA trustee William Wachtel conducted a review of the money sent to the Bahamas and produced a private report. Wachtel was part of this review, according to the trustee who spoke to Mother Jones. In a one-page statement, the WKA board of directors called this inquiry an “independent assessment.” It said that the review found “no red flags” and concluded there was “no clear evidence of misuse of funds” and “no clear evidence of donors improperly gaining benefits from donations”—presumably a reference to Bacon. The statement did not mention Bacon, Save the Bays, or the Bahamas.

Former WKA associates point out that this was not an independent investigation, given that it was conducted by a trustee. “This was a bogus audit,” Shavelson says. A onetime WKA associate says, “To have a trustee conduct an investigation that then says ‘nothing to see here’ doesn’t pass the smell test.”

The inquiry’s final report was shared with an audit committee of the WKA board, not the full board.

The WKA trustee says this inquiry showed that the $79 million was mostly spent on litigation conducted by Smith and his law firm for Save the Bays and that the inquiry reviewed billing documents and invoices from Smith and determined they were accurate and covered legitimate expenses. “We saw nothing spent for anything other than the litigation that went on,” the trustee says. A former board member, who has not seen the review, says that they learned the litigation billing included expenses for lavish hotel suites, limousines, and security services.

Save the Bays and Smith did indeed engage in environmental-related litigation. In 2015, the group launched a legal action regarding pollution attributed to a power plant. It successfully sued Nygård for illegally dredging Clifton Bay to expand his property, and that case led to the Supreme Court of the Bahamas seizing his property in 2018. It also filed a legal action claiming Nygård had engaged in unauthorized construction. In 2021, Save the Bays and Waterkeeper Bahamas filed a case to compel judicial review of foreign oil development in the Bahamas.

But former WKA associates say the nearly $79 million price tag for Save the Bays litigation seems exceedingly high. “The cost of an illegal dredging case is in the tens of thousands of dollars,” a former WKA staffer says. Shavelson asks, “Where’s all this litigation? There would have to be a mountain of stuff for those billables. I’ve never heard of that amount of money being spent on that type of litigation.” Another former WKA associate says that the typical cases that Waterkeeper Alliance members bring range for $10,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars and that there is “no way you can spend $79 million on this type of litigation. You can buy a whole ecosystem for that amount of money.” This source adds, “Without details, there’s no way you can explain these numbers.”

While Smith was filing environmental cases for Save the Bays, he was a key ally of Bacon in the billionaire’s fierce fight with Nygård. According to a lengthy New York Times account of the Bacon-Nygård clash, Smith worked with private investigators and found 15 Bahamian women to participate in a sex crimes lawsuit against Nygård. He also encouraged women who claimed to be Nygård victims to go to the Bahamian police. The newspaper noted that Smith created a nonprofit called Sanctuary, which he and Bacon funded, and that it paid Bahamian lawyers and investigators involved in putting together the sex crimes lawsuit against Nygård. Smith and the private investigators, according to the newspaper, compensated at least two witnesses who located alleged victims.

Nygård reportedly spent $15 million on a smear campaign against Bacon, which included television and radio ads, doctored videos, and outlandish accusations, and Bacon said in court that he expended $53 million for investigators and lawyers in his legal fight with Nygård.

Mother Jones sent lengthy lists of questions to Marc Yaggi and Mary Beth Postman of WKA, Fred Smith, Save the Bays, Louis Bacon (through his Moore Charitable Foundation), and the Trump transition team. It asked WKA if it would release unredacted versions of its 990s. It asked if WKA could provide an accounting of the litigation the tens of millions of dollars supposedly financed. It asked whether Tamminen’s account—including his claim that Kennedy would not provide him information to confirm the money sent to the Bahamas was handled appropriately—was accurate. None of them, except Katie Miller, a Trump transition staffer, replied. Miller emailed, “As a matter of policy, I don’t respond to left wind [sic] activists masquerading as journalists.” The Bessemer Trust did not respond to a request to comment.

Several months after Tamminen prompted a stir about the Bahamas money, Kennedy resigned as WKA president. The WKA trustee says the Bahamas project was not a factor in Kennedy’s resignation. By that point, Kennedy had become a leading promoter of Covid disinformation, and this had caused concern within WKA and among the group’s funders and supporters.

When WKA in November 2020 announced Kennedy’s resignation as president, he said, “Waterkeeper is my life’s work and will always be my proudest achievement…. I’m immensely proud of what we created.” He added, “My dreams overflow with the thousands of miles of magnificent waterways that I’ve been privileged to paddle or travel with many of you over 40 years; the mangroves, the muskies, the Spanish moss, the schooling salmon, the shrimp, crayfish, blue crab, and yellow perch, the calving glaciers and all that flowing water from the Himalayas to the Tetons, from the Andes to the Arctic, from Bimini to Homer, from Bhutan to the Jordan, and from Lake Ontario to the Futaleufú.” He did not mention the Bahamas. Upon his departure, the board named him president emeritus.

A Parting Reminder From Jimmy Carter

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

I tend not to get all dewy-eyed about bipartisanship. It was bipartisanship that gave us the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, deregulation of the financial sector that caused economic disaster, the bloated military budget, trade deals that undercut American workers, and protection for rapacious corporate interests, including energy conglomerates that long denied and covered up evidence of climate change. But I found it hard not to tear up on Thursday morning during Gerald Ford’s eulogy of Jimmy Carter, a posthumous tribute that demonstrated that political division can be overridden by shared values. Or, at least, once could be. 

Ford died 18 years ago. But before he passed, the 38th president of the United States penned a eulogy for the 39th president. Prior to his death, Ford had asked Carter to deliver the eulogy at his funeral. Carter agreed and asked if Ford would do the same at his funeral. It was a bit of a joke: who of the pair would be the one to show up and deliver the second eulogy. At Carter’s funeral at Washington National Cathedral, Ford’s son, Steve Ford, read the testament to Carter that Ford had left behind.

In the 1976 election, Carter, running as a let’s-clean-up-government Democrat who vowed “I will never lie to you,” defeated Ford, who was weighed down by the stench of Richard Nixon and Watergate (and perhaps his pardon of Nixon), by 2 points in the popular vote. Five years later, a year after Carter was trounced by Ronald Reagan, Carter and Ford found themselves together on Air Force One flying to Egypt for the funeral of Anwar Sadat, the assassinated Egyptian president with whom Carter had negotiated the historic Camp David Accords (with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin). The two one-term ex-presidents hit it off and for the next 25 years enjoyed a friendship.

“It was the first time, but by no means the last time, that our unlikely partnership ruffled feathers in the Washington establishment,” Ford recalled in his eulogy.

In the eulogy, Ford noted that during the 1976 contest, “Jimmy knew my political vulnerabilities, and he successfully pointed them out. Now I didn’t like it. But little could I know that the outcome of that 1976 election would bring about one of my deepest and most enduring friendships.” On the return trip from Egypt, they discussed their families, faith, and values—and the bother of having to raise money for a presidential library. They decided they would jointly declare that that Palestinian issue needed to be resolved to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East—not a popular position within the Reagan administration. “It was the first time, but by no means the last time, that our unlikely partnership ruffled feathers in the Washington establishment,” Ford recalled in his eulogy. The pair also agreed to hold a series of conferences on arms control—at a time when the Reagan cold warriors were looking to rip up previous nuclear weapons agreements, expand the US nuclear arsenal, and beat the Soviets in an arms race.

Ford, in this tribute, praised Carter for his integrity: “He displayed that honesty throughout his life.” He hailed Carter for pursuing “brotherhood across boundaries of nationhood, across boundaries of tradition, across boundaries of caste. In America’s urban neighborhood, in rural villages around the world, he reminded us that Christ had been a carpenter. And in Third World villages, he successfully campaigned not for votes but for the eradication of diseases that shame the developed world as they ravaged the undeveloped one.” He cited Carter’s work promoting democracy overseas: “The American people and the people of the world will be forever blessed by his decades of good works. Jimmy Carter’s legacy of peace and compassion will remain unique as it is timeless.”

It was a lovely moment—and a gesture showing that politics need not be an arena of hatred. As Steve Ford spoke his father’s words, it was nigh impossible to consider Donald Trump’s presence in the cathedral—he was in the second row, sitting next to Barack Obama—and to not contemplate how Trump has intensified the animosity that does flow through American politics. Could Trump pen such words about a onetime rival and display graciousness and compassion? No, his go-to schtick is one of cruelty, mockery, and mean-spiritedness. During the campaign, he repeatedly claimed Carter was a happy man because he was now “considered a brilliant president” when compared to President Joe Biden, whom Trump repeatedly derided as an imbecile and moron.

As Carter’s fundamental decency, intelligence, devotion to faith, commitment to public service at home and abroad, and generosity of spirit were celebrated by the eulogists, Trump was the elephant in the room.

Politics for Republicans has long been a blood sport. Nixon exploited racism with his Southern strategy; Reagan teamed up with the religious right that accused Democrats of hating God and country; Newt Gingrich encouraged Republicans to brand Democrats as traitors and the enemies of American families and children; Sarah Palin assailed Obama as a commie who despised the United States. But Trump has embraced malice and brutality unlike any president.

As Carter’s fundamental decency, intelligence, devotion to faith, commitment to public service at home and abroad, and generosity of spirit were celebrated by the eulogists—who included two Carter grandsons; former Vice President Walter Mondale’s son (who read the eulogy his deceased father left behind); Andrew Young, the civil rights leader who served in Carter’s administration as UN ambassador; and Biden—Trump was the elephant in the room. The question hovered: How have we come to this? About to reenter the White House is a grifting and deceitful narcissist who relishes insults, who incites violence, who encourages savagery. And how many houses for the poor did Trump build after his first White House tenure? What efforts did he make to improve the lives of the less fortunate overseas? Trump’s own foundation was shut down, and he was forced to pay a $2 million fine because he had inappropriately used it for business and political—not charitable—purposes.

During his presidential campaign, Carter released a book titled Why Not the Best? After Watergate exposed the sordidness of American politics, he suggested that we as a nation could do much better. When Trump was considering a presidential run in the spring of 2015, I asked one of his aides if his crew was worried about Trump’s well-known liabilities: his history of misogynistic remarks, his many business failures, his mob ties, his relentless hucksterism, his ego, his obnoxiousness. None of that, the aide said, was of concern to Trump’s team. “That’s all baked in,” he said. The strategic premise guiding Trump and his minions was that voters wanted an asshole who would be their asshole. It’s as if the Trump campaign motto would be “Why not the worst?”

As a person, Carter was the antithesis of Trump. Sure, as a politician he was no saint, and his presidency had both accomplishments and serious flaws. But for four decades after leaving the White House, he showed the world how a politician could serve without putting himself first. With Trump returning to power, Carter and all the tributes he has received are counterprogramming showing us that the leader of America need not be a cruel, callous, and vicious megalomaniac.

Trump has adopted crassness as the currency of the realm of politics. He has demonized Americans who are not within his MAGA cult and attempted to delegitimize political foes and critics (as well as the press). He has waged war on decency. In the coming stretch, he can be expected to continue this crusade and further infuse and debase American politics with hatred. Those not entranced or enthralled by his reliance and promotion of animus will need to find in our national discourse and in our own lives acts and moments of decency that can counter the rancor and enmity that Trump seeks to enshrine within the American spirit. This will make the darkness less dark, and from the grave, Carter and Ford have reminded us that is possible.

Kash Patel Claims He Played a Major Role in the Benghazi Case. Former Colleagues Say He Didn’t.

In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters, which claims a supposed Deep State has been plotting against Donald Trump for years, Kash Patel, whom Trump has tapped to replace Chris Wray as FBI director, recounts his three-year stint as a mid-level attorney at the Justice Department. For him, this gig was apparently a radical learning experience. During that time, Patel writes, he came to see that the top leaders of the government were “political gangsters, frauds, and hypocrites.” Yet in the book and in interviews, Patel has embellished his own work at the department.

Patel, previously a public defender in Miami, was a lawyer at the Justice Department’s counterterrorism section from late 2013 until after the 2016 election. In his book, he calls it “a dream job for a young and ambitious lawyer,” and he states that he played a key role in the Benghazi case, in which the FBI and the Justice Department pursued the culprits responsible for the September 11, 2012, attack on a US diplomatic compound in Libya that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. “I was leading the prosecution’s efforts at Main Justice in Washington, DC,” Patel writes.

Several FBI and Justice Department officials who worked the Benghazi case say this description is an exaggeration. Asked about Patel’s characterization, a former FBI special agent who was on that investigation for years exclaimed, “Oh my god, no. Not on that case. Not on Benghazi.”

“Kash has claimed he made certain decisions on what crimes should have been charged and should not have been. He did not make those decisions. He had no major role.”

This former agent said that the counterterrorism section had a small role in the Benghazi probe. Primarily, the FBI and the US attorney’s office in Washington, DC, handled the case. “I don’t recall Patel having any influence on it,” he said. He recounted one meeting during the investigation that Patel attended in which Patel was not taken seriously by the main attorneys on the investigation. “The issue was whether or not we had the information needed to make a charge,” the former agent said. “He wasn’t a very experienced attorney and was dismissed by some of the attorneys at the table. The message was, we’re not paying attention to you.”

A former official in the counterterrorism section pointed out that Patel “briefly” worked on the Benghazi case but “made no major decisions.” He added, “Kash has claimed he made certain decisions on what crimes should have been charged and should not have been. He did not make those decisions. He had no major role.”

Andrew McCabe, a former top FBI official who oversaw much of the Benghazi investigation, said he didn’t recall Patel playing any significant part in that case: “I was deeply involved in that case and personally involved in numerous meetings and briefings and interactions with Justice Department personnel. I don’t believe I ever met the guy. While it is possible we did meet or that we were in the same meeting on occasion, he was not one of the many people I worked closely with while overseeing the FBI’s long investigation of the attack.” (In his book, Patel includes McCabe on his list of purported anti-Trump Deep Staters who deserve “investigation.” Patel has vowed to seek revenge against Trump’s opponents, and Trump recently suggested he expects Patel to take such steps if he becomes FBI chief.)

Since writing his 2023 book, Patel has repeated his claim that he was a “lead prosecutor” on the Benghazi case. “I was the Main Justice lead prosecutor for Benghazi,” Patel said in a YouTube interview earlier this year. NBC News subsequently reported, “The Justice Department’s 2017 announcement that the Libyan [Ahmed Abu Khattala] had been charged in the attack and of his conviction in a 2019 federal trial do not list Patel as the lead prosecutor or as part of the prosecution team.”

The New York Times, too, has reported that Patel “has repeatedly claimed he was the ‘lead prosecutor’ in” the Benghazi case, but was “a junior Justice Department staff member at the time, and he was not part of the trial team.”

In his book, Patel claimed that he argued for a more aggressive prosecution of the Benghazi case and contended the investigation was unduly influenced by political decisions made to protect the Obama administration. But the former counterterrorism official disputed this, saying that there was “no political interference” and that Kash was not part of the discussions in which the critical decisions were made.

In an email to Patel, Mother Jones asked him to respond to the statements from the former FBI and Justice Department officials challenging his description of his involvement in the Benghazi case. Replying for Patel, Alex Pfieffer, a Trump transition team spokesperson, addressed only the McCabe comment: “Kash was assigned as the lead prosecutor for Main Justice in DC on the Benghazi case as part of his role as a national security prosecutor in the Obama Justice Department. Andrew McCabe was fired from the FBI after lying to investigators. He clearly resents that Kash will bring reform to the agency.”

(A 2018 Justice Department inspector general report concluded McCabe had “lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions” when he had been questioned about a leak to the Wall Street Journal. He was fired soon after. Three years later, the Justice Department reversed his dismissal and restored his pension, settling a lawsuit McCabe filed insisting that he had been fired for political reasons.)

In Government Gangsters, Patel also inflated his role in another terrorism case.

On the evening of July 11, 2010, bombs exploded at an Ethiopian restaurant and a rugby club in Kampala, Uganda, where patrons were watching the World Cup final. More than 70 people were killed, including an American who worked for a nonprofit. Al Shabaab, a Somali terrorist group with ties to Al Qaeda, claimed responsibility. Within days, the FBI’s New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, at the request of Ugandan authorities, dispatched a team of FBI agents, analysts, and forensic experts to assist the investigation.

Eventually, nine conspirators, including the accused mastermind, were captured and found guilty in Ugandan courts of assorted crimes related to the bombings. They received sentences ranging from five years to life imprisonment. This was a major victory for the fight against terrorism, for it marked, according to the BBC, “the first major conviction of al-Shabaab suspects outside Somalia.”

In his book, Patel boasted that he “served as the lead DoJ prosecutor” on this case. But there was no prosecution in the United States related to this bombing. “Kash was assisting the Ugandans,” the former counterterrorism official said. “There was no DoJ prosecution. He was for a time the DoJ lead in working with the Ugandans. But if that description makes you think he was prosecuting this case, that was incorrect.” A former FBI agent who worked for years on the Uganda investigation said, “No one on the team would have considered him a lead prosecutor. Maybe he did.”

In his reply to Mother Jones, Pfeiffer did not address these comments about Patel’s participation in the Uganda case. Instead, he noted, “Kash Patel received the Assistant Attorney General Award For Excellence in 2017 for his efforts assisting Uganda prosecute and convict the Al Shabaab terrorists responsible for the 2010 World Cup bombings.”

In response to a question about Patel’s statements indicating that he aims to pursue revenge against Trump’s political opponents and journalists, Pfeiffer said, “The FBI will target crime, not individuals with Kash leading the bureau,” and he maintained, “Kash is committed to safeguarding Americans’ First Amendment rights.”

The former counterterrorism official noted that Patel was a competent employee when he worked at this Justice Department section: “He was fine. He did his job. He’s exaggerated what he did for us. But I had no issue with him. He got along with the FBI and the military, who he often worked with. They had no issues with him. He wasn’t a problem. The one glitch was in Houston.” That glitch occurred when Patel had to rush from Tajikistan to a courtroom in Houston for a hearing in a case involving a suspected ISIS operative accused of planning to blow up an American shopping mall. The judge berated Patel for not wearing a tie and threw him out of his chambers. This kerfuffle drew some press attention, and in his book Patel bitterly expresses dismay that his superiors at the department did not stick up for him. “Cowards,” he wrote.

The former counterterrorism official noted that he and others who worked with Patel at the Justice Department have been surprised by Patel’s transformation into a self-proclaimed warrior against what he calls the Deep State. “He left the counterterrorism section to work for Devin Nunes [then the pro-Trump California Republican chairing the House Intelligence Committee], and the rest is history,” he said. “Up until then, he was a regular employee. He didn’t talk politics in the office that much. There was nothing to explain his view now that the DoJ should go after Trump’s enemies. I didn’t see this coming. None of the people I worked with saw this coming. I am mystified by what he’s become.”

Donald Trump Will Need a Police State to Implement His Agenda

Mr. Smith, please come in, have a seat. Our records show you’ve been with the State Department for 17 years, the past five in the Bureau of National Security and Nonproliferation. Now it has come to our attention through an anonymous tip to the America First Compliance Program that you made a derogatory comment about the president. A subsequent internal investigation discovered your wife donated $125 to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Through further inquiry—with the assistance of the TrumpX social media team—we located a deleted post from your daughter’s timeline that included a photograph of her and your wife knocking on doors in west Philadelphia for Kamala Harris. Under the new Loyal Americans in Government executive order, we are terminating your employment as of this moment. As you might know, your position has been reclassified and no longer enjoys the civil service protections of the past. There is no right of appeal. My secretary will provide you the separation paperwork. You may leave now.

Donald Trump has many plans for his return engagement at the White House. Several will require police-state tactics.

During his 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly and enthusiastically declared he would order the mass deportation of 11 million or so undocumented immigrants. At his rallies, diehard fans excitedly waved signs proclaiming the slogan they chanted: “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” Such a program would require deploying a paramilitary force—or even the National Guard or the military—to locate migrants, apprehend them, and guard them in a network of prisons and detention camps. (Executives at private prison, security, and surveillance software companies are already salivating.) This system would depend on Trump ramping up monitoring of workplaces and neighborhoods, and on anonymous tip lines susceptible to abuse and false leads. (Have a problem with a neighbor? Report ’em.) Perhaps the forces rounding up migrants will be afforded special powers to evade civil liberties protections. As in East Germany during the Cold War, an atmosphere of terror and intimidation will pervade.

Expect something similar within the federal workforce. Months before he left office at the end of his first term, Trump issued an executive order that would have removed employment protections from civil servants deemed disloyal to the president and that could have required expressions of allegiance before being hired—in other words, loyalty oaths for Trump. The order created a new employment category called Schedule F, to be applied to perhaps tens of thousands of federal workers (maybe more), permitting them to be fired without cause. President Joe Biden rescinded the order upon entering the White House and, in October, his administration issued final rules aimed at preventing a future president from reinstating it. But Trump has vowed to bring the plan back on “day one” and turn a large section of the federal workforce into a Trump corps—a stated goal of Steve Bannon and other MAGA schemers.

Reviving Schedule F, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) has warned, would be a “direct threat to our national security and our government’s ability to function.” Under such a regime, a broad range of federal employees—say, lawyers at the EPA who work on climate change, scientists at the CDC who prepare for pandemics, or analysts at the CIA who watch the Kremlin—could be dumped at will if they raise questions about a Trump position or don’t pay him obeisance. And the threat of a pink slip would not only silence dissent; it could be used to press government employees to take inappropriate actions—maybe jigger statistics to make Trump’s economic policies look good, or slow-walk disaster aid destined for blue states.

Independent, fact-based, and expertise-driven work across the executive branch would be threatened. Picture a world in which ratting on colleagues is encouraged and snitches roam the hallways of federal agencies looking for signs of disloyalty to Trump. The federal bureaucracy will become a frightening place for many public servants, likely triggering an immense brain drain.

There could be pressure to award government contracts, impose or lift regulations, or conduct investigations based on Trump’s lists of friends and foes. With this power, Trump would be able to threaten corporations, organizations, and people who piss him off. He could sic the IRS on them. He could order the imposition of tariffs to hinder specific firms and sectors. Most notably, Trump could instruct FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors to investigate his rivals, even when there is no legitimate case. In the past, he has called for initiating criminal probes against Joe Biden, Alvin Bragg, Liz Cheney, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Kamala Harris, Letitia James, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and many others. Were he to demand such investigations, it would turn the Justice Department into an agency of retribution, serving Trump’s revenge fantasies and shifting resources from legitimate endeavors. That would be good news for real criminals.

And what of the agencies that Congress has long intended to be insulated from presidential interference? The infamous Project 2025 policy blueprint—expected to be the basis of many Trump actions—calls for ending the independence of these powerful and important regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission. The Supreme Court would probably need to okay such a bold expansion of presidential power, but conservative groups recently took one challenge designed to provoke such a decision all the way to the high court. While the justices this past October declined—for now—to hear the case, Trump and his allies have mused about seizing control of these bodies, and Trump has openly discussed using the FCC to punish troublesome newscasters by pulling broadcasting licenses.

There are protections against spying on Americans. But with the Supreme Court ruling a president has wide-ranging immunity, what’s to stop him?

The military, too, might not be immune. In mid-November, the news leaked that Trump advisers were weighing an executive order that would create a “warrior board” of former senior military personnel to vet three- and four-star officers and recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership. Such a board would permit Trump to purge the military of leaders tied to DEI programs—whom he previously assailed as “woke generals”—or those he deems to be insufficiently devoted to him, creating a chilling effect throughout the Pentagon.

And there’s another way the military could be politicized. Trump allies have urged the revival of the Insurrection Act, which permits a president to use the military “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” Trump loyalists have claimed he could declare undocumented migrants an invading army and set the military upon them. And in an interview late in the campaign, Trump proposed using the armed forces to go after “radical left lunatics.” He might want to do the same to others opposing his actions—what he calls “the enemy within”—and the Insurrection Act’s vague standards are ripe for abuse: Under the supposed goal of suppressing domestic violence, the military could be ordered to spy on Americans who might be planning protests.

Once he’s back in the White House, Trump will again have access to the extensive surveillance power of the intelligence community. He could compel agencies to spy on American citizens with whom he has a beef. They could be coerced to supply him with information he could use to pressure, embarrass, or harm a detractor. Doing so might be illegal; there are civil liberty protections against spying on Americans. But now that the Supreme Court has ruled a president has wide-ranging immunity against criminal prosecution, what’s to stop him? (During oral arguments, his lawyer suggested that, as president, Trump could order a Navy seal team to assassinate a political rival and be clear of prosecution.)

The same goes for other laws that prohibit abusing government power. It’s not just Trump who is free of guardrails. If other government officials break the law doing his bidding, he will have the power to pardon them. His minions will be well protected.

There are more than 430 federal departments and agencies. Trump could turn each into a ministry of fear, full of devotees who serve him, not the public interest, which he can use to target anyone who draws his ire. Meanwhile, the mass deportation program, should it come into being, will terrorize millions and create an infrastructure fueled by suspicion. If Trump succeeds in these authoritarian endeavors, it will radically reshape not only the US government but the very nature of America.

How Kash Patel Became a Useful Idiot for Vladimir Putin

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

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.”

Here Are the Republicans Kash Patel Wants to Target

For years, Kash Patel, the MAGA provocateur, conspiracy theory monger, and seller of pills he claims reverse the effects of Covid vaccines, who Donald Trump has announced as his pick to replace FBI Director Chris Wray, has made his mission plain: He wants to crush the supposed Deep State that has conspired against Trump. Last year, while appearing on Steve Bannon’s podcast, he vowed, “We will go and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens to help Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.” This was not an empty threat, for Patel has a list of specific targets for his score-settling. And that line-up includes not only Democrats but also prominent Republicans.

Patel laid out his plans in a 2023 book titled Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for our Democracy. In this work, he breathlessly described the Deep State as a “coordinated, ideologically rigid force independent from the people that manipulates the levers of politics and justice for its own gain and self-preservation.” It is run “by a significant number of high-level cultural leaders and officials who, acting through networks of networks, disregard objectivity, weaponize the law, spread disinformation, spurn fairness, or even violate their oaths of office for political and personal gain, all at the expense of equal justice and American national security.” He added, “They are thugs in suits, nothing more than government gangsters.” And he inveighed that this is “a cabal of unelected tyrants.”

In his book, Patel, a supporter of QAnon and a promoter of assorted MAGA conspiracy theories (the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, the Trump-Russia investigation was a hoax, and the January 6 riot was sparked by “strange agitators” and federal agents), called for mounting “investigations” to “take on the Deep State.” Though he doesn’t specify what the cause for these inquiries would be, he has plenty of people in mind. In an appendix to the book, Patel presented a list of 60 supposed members of the Deep State who are current or former executive branch officials and who presumably would be the prey. He noted this roster did not include “other corrupt actors,” such as California Democrats Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, “the entire fake news mafia press corps,” and former GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan. (When Patel worked for the GOP-controlled House intelligence committee, he had run-ins with Ryan over the issuance of subpoenas and Patel leaking information to a Fox News reporter—which must mean that Ryan was a Deep State operative.)

Patel’s list names what would for a MAGA activist be the obvious purported cabalists: President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former CIA chief John Brennan, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, and former or current FBI directors Chris Wray, Robert Mueller, and James Comey. (Patel doesn’t explain why Comey, a supposed anti-Trump Deep State player, torpedoed Clinton’s presidential bid in 2016 when he reopened an FBI inquiry into her handling of State Department emails in the final days of the campaign.)

This line-up also includes a number of Republicans and onetime Trump appointees. These include Bill Barr, who served as attorney general for Trump; John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers in his first White House stint; Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House counsel; Mark Esper, a secretary of defense under Trump; Sarah Isgur Flores, who was head of communications for Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions; Alyssa Farah Griffin, the director of strategic commissions in the Trump White House; and Stephanie Grisham, former chief of staff for Melania Trump.

When Barr was Trump’s attorney general, he prevented Trump from appointing Patel deputy director of the FBI, noting Patel was vastly unqualified for the position. “Over my dead body,” Barr told the White House at the time. Barr’s presence on Patel’s run-down of Deep State wrongdoers—like Ryan’s inclusion— suggests it might also function as a list of his own personal vendettas.

After recently learning her name appeared in Patel’s appendix of enemies, Flores, who’s now a news commentator, tweeted, “Just learned I’m included on this list. I’ve never met Patel or attended any meetings where he was present as far as I know. Will include a disclaimer when I talk about this intent to nominate from now on.”

There are other Republicans on Patel’s Deep State inventory: Robert Hur, the US attorney who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents; Cassidy Hutchinson, the twenty-something aide who worked for Mark Meadows, the final White House chief of staff during the first Trump presidency; Charles Kupperman, a deputy national security adviser for Trump; Ryan McCarthy, a secretary of the Army under Trump; Pat Philbin, a deputy White House counsel for Trump; Rod Rosenstein, a deputy attorney general for Trump; and Miles Taylor, a Department of Homeland Security official under Trump.

Last year, Patel filed a lawsuit against Wray, Rosenstein, Hur, and others, claiming that in 2017, when he was an investigator for the House intelligence committee, the Justice Department spied on him.

These Republicans on Patel’s hit list are all in his dark worldview sinister Deep Staters. Yet some of these selections are especially absurd. Barr, as attorney general, undermined Mueller’s investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal, an inquiry that according to Patel was a Deep State plot. Why would a Deep State denizen do that? And while Barr did not back up Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him, he endorsed Trump’s presidential campaign this year. Another curious move for an anti-Trump conspirator.

When she was at the Justice Department, Flores defended Trump’s controversial Muslim travel ban and his family separation policy. Hur issued a report that raised questions about Biden’s age and abilities. Rosenstein helped Trump fire Comey as FBI director. Hutchinson was an intern for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and then Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) before becoming an intern in the Trump White House for the office of legislative affairs. (She was a key witness at the hearings held by the House select committee that investigated the January 6 riot.). Griffin, the daughter of far-right journalist Joseph Farah, worked for her dad’s website, WorldNetDaily, then interned for a GOP congressman and was an associate producer for Fox host Laura Ingraham. She later served as a press secretary for Meadows and for the House Freedom Caucus before becoming a spokesperson for Vice President Mike Pence and, then, director of strategic communications for the Trump White House.

These are not the profiles or actions of Deep State plotters. Their inclusion on Patel’s list reveals the ludicrousness of his notion that a nefarious Deep State exists and has been scheming to sabotage Trump and destroy America. Patel is like the old commie-hunter who spots subversives under every bed and at every PTA bake sale. His book and his entire exercise of naming names raises questions about his analytical ability—an important asset for an FBI director. This appendix shows Patel is nothing but an extreme Trump loyalist, yearning to use (or abuse) government power to pursue Trump’s critics and opponents, as well as his own. Patel is even something of a Trump royalist, having written a series of children’s books about a “King Donald” who manages to triumph over his evil foes led by “Hillary Queenton.”

Still, Patel and Government Gangsters, which features a photo of Patel on the cover, ought not be dismissed. Patel has signaled he’s looking to conduct revenge-a-thon, and Trump endorsed this work as a “brilliant roadmap highlighting every corrupt actor.” He declared, “we will use this blueprint to help us take back the White House and remove these Gangsters from all of Government!” That indicates Patel’s list could end up as a to-do—or to-get—list for Trump. Not only Democrats should worry about that.

How Kash Patel, Trump’s FBI Pick, Embraced the Unhinged QAnon Movement

In the middle of the Thanksgiving holiday stretch, Donald Trump announced what might be his most extreme and controversial appointment yet: Kash Patel for FBI director. There are many reasons why this decision is outrageous. Patel is a MAGA combatant who has fiercely advocated Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and who has championed January 6 rioters as patriots and unfairly persecuted political prisoners. (The still ongoing January 6 case, including scores of prosecutions for assaults on police, is one of the FBI’s largest and most successful criminal investigations ever.) Patel is also a fervent promoter of conspiracy theories. At the end of Trump’s first presidency, when he was a Pentagon official, he spread the bonkers idea that Italian military satellites had been employed to turn Trump votes to Joe Biden votes in the 2020 election. And he has falsely claimed that the Trump-Russia scandal was a hoax cooked up by the FBI and so-called Deep State to sabotage Trump.

Moreover, Patel has been supportive of the most loony conspiracy theory in MAGA land: QAnon.

The QAnon theory, which arose in 2017, holds that an intelligence operative known only as Q has revealed through cryptic messages that a cabal of global, Satanic, cannibalistic elitists and pedophiles is operating a child sex trafficking operation as it vies for world domination and conspires against Trump. This evil band supposedly includes Democratic politicians, Hollywood celebrities, business tycoons, and other notables. Those who believe this bunk see Trump as a hero who is secretly battling this conspiracy in a titanic, behind-the-scenes struggle. It is pure nuttery. Worse than that, QAnon has sparked multiple acts of violence.

Yet Patel repeatedly has hailed QAnoners and promoted this conspiracy theory. In early 2022, when he sat on the board of Trump’s social media company, Truth Social, Patel amplified an account called @Q that pushed out QAnon messaging. As Media Matters reported: “Patel’s catering to the QAnon community has also gone beyond the @Q account. In July, he posted an image featuring a flaming Q on Truth Social and starting in at least April, he went on numerous QAnon-supporting shows to promote Truth Social—urging viewers to join the platform, praising hosts for being on the platform, and promising to promote the hosts there.” On one show, Patel declared, “Whether it’s the Qs of the world, who I agree with some of what he does and I disagree with some of what he does, if it allows people to gather and focus on the truth and the facts, I’m all for it.”

“There’s a lot of good to a lot of it,” Patel said of QAnon, which he called a “movement.”

On another show, Patel acknowledged he was courting the QAnon crowd for Truth Social: “We try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences because whoever that person is has certainly captured a widespread breath of the MAGA and the America First movement. And so what I try to do is—what I try to do with anything, Q or otherwise, is you can’t ignore that group of people that has such a strong dominant following.” He praised QAnon, saying, “There’s a lot of good to a lot of it,” and he agreed with a host who said Q had “been so right on so many things.” Patel praised Q for starting a “movement.”

Appearing on Grace Time TV in Septmeber 2022, Patel said of the QAnon community, “We’re just blown away at the amount of acumen some of these people have.” He added, “If it’s Q or whatever movement that’s getting that information out, I am all for it, every day of the week.”

When Patel was promoting a children’s book he wrote—about a King Donald who is persecuted by his political enemies—he offered ten copies in which he signed the books and added a special message: “WWG1WGA!”” That’s the QAnon motto: “Where we go one, we go all.” He hyped this special offer on Truth Social using the hashtag “#WWG1WGA.”

“Let’s have fun with the truth,” Patel said.

Appearing on the MatrixxxGrove Show, Patel defended his use of the QAnon motto: “People keep asking me about all this Q stuff. I’m like, what does it matter? What I’m telling you is there is truth in a lot of things that many people say, and what I’m putting out there is the truth. And how about we have some fun along the way?” He added, “Let’s have fun with the truth.” He also characterized the QAnon movement as being a vital part of the national debate: “Basically, the bottom line is—and I get attacked for calling out some of the stuff that quote-unquote Q says and whatnot. I’m like, what’s the problem with that? It’s social discourse.”

Patel is a purveyor of far-right conspiracism in other ways that overlap with QAnon. He claims a nefarious Deep State controls the US government and is arrayed against Trump and conservatives. He encourages paranoia and calls for revenge. Talking to MAGA strategist Steve Bannon on Bannon’s podcast last year, Patel proclaimed, “We will go and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens to help Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whither its criminally or civilly.”

Here is Trump’s nominee for FBI Director Kash Patel calling for “offensive operations” to jail Americans who they consider “the enemy.”“We will go out and find the conspirators… Yes, we are going to come after the people in the media."

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen.bsky.social) 2024-12-01T01:02:24.157Z

Seeking retribution, spreading conspiracy theories, backing an attempt to overthrow a presidential election, supporting J6 rioters, echoing Moscow talking points—none of this is what one would see in a responsible choice for FBI director. But Patel’s cozying up to QAnon is especially troubling. Among many vital duties, the FBI director oversees the federal government’s efforts to combat violent crime—an area where QAnon remains a concern. Patel’s relationship with QAnon shows either that he has a severely distorted view of reality or that he will recklessly exploit dangerous, misguided, and false ideas for political benefit. Neither is an approach suitable for the most powerful and important law enforcement agency in the land.

Tulsi Gabbard Keeps Starting Up PACs. Where Is the Money Going?

In March 2024, Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman and failed presidential candidate whom Donald Trump has tapped to be director of national intelligence, created a political action committee called Defend Freedom, Inc. The group posted a bare-bones website featuring photos of Gabbard and declared it “was organized to elect patriots who will fight to defend America’s Peace, Security, Prosperity, and Freedom.” It asked for donations of up to $5,000 to “make an impact across America.” Tens of thousands of people contributed to Gabbard’s PAC. Through mid-October it raised $1.9 million, including a $16,552 transfer from another Gabbard PAC called Team Tulsi.

Of all the money it pulled in, Defend Freedom, Inc. devoted only $20,000 to contributions for a small number of candidates, all far-right MAGA-ish Republicans: US Senate candidates Kari Lake and Tim Sheehy, and US House contenders Joe Kent, Brian Jack, and Mayra Flores. (Before running for a congressional seat in 2022, Flores published social media posts promoting QAnon.) Where did all the money go? Gabbard’s outfit spent $1.3 million on operating expenses—at least $1 million on fundraising and direct mail, according to its filings with the Federal Election Commission. Like many PACs, it acted mainly as a money-churning machine that generated donations that mostly profited vendors and consultants.

“It’s uncommon for a politician to have three or four separate PACs, though they can be used for different purposes. The most common number is one. Generally the more you have is because of obfuscation. It confuses people.”

Defend Freedom, Inc. is one of a network of organizations Gabbard has assembled in recent years, and they warrant a thorough review as part of her Senate confirmation process.

Gabbard is a highly unconventional candidate for the DNI job, which entails overseeing all 18 agencies in the US intelligence community (including the CIA and the NSA). She has espoused fringe views often in sync with Moscow talking points. She provided a preemptive defense of Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and afterward boosted the conspiracy theory advanced by Russia that the United States had been collaborating with Ukraine to develop biological weapons to deploy against Russia. Her fondness for Putin has earned her favorable coverage from Russia’s propaganda outlets, and her appointment, if she is confirmed, will likely spook intelligence services throughout the world and make them hesitant to collaborate with US intelligence. She also has no experience managing or holding a senior position within a large organization, let alone an agency with the task of safeguarding the nation. Consequently, an extensive vetting of Gabbard ought to focus on her own political operation.

In February, Gabbard established a Super PAC called For Love of Country, Inc. Its name echoed the title of a book she would release in April with the subtitle “Leave the Democrat Party Behind.” Gabbard had quit the Democratic Party in 2022, proclaiming herself an independent, and she went on to become a highly partisan commentator, hurling harsh rhetoric at her former party. The promotional material for this book claimed that the Democrats were now “controlled by an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by woke ideology and racializing everything.” It slammed the Democratic Party as “a clear and present threat to the God‑given freedoms enshrined in the Constitution.”

Around the time of the book’s publication—at a point when Gabbard’s bizarre political journey had taken her from a Democratic presidential bid to appearing on the short list of Trump’s potential running-mates—her For Love of Country, Inc. PAC banked hefty checks from several big-money Republican funders. The biggest amount came from a donor named David Flory, who sent Gabbard’s PAC a whopping $100,000. On the PAC’s FEC filing, it neglected to note—as it is compelled to do—Flory’s occupation and employer.

There was something odd about this contribution. The name David Flory matches that of a Miami investor and former Washington, DC, lobbyist who in recent years has donated millions to Republican candidates and committees, including the Trump campaign, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the PAC run by John Bolton, a GOP hawk. But the David Flory recorded on the PAC’s filing listed a different address than the one used by the David Flory who made all those other contributions. The address on the For Love of Country, Inc. PAC filing was for a modest-looking apartment building on the western edge of Miami—a residence unlikely to be the home of a $100,000 donor. The Flory with the record of big-bucks donations lives in a Miami Beach apartment worth an estimated $4.1 million.

According to public records, there is no David Flory who resides at that apartment building in western Miami. But a fellow named David Flor once lived there. He died in 2013.

Looking to talk to the David Flory of Miami Beach, a Mother Jones reporter reached his wife, Julie Flory on her cell phone, and asked if she was familiar with the Miami address associated with the $100,000 donation to the For Love of Country, Inc. PAC. She said did not know it. She then conferenced her husband David into the call. Asked about the $100,000 contribution to Gabbard’s PAC and the address tied to it, he said, “Doesn’t sound familiar,” and he tried to end the conversation. Pressed as to whether he had made a donation to Gabbard, he said, “I’m not interested in talking to you about it.” Sounding irritated, he addressed his wife, “Julie, don’t take these calls. Just hang up on them.” He then left the call.

Another early major donor to the For Love of Country, Inc. PAC was John Calnan, the head of a Massachusetts construction company, who kicked in $25,000. He gave $200,000 to the Trump campaign this year. A few months later—shortly after Gabbard endorsed Trump—disgraced Las Vegas mogul, Steve Wynn, a close pal of Trump, cut this PAC a $60,000 check.

All told, from February through mid-October, For Love of Country, Inc. raised $280,000. It only spent $49,000. Ten thousand dollars of those expenditures paid for an event in Las Vegas. Almost all the rest covered payments to Gabbard’s political staff and advisers.

The PAC described itself as “Tulsi’s vehicle for messaging in the 2024 election, including a national ad campaign to communicate with middle-of-the-road voters, disenfranchised Democrats, and undecided Independents.” It claimed, “For Love of Country PAC will use traditional and disruptive methods to blend the tried-and-true approach with innovation to reach otherwise unlikely voting demographics.” Its expenditures through mid-October do not indicate there was much of an effort of that sort made by Gabbard’s PAC. It looks as if this PAC funded by pro-Trump Republican money-bags mostly existed to cover the costs of Gabbard’s political team.

Gabbard controls yet another PAC, Our Freedom, Our Future, which was launched in 2023. Its mission, according to its website, is “to protect our freedoms and support leaders who share her commitment to uphold and protect our God-given rights enshrined in the Constitution.” It declared, “Our founders envisioned a government that is of, by, and for the people—not of, by, and for the powerful elite. We need to elect leaders who are committed to the same.” From mid-2023 until October, it raised only $45,000, with the lion’s share of that money going to pay Gabbard’s spokesperson and another adviser. It made a $1,000 contribution to a Republican candidate in Ohio who lost a congressional primary contest.

“It’s uncommon for a politician to have three or four separate PACs, though they can be used for different purposes,” says Sarah Bryner, a political scientist and campaign finance expert. “The most common number is one. Generally the more you have is because of obfuscation. It confuses people.”

Gabbard also created a nonprofit called We Must Protect. In its tax filing, the group stated its mission was to “engage in research and public education for the benefit of those vulnerable populations in our community that deserve to be honored and cared for.” It drew only $2,500 in funding in 2022. After the horrendous wildfires on Maui last year, We Must Protect tried to raise money to aid the victims and promised “every dollar” contributed will “help people affected by the devastating fires.” The nonprofit’s 2023 tax filing is not yet available. So its fundraising and relief efforts related to the fires cannot be publicly evaluated. Nor are its donors publicly disclosed. In October, Gabbard said that We Must Protect had raised $331,000 to aid survivors of Hurricane Helene.

Last week, Mother Jones sent Tulsi Gabbard a long list of questions regarding her PACs and We Must Protect, which shares a phone number with Gabbard’s office and her Defend Freedom, Inc. PAC. We requested We Must Protect’s 2023 tax filing and information about its donors and its work regarding the Maui fires. The list included queries about the PACs’ spending and whether they did the work they claimed to do, about their high spending on fundraising, and about the $100,000 contribution attributed to David Flory.

Gabbard declined to respond to any of the questions or provide any information on We Must Protect’s donors and activities. Erika Tsuji, her spokeswoman, forwarded the list to the Trump transition office. Alexa Henning, a spokeswoman for the transition, replied with a statement that did not address any of the queries. She only offered praise for We Must Protect and claimed Gabbard’s Defend Freedom PAC and For Love of Country PAC “enabled her to engage millions of Americans…encouraging them back pragmatic GOP candidates nationwide, including electing Donald. J. Trump.”

One Gabbard PAC did recently encounter trouble with the FEC. On November 4, the commission sent a letter to Thomas Datwyler, the treasurer of the For Love of Country, Inc. PAC, notifying the outfit that it had apparently placed $151,000 of its donations into the wrong account and setting a December 9 deadline for a response.

Datwyler, a longtime financial consultant for GOP candidates, is also the treasurer for Defend Freedom, Inc.; Our Freedom, Our Future; and Team Tulsi. Last year, he was caught up in the George Santos scandal. In the midst of the controversy over the then-GOP congressman’s false claims about his campaign finances—among his many lies about his background and career—paperwork filed with the FEC indicated that Datwyler had replaced the original treasurer for several of Santos’ campaign committees. But Datwyler’s attorney quickly informed the FEC that Datwyler had not agreed to become treasurer for the Santos entities. This added yet another level of mystery to the Santos scandal.

Months later, there was another twist to this story: Datwyler’s attorney wrote the FEC to withdraw his previous statement that denied Datwyler had become the treasurer for those Santos committees. He noted that “public reporting has caused me to lose confidence in the accuracy and veracity of the information provided by Mr. Datwyler at the time I submitted those communications on his behalf.” The Daily Beast had reported that that “Datwyler had in reality operated as a shadow treasurer for Santos—despite disavowing that role to the public, to the FEC, and apparently even his own lawyer.”

Datwyler did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the Santos episode and Gabbard’s PACs. Gabbard, too, did not respond to questions about Datwyler.

If Gabbard reaches a Senate confirmation hearing, there will be much for the senators to grill her on, especially her sympathetic views regarding Putin and Russia and her support for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, as well as her efforts to help Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, who each exposed top-secret information that caused damage for the intelligence community. A key question will be whether someone as excessively partisan as Gabbard can be a fair-minded and even-handed overseer of the intelligence agencies, the intelligence they produce, and the covert actions they mount. Senate Intelligence Committee investigators should be sure to examine the network of organizations she has built and the flow of money in and out of her nonprofit. There are few jobs in the federal government as important as managing the sprawling US intelligence community. With no direct intelligence experience, Gabbard deserves scrutiny of all matters that can shed light on her fitness for this post.

Additional reporting by Russ Choma.

The Media and Trump: Not Resistance, But Not Acceptance

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Shortly after Donald Trump narrowly beat Kamala Harris, Politico, the all-politics-all-the-time news outlet, invited readers to participate in a contest: Predict Trump’s cabinet appointees. Whoever did best would walk away with assorted Politico swag. A convicted felon and deceitful demagogue who four years ago incited an attack on the Capitol and tried to overthrow American democracy—a man described as a “fascist” by retired generals who worked with him—is returning to power and bringing with him to the White House a fistful of threats, including vows to suppress the media. But we can have fun, right? Pin the tail on the Trump appointees and win prizes!

This was a stupid and small move that received scant public attention. But it symbolizes a shift in the media, as news outfits figure out how to contend with the new order. Too many, I’m afraid, will either purposefully choose or drift toward an accommodationist stance. I recently heard about the leaders of one online site that previously published hard-hitting stories on Trump and his allies informing their staff that it must pivot with Trump back in the White House. And it’s long been true that mainstream news organizations, particularly network television, have had to reach a modus vivendi with a White House to get the exclusive interviews and video footage they crave. That can be expected once again.

My hunch is that a line will form across the media landscape between those entities that cover the Trump crowd in a relatively normal fashion—What is the president thinking? What are his advisers telling him? What is happening between the White House and Congress? What’s the latest palace intrigue? Who’s invited to the state dinner? What do the polls say?—and those who view as the overarching story the profound threat of authoritarianism posed by Trump and his henchmen and henchwomen. Do the usual political stories matter as much if Trump moves ahead with plans to deport millions and to place in power assorted extremists? Or if he moves to undermine democracy?

Within days of Trump’s announcement that he will nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services—one of his most absurd and dangerous picks—legacy media were downplaying the peril of a Kennedy appointment. On social media NPR reported, “RFK Jr. wants to tackle chronic disease. Despite controversial views on vaccines, his focus on healthy food and taking on special interests may find broad support—and face political headwinds.”

RFK Jr. wants to tackle chronic disease. Despite controversial views on vaccines, his focus on healthy food and taking on special interests may find broad support — and face political headwinds.

— NPR (@npr.org) 2024-11-15T19:28:48.033Z

The New York Times repeatedly referred to Kennedy as merely a “vaccine skeptic.” As did CNN. Controversial views? Skepticism? Describing Kennedy as a vaccine skeptic with unconventional views is a form of sanewashing. That’s rather value neutral and, more important, highly inaccurate. Kennedy is a promoter of debunked conspiracy theories that are bonkers. (Here’s one I examined.) And he is not a skeptic of vaccines; he is an anti-vaxxer who has said no vaccine is safe or effective. Not one. This fellow has declared he wants to place all new drug development on hold for eight years. That means no new medications for cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, heart disease, and everything else. He is a radical, and if he’s allowed to turn his “controversial views” into policy, millions of Americans could suffer.

One media trait is an aversion to repetition. News is what’s new, right? We already reported that.

This somewhat respectful treatment of Kennedy is but one example. Look at how the New York Times characterized several of Trump’s other bizarre appointments: “Trump Takes on the Pillars of the ‘Deep State.’” The paper reported, “The Justice Department, Pentagon and intelligence agencies were the three areas of government that proved to be the most stubborn obstacles to Mr. Trump in his first term.” This presentation gives weight to Trump’s conspiratorial claim there’s a diabolical Deep State that has been arrayed against him. Worse, it portrays government agencies that tried to hold Trump accountable for alleged wrongdoing as obstructionist. Meanwhile, the Washington Post is holding a 2024 Global Women’s Summit featuring Kellyanne Conway, a Trump adviser, and Lara Trump, the GOP co-chair and Trump daughter-in-law—two women who are part of Trump’s inner circle. I assume that Jeff Bezos’ newspaper is hoping to financially profit from this conference—being conducted in partnership with Tina Brown Media—and figure it needs Trump and Conway to help them succeed. Does democracy die at fancy confabs that celebrate enablers of autocracy?

Trump’s thin victory in 2024 ought not wipe the slate clean. He remains a thug who refused to accept election results not in his favor, encouraged political violence, amplified foul conspiracy theories of various stripes, lied nonstop to spread fear, hatred, and paranoia, demonized his foes as “the enemy within,” expressed admiration for Hitler’s generals, and proposed terminating the Constitution, placing critics in front of military tribunals, prosecuting his detractors, and even executing one of them. One media trait is an aversion to repetition. News is what’s new, right? We already reported that. But if Trump’s far-reaching offenses are not repeatedly centered in media coverage of him, the press will be accomplices to Trump’s perilous perversion of American politics.

No doubt, there will be the occasional wonderful exposé of Trump’s perfidy in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. But the big media institutions—mostly for-profit corporations with eyes keenly trained on the bottom line—will look to play ball with the Trump crew or, at least, cover it in business-as-usual fashion, even as Trump pummels them as the “enemy of the people.” The billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who caused a fuss by blocking the paper’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris for president, this past week said that he wants to redo the “entire” paper to make sure “voices from all sides” are heard and the news is “just the facts.” He didn’t say much more to indicate whether this means a kinder approach to Trump and the land of MAGA. Yet that seemed the message.

The gravitational pull within this business encourages normalizing politicians and officials and eschewing evaluation and rendering judgments.

There are other media-related concerns as we approach Trump 2.0. As demonstrated in the past fortnight, Trump’s style is to wield a firehose of multiple outrages, realizing that it’s tough to track each and every one of his transgressions in such a blitz. I fear as he mounts his assault on good government and decency during his presidency, there will be too many misdeeds to follow. There won’t be enough journalists to cover all his villainy and its consequences—neither at the local nor the national levels. The media industry has been decimated in the past two decades, with a sharp decline in news reporters on the beat. Having fewer watchdogs allows grifters, miscreants, and outright crooks to get away with more wrongdoing. CNN reportedly intends to impose wide-ranging staff cuts, including dumping producers who work with reporters and correspondents. If this happens, the network will diminish its capacity for reporting. And Comcast is reportedly considering spinning off MSNBC, which would disconnect it from NBC News and perhaps weaken the network. (Interest declared: I am an MSNBC commentator.)

After the 2024 election—during which Trump was too frequently treated as a regular candidate by the press and his endless deployment of false narratives often not highlighted—I’m not confident that the American media is up to the task of covering a second Trump administration and all the potential damage it can cause. The gravitational pull within this business encourages normalizing politicians and officials and eschewing evaluation and rendering judgments. Trump is a disinformation machine and a threat to democracy. But will these be the central narratives of the mainstream coverage of his second presidency? Can the media maintain the main plot: Trump presents a danger? Already I sense a degree of acquiescence within certain media quarters that signals an acceptance of Trump to the public.

The powerhouse news outfits should not declare themselves a wing of the resistance to Trump. That is not their job. As Marty Baron, the former Washington Post editor once said, “We’re not at war with the [Trump] administration, we’re at work.” But in the Trump era, the press ought to think hard about what that work entails and not apply routine White House coverage to Trump and his gang, especially as Trump looks to limit press freedoms and continues his war on democratic norms and protections. Here’s my suggestion: not resistance, but not acceptance. The public needs constant reminders and reports on the Trump crowd’s authoritarian plans, extremist policies, and grifting schemes. These are not conventional times; they require unconventional coverage. The weeks, months, and years ahead will test all of us—voters, opposition politicians, and thought leaders—and the press, perhaps more so than most. If the media rolls over for Trump and his troops, that will make it far easier for Trump to roll over American democracy.

Trump Cabinet Picks Rubio and Stefanik Once Confirmed Putin Attacked the 2016 Election to Help Trump

For eight years, an article of faith within Trumpworld and the right-wing media cosmos has been that the Trump-Russia scandal was a hoax, a canard cooked up by nefarious Deep State actors and bolstered by their co-conspirators in the press and the Democratic Party to sabotage and destroy Donald Trump. Trump himself continues to rail in shorthand about “Russia, Russia, Russia.” He has pointed to this “witch hunt” as evidence of extensive corruption within the intelligence and law enforcement communities of the federal government and called for the criminal prosecution of those whom he accuses of orchestrating this diabolical plot against him.

How then to explain his decision to tap for top national security slots in his Cabinet two Republican legislators with access to top-secret information who have previously confirmed that Vladimir Putin in 2016 attacked the US election to help elect Trump president and that Trump failed as an American leader to acknowledge and condemn this devious assault on the republic? One of these lawmakers even oversaw an investigation that concluded the most senior Trump campaign aide in 2016 had colluded with a Russian intelligence officer while the Kremlin was mounting its information warfare against America.

“I am concerned about some of the contacts between Russians and surrogates within the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign,” Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick as UN ambassador, said in 2018.

The pair are Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), whom Trump has picked to be UN ambassador, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Flas), whom Trump has selected to be secretary of state. Each is a veteran member of the intelligence committee of the chamber in which they serve and privy to the most sensitive secrets of US intelligence.

After the 2016 contest, Trump tried to con the public about the Russian attack—which included a hack-and-leak operation that disseminated stolen Democratic emails and materials to harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and a covert social media scheme to spread messages, memes, and disinformation to sow discord and benefit Trump. The intelligence community and cybersecurity firms had concluded the Kremlin had waged this secret campaign against the United States to boost Trump, but Trump claimed no such thing happened. He dismissed all talk of the multiple contacts between the Trump camp and Russian representatives during the 2016 contest. He also covered up his own secret business dealings with Russian developers and Putin’s office during the campaign, as well as a hush-hush meeting held between his senior campaign advisers and a Moscow intermediary. 

Stefanik didn’t buy Trump’s subterfuge. In an interview with the Watertown Daily Times in March 2018, she said, “Russia meddled in our electoral process.” And she noted the Kremlin skullduggery was designed to benefit Trump: “We’ve seen evidence that Russia tried to hurt the Hillary Clinton campaign.” Moreover, she fretted about the curious Trump-Russia contacts: “I am concerned about some of the contacts between Russians and surrogates within the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign.”

A year later, with Trump still pushing his phony “Russia hoax” claim, Stefanik, at a town hall meeting, disagreed with the Trump line that the Moscow assault was no big deal. It was, she said, “much more systemic, much more targeted, with very sophisticated hacking efforts, disinformation efforts targeted to specific campaigns.” Stefanik added that the Trump administration needed to be pressed “to take the threat from Russia very seriously.” She criticized the Trump campaign for holding that covert meeting with the Moscow go-between. 

There was no Russia witch-hunt, Stefanik contended. According to her view, Trump was peddling a self-serving and false narrative about an important issue of national security: an attack by a foreign adversary on the United States.

Rubio went much further than this.

As chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Rubio, in August 2020, released a massive 966-page report on the Russian assault. In a press release, he noted, “Over the last three years, the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a bipartisan and thorough investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election and undermine our democracy. We interviewed over 200 witnesses and reviewed over one million pages of documents. No probe into this matter has been more exhaustive.” And he stated the committee “found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.”

That is, no hoax.

The detailed report confirmed what other investigations had concluded: “Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information [via WikiLeaks] 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.”

Worse for Trump, the report pointed out that he and his campaign had tried to exploit the Russian assault and had aided and abetted it by denying the Russians were engaged in such activity, thus helping Moscow cover up its effort to subvert an American election: “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.”

Rubio’s report was full of damning information for Trump.

A large chunk focused on Paul Manafort, who was a senior Trump campaign official in 2016. The committee noted that Manafort, who was imprisoned in 2018 for committing fraud and money laundering (and pardoned by Trump in 2020), posed a “grave counterintelligence threat” due to his Russian connections. The report detailed his extensive dealings during the campaign with a onetime business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik, who the committee described as a “Russian intelligence officer.” The committee put it bluntly: “Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.” Throughout the election, according to the report, Manafort “directly and indirectly communicated with Kilimnik,” Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and several pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine.

When the report was released, Rubio declared in a press release that the committee had uncovered “absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election.” Yet that was misleading. The report stated, “The Committee obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the [Russian intelligence service’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” That meant Trump’s campaign manager was in close contact with a Russian intelligence officer possibly tied to Putin’s covert attack on the 2016 campaign. The committee also revealed it had found “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was connected “to the hack-and-leak operations.” Perhaps there was some collusion. But the report’s discussion of that information was redacted.

Rubio’s report was a slam-dunk counter to the Trump-Russia deniers on the right who had strived mightily to turn this serious matter into nothing but a left-wing fantasy, and to Trump himself. It declared that Trump’s campaign was run by a counterintelligence threat who had covertly huddled with a Russian intelligence officer and that Trump and his lieutenants assisted the Kremlin’s attack on the United States by echoing Putin’s denials.

The report was proof Trump had betrayed the nation. This is a truth that he and his enablers within the GOP and the conservative movement have attempted to smother for years. To do so, they concocted the notion of a Deep State conspiracy and relentlessly derided Democrats, liberals, journalists, and anyone else who voiced concern about or interest in Russian interference and Trump’s acquiescence to Moscow.

Now Trump has embraced two senior Republican lawmakers who challenged Trump’s claim of a hoax and who affirmed the reality of the Trump-Russia scandal and Trump’s role in it. Were they part of that Deep State scheme against Trump? Neither have renounced their previous statements. Rubio has not disavowed the report he once proudly hailed. As the denizens of MAGA World—and Trump himself—should see it, Rubio and Stefanik were part of the traitorous cabal that pushed disinformation to demolish Trump. In their eyes, Rubio even produced a nearly 1000-page-long report to advance this treasonous con job.

Their appointments show the absurdity of Trump’s Russia-denying endeavors—though these efforts succeeded. Now Trump has included in his new administrations two prominent Republicans who know that he has been lying all along about Russia. While both Stefanik and Rubio were once critics of Trump, they have, like most within the GOP, bent the knee, and they don’t mind serving a fellow who provided cover for Putin and who cared more for his own political interests than the country’s security. Nevertheless, it would be worthwhile for Democrats to question Stefanik and Rubio on this matter during their Senate confirmation hearings. They ought to be asked about their previous statements and Rubio’s report. This will probably yield a fair amount of squirming. More important, it will serve as a reminder that Trump has gotten away with a foul deed that has profoundly shaped the nation.