Moving Quickly To Improve Things

Kash Patel was sworn in as FBI Director last week. He is already making his presence known.

On Friday, PJ Media reported:

Newly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel is on fire. After his swearing-in, he gave a not-so-subtle speech, showing that he’s ready to handle the media’s smears.

“I know the media’s in here, and if you have a target, that target’s right here,” he said, pointing to himself. “It’s not the men and women at the FBI.”

…He wasted no time turning his bold rhetoric into action. Following his blistering speech on Friday, he ordered the transfer of 1,500 agents and staff from the bureau’s Washington, D.C., headquarters to field offices across the country.

Roughly 1,000 will be sent to high-crime cities that the Trump administration designated, where they can focus on fighting crime instead of political games. Another 500 will be reassigned to Huntsville, Ala., which is widely seen as D.C.’s version of exile.

Getting FBI agents out of Washington and into the rest of America makes sense. They are needed to aid local and state law enforcement. We have a drug epidemic in this country and a crime epidemic that goes along with that. Let’s get the FBI out of the office and on the street helping local law enforcement.

Looking Through The Lens Of History

On Thursday, John Hinderaker posted an article at Power Line Blog about the Senate confirmation hearings. He notes that at the three hearings this week  the Democrats were hoping to stop the nominees, things did not necessarily move in that direction.

The article notes:

But now several of Trump’s most controversial nominees–controversial meaning that the New York Times and The Washington Post really, really hate them–have taken their turn. Today, Robert Kennedy, Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard all testified in confirmation hearings. These are the nominees (along with Hegseth) that the Democrats are seriously determined to block, and you could see it in their hysterical, if sometimes hilarious, questioning.

I was able to watch only brief portions of today’s hearings and don’t have an opinion on how, in general, they went, other than the fact that the Democrats were in full howl-at-the-moon mode.

I hope all three nominees are confirmed, although I could go either way on Kennedy. Even here, though, Kennedy came across as I expected. He is walking away from some of his more out-there positions of years ago, and is focused on “making America healthy again.” I think there is room for him to do considerable good as an advocate for more healthy lifestyles.

But I really hope that Tulsi Gabbard is confirmed. From my own (admittedly minimal) experience with her, I have a great deal of respect for Gabbard’s patriotism, her intelligence–she is very, very smart–and her military bearing. And, to be honest, in my dealings with Gabbard I just liked her.

America’s “intelligence community” is sick and throughly politicized. Tulsi is, I think, a great choice to set it straight. I don’t agree with all of her opinions–my view of the Iraq war is more positive than hers, for instance–but I trust her to oversee an objective, competent and non-politicized intelligence operation. Which is what Trump wants, and a huge improvement.

The article notes a bit of history often overlooked:

The Democrats can’t block any of the President’s nominees, so their grandstanding is directed mostly at their own base. I suppose they also hope to persuade four Republicans to vote against Gabbard and the others. That shouldn’t happen. Of this group, the only one who isn’t plainly an excellent choice is the eccentric Robert Kennedy. But Kennedy, too, is President Trump’s choice, and there is a clear rationale for why he might be a very good Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Beginning with the Clinton administration and until this year, I believe there were only two occasions on which any senator of a president’s party voted against any of his Cabinet nominees. That number grew from two to three when three Republicans voted against Pete Hegseth’s confirmation as Secretary of Defense. Let’s hope that Senate Republicans don’t continue to break with tradition.

If the Republicans are not willing to support their own President’s choices, why should they be considered Republicans? I am willing to support any primary opponent who runs against a Republican who opposes President Trump’s choices.

Hang On, Help Is On The Way

On Friday, Byron York posted an article at The Washington Examiner about Kash Patel, President Trump’s choice to run the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The article notes that Kash Patel was once targeted by the FBI because he uncovered some of their malfeasance.

The article lists some of the political acts of the FBI during the Trump years:

1) Opened investigations on presidential candidates. …FBI investigations of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016. The big difference between them was that the then-FBI director, James Comey, planned to exonerate Clinton before interviewing her or other key witnesses in the email case. There was no such intent to exonerate in the Trump investigation.

2) Deployed undercover agents and confidential sources to spy on a candidate’s advisers.

3) Hired a campaign opposition researcher under the guise of intelligence gathering.

4) Presented false opposition research to a court as a basis for wiretapping a candidate’s adviser.

5) Used false opposition research to brief the president of the United States.

6) Ambushed the president-elect with false opposition research.

7) Sought to include false opposition research in intelligence community products.

8) Ambushed the national security adviser with wiretap information on the pretense of a Logan Act violation.

9) Misled/stonewalled Congress on the investigation of the president.

10) Misled the president about the investigation targeting him.

The article also notes:

Many of the other examples, numbers 2 through 10, refer to the Trump-Russia investigation, in which bureau leadership unleashed the FBI on an enemy — the presidential candidate and then President Trump. Democrats cheered them on from Congress, where they hoped a Trump-Russia special counsel investigation, led by a former FBI director, would give them a case for impeaching Trump. (It didn’t, but Democrats quickly changed gears and impeached Trump for something else.)

Another thing the FBI did was stonewall the congressional leaders who had the authority and responsibility to oversee the FBI. When in the final months of the 2016 campaign and the first months of Trump’s presidency members of Congress began to realize how intensely the FBI had targeted Trump, they wanted to know what was going on. They had a right to know. But the FBI and the Justice Department told them to get lost.

One of those congressional investigators was Kash Patel, who at the time was working for then-Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Patel was looking into the provenance of the Steele dossier, which was the compilation of false and incendiary allegations that, among other things, Trump was involved in a “well-developed conspiracy” with Russia to fix the 2016 election and that Russian intelligence had hidden camera video of Trump engaged in kinky sex with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. 

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It reminds us of the reasons that the FBI has to be cleaned up and reformed.

About Those Nominees

On Thursday, Victor Davis Hanson posted an article at American Greatness about President Trump’s cabinet nominees. He took a stroll down Memory Lane in case some of us have forgotten some of the actions taken by President Biden’s Cabinet members.

In writing about Kash Patel as FBI Director, Victor Davis Hanson reminds us:

But what will Patel not do as the new director?

He will not serially lie under oath to federal investigators as did interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a current Patel critic.

He will not forge an FBI court affidavit, as did convicted felon and agency lawyer Kevin Clinesmith.

He will not claim amnesia 245 times under congressional oath to evade embarrassing admissions as did former Director James Comey.

He will not partner with a foreign national to collect dirt and subvert a presidential campaign as the FBI did with Christopher Steele in 2016.

He will not use the FBI to draft social media to suppress news unfavorable to a presidential candidate on the eve of an election.

He would not have suppressed FBI knowledge that Hunter Biden’s laptop was genuine—to allow the lie to spread that it was “Russian disinformation” on the eve of the 2020 election.

He will not raid the home of an ex-president with SWAT teams, surveil Catholics, monitor parents at school board meetings, or go after pro-life peaceful protestors.

Then Victor Davis Hanson talks about Pete Hegseth:

What will Hegseth likely not do?

Go AWOL without notifying the president of a serious medical procedure as did current Secretary Lloyd Austin?

Install race and gender criteria for promotion and mandate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training?

Insinuate falsely that cabals of white supremacists had infiltrated the military—only to alienate that entire demographic and thus ensure the Pentagon came up 40,000 recruits short?

Oversee the scramble from Kabul that saw $50 billion in U.S. military equipment abandoned to Taliban terrorists?

Watch passively as a Chinese spy balloon traversed the continental United States for a week?

Allow the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to promise his Chinese communist counterpart that the People’s Liberation Army would first be informed if the President of the United States was felt to issue a dangerous order?

Rotate into the Pentagon from a defense contractor boardship and then leave office to rotate back there to leverage procurement decisions?

Oversee the Pentagon’s serial flunking of fiscal audits?

Next, Robert Kennedy, Jr.:

But what will RFK also not do as HHS secretary?

Oversee his agencies circumventing U.S. law by transferring money to communist China to help it produce lethal gain-of-function viruses of the COVID-19 sort—in the manner of Dr. Fauci?

Organize scientists to go after critics of mandatory masking and defame them?

Give pharmaceutical companies near-lifetime exemptions from legal jeopardy for rushing into production mRNA vaccines not traditionally vetted and tested?

Leave office to monetize his HHS expertise and thus make millions from the pharmaceutical companies?

Please follow the link to the article–there is more!

The article concludes:

We are going to hear some outrageous things in the upcoming congressional confirmation hearings.

But one thing we will not hear about are the crimes, deceptions, and utter incompetence of prior and current government grandees.

The current crew, not their proposed Trump replacements, prompted the sick and tired American people to demand different people.

Voters want novel approaches to reform a government that they not only no longer trust but also now deeply fear.

True.

 

Consider The Source

On November 22, The Daily Caller posted an article about a recent statement by Andrew McCabe. As I am sure you remember, former FBI Director McCabe was at the heart of the crossfire hurricane scandal and other actions used by the deep state to cripple the first term of President Trump. Frankly, if justice were bi-partisan, Andrew McCabe would be in jail at the very least. However, he still considers himself relevant.

The article reports:

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe expressed concern on Thursday that President-elect Donald Trump could name Kash Patel as FBI director.

Patel and former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan are the frontrunners to replace FBI Director Christopher Wray, who Trump appointed in 2017 after firing then-FBI Director James Comey. McCabe expressed nervousness about Trump potentially choosing Patel, a former Trump administration official, as Wray’s replacement, saying Patel would be more dangerous as the agency’s number two person.

“No part of the FBI’s mission is safe with Kash Patel in any position of leadership in the FBI and certainly not in the deputy director’s job. So just as a… as an example, the deputy director job in the FBI is unique because, of course, the director is a political appointee and the and the deputy director is typically a senior FBI agent, somebody who spent their entire career learning about the FBI, understanding its people and doing its work. So the deputy director actually runs the FBI on a day to day basis,” McCabe told CNN host Kaitlan Collins. “You’re essentially the chief operating officer.””

The article notes:

McCabe was fired as deputy director of the FBI in 2018 following an inspector general’s report that accused him of lying about leaks to the media, but the firing was reversed in 2021 following a legal settlement after President Joe Biden took office.

If McCabe is against the appointment of Kash Patel, then I support the appointment!

The Police State In Action

On Wednesday, Breitbart posted the following headline:

Exclusive — ‘We Caught Them Red-Handed’: DOJ Spied on GOP Staffers Probing the Origins of the Russia Collusion Hoax

Is anyone surprised?

The article reports:

The Department of Justice (DOJ) obtained private communications and other personal records of multiple Republican House and Senate staffers who were investigating the department’s role in the origins of the Russia collusion hoax, according to former senior Trump administration official Kash Patel.

A recently-revealed subpoena shows that the DOJ sought the records for not only Patel when he was an investigator for then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), but also those of Jason Foster, who was at the time chief investigative counsel to then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (I-IA) and was also looking into the DOJ’s role in the hoax.

According to multiple subpoenas revealed so far, the DOJ had subpoenaed Google, Apple, and other companies to obtain private records in what Patel believes was an unlawful attempt to dig up dirt on them in retaliation for investigating the Democrat-pushed hoax that Donald Trump’s campaign had colluded with Russia in the 2016 presidential election.

It is time to fire every supervisor and leader in the Department of Justice and replace them with people who are willing to respect the U.S. Constitution that they took an oath to uphold and protect.

The article concludes:

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz is looking into the DOJ’s use of subpoenas “and other legal authorities” to obtain the private communications records of lawmakers, staff, and journalists, according to the DOJ Office of Inspector General website:

The DOJ OIG is reviewing the DOJ’s use of subpoenas and other legal authorities to obtain communication records of Members of Congress and affiliated persons, and the news media in connection with recent investigations of alleged unauthorized disclosures of information to the media by government officials.

The review will examine the Department’s compliance with applicable DOJ policies and procedures, and whether any such uses, or the investigations, were based upon improper considerations.

“Whether you hated us back then [because of] the Nunes memo — well, every report since then has said the same thing we did,” Patel said. “We were the first out of the gate. The IG, John Durham, said there was no lawful basis to ever investigate Trump or his campaign and that FBI people lied to a federal court and the slew of other violations that they came up with.”

“They got caught. We asked them to help expose it and instead they doubled down and used the system of justice and FBI investigatory powers to try to take us out and silence us,” he said.

“I’m going to put Chris Wray, Rod Rosenstein … and other people in the hot seat under oath, and I’m going to depose them, and demand they answer these questions, and we’re going to watch them lie to the world,” Patel said, adding that Rosenstein currently works at Wray’s old law firm.

“None of this is a coincidence. These people cover up for each other and Chris Wray is still covering up for them as a director of the FBI and I’m going to expose it all,” he said.

It’s time to either abolish the DOJ and the FBI or simply fire the executives and appoint new ones.

About That Judge…

On Tuesday, The Conservative Treehouse posted an article about the judge who is presiding over the special counsel case against President Trump.

The article includes a conversation between Sebastian Gorka and Kash Patel.

This is the conversation:

TRANSCRIPT – Kash Patel: “Judge Chutkan, for those who don’t know, represented Burisma, Hunter Biden’s fraudulent consulting firm, she was a lawyer at the same law firm with Hunter Biden. But Seb, let’s put that aside. What other matters are there for her recusal? In 2017 when Devin Nunes and I were running the Russiagate investigation, we figured out who paid for the Steele dossier. Fusion GPS, the DNC, and the Hillary Clinton campaign paid Christopher Steele millions of dollars and they laundered it through the FBI and the FISA court to unlawfully surveil Donald Trump.  That’s big-time stuff.

On the eve of us winning that disclosu

re, before the world knew, Fusion GPS took us to federal court and that case landed in JUDGE CHUTKAN’S COURT ROOM. … After a month of heavy litigation where Judge Chutkan knew the ins and outs of Fusion GPS, our proceedings, all possible witnesses, etc., when she could not prevent us from prevailing, she recused -on her own- from that case. Why?”

“We found out her law firm, Boies Schiller, represented Fusion GPS.  The very client that was in front of her in federal court was one of her former clients. That is rule #1 for disqualification.”

GORKA: “Boies Schiller Flexner is the same company where Chutkan and Hunter Biden worked!”

PATEL: “You gotta ask yourself, Seb, how come it took Chutkan a month [to recuse herself]? … She wanted to block the bank records.

Imagine if we never found out who paid for the dossier. … She set the precedent. She cannot neutrally and arbitrarily preside over Donald Trump’s criminal trial when she recused herself from the very representation of the Democratic entrenchment: the DNC, the Hillary Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS, because she was so biased because of her prior representation from Boies Schiller.

How could she possibly be allowed to stay on this case? And it wasn’t us, Seb. We got her off because of her own history. That precedent is what Donald Trump’s lawyers must apply this week.”

Obviously, this is something to watch.

Things To Consider

If you watch the well-produced televised January 6th hearings, there are a few things that you should keep in mind. I am writing this Thursday afternoon, so I have no idea what we are in for. However, there are a few facts that I doubt will be mentioned in the hearings.

On Wednesday, Just the News reported that the Pentagon had requested National Guard troops for Washington before the January 6th riots. These requests were turned down by the Capitol Police and the Democrats. So who wanted things to get out of hand on January 6th?

The article reports:

An official timeline of the Jan. 6 tragedy assembled by Capitol Police shows that a Defense Department official reached out to a Capitol Police deputy chief, Sean Gallagher, on Jan. 2, 2021 to see if a request for troops was forthcoming, but the offer was quickly rejected after a consultation with then-Chief Steve Sund.

“Carol Corbin (DOD) texts USCP Deputy Chief Sean Gallagher, Protective Service Bureau, to determine whether USCP is considering a request for National Guard soldiers for January 6, 2021 event,” the timeline reads in the lone entry listed for Saturday, Jan. 2, 2021.

The following morning, the timeline states, “Gallagher replies to DOD via text that a request for National Guard support not forthcoming at this time after consultation with COP Sund.”

The assessment of what the Trump rally would be changed as the event drew closer:

“Due to the tense political environment following the 2020 election, the threat of disruptive actions or violence cannot be ruled out,” the new assessment declared. “Supporters of the current president see January 6, 2021 as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election. This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent.”

Within 24 hours, Sund had changed his mind and began seeking permission from the political powers surrounding House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer to deploy the National Guard as a preventive measure on Monday, Jan. 4, 2021.

The Capitol Police official timeline provides the most succinct summary of a series of events around Sund’s request, some of which have been disputed and at times misreported in the news media.

“COP Sund asks Senate Sergeant at Arms (SSAA) Michael Stenger and House Sergeant at Arms (HSAA) Paul Irving for authority to have National Guard to assist with security for the January 6, 2021 event based on briefing with law enforcement partner and revised intelligence Assessment,” the timeline recorded. “COP Sund’s request is denied. SSAA and HSAA tell COP Sund to contact General Walker at DC National Guard to discuss the guard’s ability to support a request if needed.”

The article notes:

“We went to the Capitol Police and the Secret Service and law enforcement agencies and Mayor Bowser days before January 6, and asked them, ‘Do you want thousands of National Guardsmen and women for January 6?'” Patel (Kash Patel) said in a detailed interview earlier this year. “They all said no. Why did we do that? The law requires them to request it before we can deploy them. And the DOD IG found we did not delay, we actually prepared in a preemptive fashion, which is what we do at DOD.”

Please follow the link to read the entire article. January 6th was a planned attack, but not by the people currently being blamed for it.

Quietly Paying The Fine After You Have Broken The Law

When charged with a crime that has a penalty of a cash payment, the quickest way to get that charge and the crime off of the front pages of the media is to quietly pay the fine. If you’re a Republican, that might not work, but if you are Democrat, it will definitely kill the story.

On Saturday, The Epoch Times reported the following statement by Kash Patel, regarding the violations by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016:

“So the Hillary Clinton campaign is not contesting it, they’re paying the fine. It’s basically admitting that they did this and they’re out is: ‘we just don’t want a protracted legal deal, as if the Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC ever shied away from taking something or someone to court,” Patel added.

(Hillary) Clinton’s campaign and the DNC agreed to pay a combined $113,000 to the FEC, according to documents made public on March 30, after the commission found probable cause that the entities violated federal law by describing payments that ultimately went to the Fusion GPS research group as going toward legal services and consulting.

“It shows them how wrong they were to violate the law and spend political campaign dollars on hit job, opposition research pieces for then-candidate Trump, all of which, [to] remind the audience, was then used intentionally by the FBI—even though they knew it was false—to go to a federal secret court and surveil a presidential candidate and later a president of the United States.”

The article concludes:

In October 2020, Durham (Special counsel John Durham) was appointed by the Dept. of Justice as special counsel to investigate the FBI’s handling of Russiagate. His recent filings revealed that internet traffic at Trump Tower and the White House was accessed to fabricate ties between Trump and Russia.

The filing, which was submitted late on Feb. 11 in connection with the indictment of Michael Sussmann, a former attorney to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, reveals that Rodney Joffe, a tech executive who was working with Sussmann, had exploited access to domain name system (DNS) internet traffic pertaining to the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP) as well as Trump Tower and Donald Trump’s Central Park West apartment building.

“This FEC fine is another step towards accountability. But [for] me as a former federal prosecutor, maybe I’m biased, but the ultimate step of accountability which the American public is waiting for,comes in the form of indictments, especially to those people who violated their oath of office,” Patel said.

Indictments would be nice, but unfortunately it is becoming very obvious to most Americans that only Republicans get indicted when they break the law.