What a 'deep state' investigation could look like if Kash Patel becomes FBI director
Trump loyalist Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump's choice to become the next FBI director, has said the FBI's investigation of alleged ties between Trump or his associates and Russia, launched more than eight years ago, was such a massive "criminal enterprise" that it "drowns Watergate."
And he says the current and former U.S. officials who he claims orchestrated "Russia Gate" should be prosecuted, while "thousands and thousands and thousands" of government employees need to be fired for aiding the so-called "deep state" -- what conspiracy theorists claim is a cadre of career government employees working together to secretly manipulate policy, undermine elected leaders, and take down Trump.
As a senior House investigator during part of Trump's first term, Patel helped direct the House Republicans' probe of the Russia investigation, which led to Patel joining the Trump administration in 2019.
When Patel appeared on Trump ally Steve Bannon's podcast last December, Bannon asked him if -- as someone expected to take on a senior national security role in what they hoped would be Trump's next administration -- Patel was "highly confident" he could quickly deliver "serious prosecutions and accountability" for the "evil deeds" of the "deep state."
"Yes," Patel responded.
It's unclear if comments like that reflect pre-election posturing or genuine intentions, especially considering that multiple official inquiries into "Russia Gate" have not supported the types of grand claims Patel and other Trump allies have made about it. But, if Patel becomes FBI director and actually launches such investigations, how would he conduct them, who would he target, and what type of "accountability" would he seek?
Patel's media interviews, his other public statements, and a book that he published last year titled "Government Gangsters" -- which Trump praised as a "roadmap to end the Deep State's reign" -- offer potential clues.
'The evidence is there'
Patel spent several years as a prosecutor in the Justice Department's National Security Division before becoming a House investigator and then joining the Trump administration. In the final year of Trump's presidency, Patel was appointed acting deputy director of national intelligence -- the second-in-command of the entire U.S. intelligence community -- and then chief of staff to the acting U.S. defense secretary, a position critics claimed he was unqualified to hold.
Of efforts to dig into "Russia Gate," Patel said on his "Kash's Corner" podcast in July 2021, "I would basically run this entire investigation as if it was a giant conspiracy."
At the time, he had high hopes that a probe by special counsel John Durham, who was appointed under the first Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation, would ultimately produce a wave of indictments.
"[It was] the greatest political fraud in American history," Patel said of the alleged conspiracy. "No one person could pull this off alone. It's impossible."
More recently, at a September Trump campaign rally in Las Vegas, Patel offered this summary of what he believes happened: In 2016, the Democratic Party "illegally spen[t] campaign dollars to hire a foreign intelligence asset from overseas and funnel fake, false information into the Federal Bureau of Investigation, only to have them go to a secret surveillance court, lie to a federal judge, just so that they could illegally surveil their political opponent," he said.
But that's not what happened, according to Durham's final report, as well as a separate report from the Justice Department's inspector general and other publicly-released government records.
In July 2016, based on uncorroborated information the FBI received suggesting Russia might try to help Trump win the 2016 election, the agency launched a wide-ranging investigation into whether Trump and his associates were working with Russia.
Separately, a law firm working for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign hired a private investigator, former British spy Christopher Steele, to conduct opposition research on Trump, and Steele compiled a series of reports with shocking claims about Trump and his associates.
When FBI officials in Washington -- already looking at Trump's associates -- then received those reports in September 2016, they asked a secret surveillance court for approval to eavesdrop on Trump adviser Carter Page. The FBI officials heavily relied on Christopher Steele's reports in their applications to obtain that approval. According to Durham, the FBI came to learn after its first application was approved that much of Steele's information originated from a Russian national who either fabricated it or passed it on from a former Democratic staffer.
In his final report on the matter, Durham blasted the FBI for using "unvetted and unverified" information to open a "full investigation" and to repeatedly obtain approval for intrusive surveillance of Page. Durham said "senior FBI personnel" and federal prosecutors "displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor" toward the allegations they received, and they failed to sufficiently disclose contrary information when they learned it.
But Durham also said his investigation didn't find evidence proving that any FBI official "intentionally" tried to "falsely accuse Trump of improper ties to Russia," or intentionally sought to provide inaccurate information to the surveillance court.
"[T]he Office was unable to establish that any government officials acted with a criminal intent to violate the law, as opposed to mere negligence or recklessness," Durham wrote in his final report.
Through its own investigation, the Justice Department's inspector concluded that while there were "fundamental errors" and significant "failures" in the FBI probe, the investigation itself was reasonably opened based on the information the FBI had received.
Still, Patel has repeatedly insisted that "laws were broken," as he said during a podcast in August 2021.
"And the evidence is there," he claimed, without providing specifics.
There's no 'hit list'?
Over the past few years, Patel has provided varying numbers regarding how many people he claims may have committed crimes related to the Russia probe.
In some interviews, he's suggested there's only a handful. In other interviews, he's said as many as 20 people -- inside and outside of government -- need to be scrutinized.
In an interview two months ago, Patel insisted he doesn't "have a hit list" of people he would target. But spread across his many interviews, he has repeatedly identified certain people by name.
Current FBI Director Cristopher Wray, who was nominated by Trump at the start of his first administration and would now be replaced by Patel, has been frequently mentioned. So have former FBI Director James Comey, who Wray replaced after Trump fired him, and Comey's former deputy, Andy McCabe.
McCabe "basically orchestrated this entire thing for Comey," Patel claimed on a March 2022 podcast, regarding the Russia probe.
Ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page, who exchanged personal text messages criticizing Trump as they worked on a major investigation related to him, "broke the law" and "weaponized the system of justice against a political target they hated," Patel said on the Shawn Ryan podcast two months ago. Strzok was fired from the bureau in 2018 and subsequently reached a settlement with the Justice Department over his claims that his privacy rights were violated when his text messages were released.
In its final report on the matter, the Justice Department's inspector general said it uncovered no evidence that "political bias or improper motivation influenced" the investigation of alleged ties between Trump or his associates and Russia.
Still, in a June 2022 interview, Patel said, "I would be able to bring cases against all of them."
And, on his podcast in July 2021, Patel said that if he were in charge of the federal investigation, he would grant immunity to Lisa Page so she could testify against more than a dozen others he'd consider subpoenaing.
In other interviews, Patel has said Steele and a slew of Obama administration officials -- including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper -- potentially committed crimes, even though the multiple probes that reviewed the matter resulted in no charges against them.
And in the interview two months ago, Patel said that several former Trump administration officials -- former Attorney General Bill Bar, former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, former CIA Director Gina Haspel, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and former National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill -- might also deserve prosecution.
"I don't know that it ever gets to the level of treason singularly with any of them, but what you have is a build-up of so many actions by the deep state that it becomes borderline treasonous," he said of officials from both the Obama and Trump administrations.
The multiple federal inquiries into "Russia Gate" have not produced evidence to support charges against any of those officials.
Patel has also identified many others, including saying in a 2021 interview that Jake Sullivan, who was Hillary Clinton's foreign policy adviser during her 2016 campaign and now serves as President Joe Biden's national security adviser, "has got problems as well," without offering any details.
Appearing on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, Sullivan said he has "50 days left to continue to try to protect this country from threats," and, "I'm going to spend every day doing that and not worrying about other things."
Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Clinton, Brennan, Clapper, Barr, Rosenstein, Haspel, Esper, Hill and Sullivan are all among 60 current and former officials identified in Patel's book as "Members of the Executive Branch Deep State" -- people who he called "corrupt actors of the first order."
Like Barr, Rosenstein, Haspel and Esper, nearly a third of the 60 were appointed to senior roles by Trump or members of his administration.
"[A]ll those who manipulated evidence, hid exculpatory information, or in any way abused their authority for political ends must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," Patel wrote in his book.
Many -- if not all -- of those referenced by Patel have denied any wrongdoing.
Patel has also suggested that members of the media should be targeted for investigation.
"We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media," Patel said on Bannon's podcast last year. "Yes, we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens [and] who helped Joe Biden rig the presidential election, we're going to come after you."
"Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out, but we're putting you all on notice," he added.
'Get more creative'
Patel has suggested that prosecutors who bring such conspiracy cases need to be "more creative."
In 2021, Durham indicted attorney Michael Sussmann for allegedly lying to the FBI about Democrats' connections to the origins of Trump-related allegations he provided them, separately from Steele's reports. But when a jury in Washington, D.C., acquitted Sussmann a year later, Patel said on a podcast that Durham was "too much by the book" and "too much of a straight arrow."
Patel was particularly upset that Durham followed Justice Department guidelines in the case and filed charges where the central actions allegedly took place -- in "liberal" Washington, D.C.
"He has to get more creative," Patel said. A conspiracy case "can be brought anywhere any part of the conspiracy occurred, so if some guy moved through southwest Utah for a split second, you can bring the whole case there," Patel claimed.
When Durham then put Igor Danchenko, Steele's original source for the dossier allegations, on trial in Northern Virginia for allegedly lying about his role to the FBI, Patel predicted things would be "entirely different" there. But the jury in Virginia rejected a Durham case for the second time, acquitting Danchenko.
Patel, in his book last year, nonetheless said the Justice Department must "drastically curb" the number of cases it prosecutes in Washington because it is "perhaps the most liberal jurisdiction in America."
Durham ultimately brought few indictments from his investigation. The only person successfully prosecuted was Kevin Clinesmith, who Patel once described as a "medium-level attorney at the FBI" and who altered an email supporting the final application for surveillance of Carter Page, eight months after the FBI began its surveillance. Clinesmith pleaded guilty to a false statement charge and was sentenced to a year's probation, with the judge saying that while the criminal conduct was serious, it did not necessarily alter the secret court's decision to approve further surveillance.
'Annihilate the deep state'
Though Patel often says criminal investigations are a key part of seeking justice for the crimes of "Russia Gate," he has also emphasized there are others way to help rid government of so-called "Deep State" actors.
"You walk in on Day 1 and you fire literally everyone that was part of that Deep State," he said to cheers at the conservative CPAC conference last year. "It'll be thousands and thousands and thousands, and nobody has had the guts to do that. But President Trump will."
In his book, Patel called for a "comprehensive housecleaning" at the Justice Department and a wholesale overhaul of the FBI, which he called "the prime functionary of the Deep State."
He wrote that "unaccountable bad actors" at the top of the FBI and other agencies are "aided and abetted by staff in the government who are either in on the game or too afraid to speak up."
Wray has pushed back against such claims for years, saying as early as Trump's first year in office that the FBI he knows "is tens of thousands of brave men and women working as hard as they can to keep people they will never know safe from harm."
At the CPAC event last year, Patel said "the biggest scam in government" is the assertion that career government employees can't be easily fired.
"There are ways to do it. Don't believe anybody that says, 'Oh, these guys are in for life,'" he insisted.
Speaking at another conservative event in October, just two weeks before the presidential election that would lead to his nomination as FBI director, Patel was even more blunt.
"We are on a mission to annihilate the deep state," he said.
