Disgraced former FBI officials who failed to find Trump campaign collusion with Russia have begun smearing Kash Patel — the House Intelligence Committee investigator who exposed Russiagate as a hoax — suggesting that he will be ensnared in the FBI’s investigation of documents seized from Mar-a-Lago and threatening that he should be quiet and get a lawyer.
Andrew Weissman, the lead prosecutor for former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s failed effort to find and charge then-President Donald Trump with Russian collusion, recently suggested in an interview on MSNBC that Patel was “clearly in the crosshairs,” since the Department of Justice chose not to redact his name before releasing the FBI affidavit used to raid Mar-a-Lago. Without explaining why, Weissman asserted, “Kash Patel…needs to really be getting a lawyer.”
Weissmann: Kash Patel.. needs to be really getting a lawyer pic.twitter.com/wYXG4bEkrO
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 26, 2022
Peter Strzok, the former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division who led the investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016, recently suggested Patel was in trouble. “Never great to see your unredacted name in a search warrant affidavit. To borrow from Eric Hirschmann, ‘I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life. Get a great F’ing criminal defense lawyer — you’re going to need it,” he tweeted.
David Ignatius, Washington Post columnist — who first reported on the leaked classified contents of a call between then-former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn with a Russian diplomat — recently penned a hit piece on Patel, where he also suggested that Patel would be in trouble. “I fear that a sequel is coming, where Kash and King Donald’s other knights will joust with what they claim are government gangsters — and this won’t be a children’s book,” Ignatius warned ominously.
And recently on CNN, former federal prosecutor Jennifer Rodgers claimed Patel is “implicated” in some wrongdoing. In an apparent effort to get him to stop contradicting the establishment media narrative on the raid at Mar-a-Lago, she warned, “If I were him, I would stay quiet.”
Patel, in an interview with Breitbart News on Saturday, responded to Weissman and Strzok’s warnings and threats, saying:
Weissman and Strzok took their best shot at locking up Trump and failed — despite having almost unlimited resources at their command. Now they have been reduced to uttering asinine threats against me on cable TV and social media. They both provide an object example of people so carried away by their hatred of Trump that they set their reputations, their careers, and their souls on fire in the course of their obsessive vendetta against the former president. It’s predictable that they are now trying to take aim at me, the Russia Gate investigator that got Strzok fired and destroyed Weissman’s witch hunt before he ever launched it.
He added, “They want to try to get me in an obstruction of justice trap for somehow impeding a federal investigation involving Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified information, but I don’t know how that would be possible, since I’ve never talked to any single fed on it.”
The recently released FBI affidavit cited a May 5, 2022, Breitbart News article of an interview with Patel where he named a February 18, 2022, NBC News report that said the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) found items marked “classified” among 15 boxes of White House records retrieved from Mar-a-Lago in January 2022. Patel told Breitbart News that the report was “misleading” since Trump had already declassified sets of documents, but that the classification markings had not been updated.
Patel said on Saturday he had no idea what documents were at Mar-a-Lago when the FBI raided. However, he said what he does know is that declassified Russiagate documents were among those handed over to NARA back in January 2022, and that those have been given to the DOJ with no word on when they might be given back.
Patel said those Russiagate documents have never been publicly released. After NARA took possession of them in January, they were given to the DOJ to be viewed for any personal identifiable information (PII) and were supposed to be given back to NARA, but have not yet been returned.
“Remember, Devin [Nunes] and I have always said we got out about 60% of the Russiagate stuff we wanted to get out. The rest was in that binder,” he said.
Patel said even though Trump had designated him as his representative to NARA on June 19, 2022, in order to facilitate the release of already declassified Russiagate documents, Patel has not had the opportunity to review any documents NARA possesses from before or after the raid, since NARA has claimed they could not verify his security clearance.
“They’re playing bureaucratic gymnastics where their position is, ‘We can’t verify your security clearance,’ even though I know I have active security clearance that’s been verified by multiple government agencies,” he said. “After asking for an update on the binder of documents and other material, NARA has said, ‘Oh, we sent it to DOJ. We don’t know what’s here anymore.’ You know, it’s the total run around.”
Patel said it is no coincidence that the people who are threatening him and are in charge of the current FBI investigation into the documents are the same people embroiled in the Russiagate scandal, which means they have the most to lose if the documents are released.
“The same Russiagate people who started that investigation are now running DOJ and are the same FBI guys at counterintelligence running this investigation. They all know the information we discovered — Devin and I — during Russiagate. And they all know what didn’t get out as a result of that big binder of stuff not ever being released by Trump,” he said.
“Some of the same counterintelligence guys that John Durham is looking at who worked for Strzok and Priestap are working on the Hunter Biden laptop case, and this case and others — it’s the same crew,” he said.
“The same people that were supposed to have committed Russiagate are now back in charge, and they know that if they go in and raid Trump’s house and say we have an ongoing counterintelligence investigation, that the documents will never be released,” he said. “They’re afraid of more of their corruption being exposed, more of their unlawful conduct. What happens when the rest comes out?”
Deputy Assistant FBI Director Peter Strzok testifies before a joint committee hearing of the House Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill July 12, 2018 in Washington, DC. While involved in the probe into Hillary ClintonÕs use of a private email server in 2016, Strzok exchanged text messages with FBI attorney Lisa Page that were critical of Trump. After learning about the messages, Mueller removed Strzok from his investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election.
He said Weissman and Strzok in particular know what those Russiagate documents say. “Now coincidentally, these guys are the ones screaming that I need to get a lawyer,” he said.
Patel, a former federal prosecutor, was the lead investigator for the House Intelligence Committee’s probe into the origins of Russiagate and authored a memo that not only exposed DOJ and FBI malfeasance, but led to the firing of several involved, including Strzok.
The probe and subsequent memo exposed that the DOJ and FBI knew Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for the creation of the so-called “Steele Dossier” — which was based on foreign disinformation and alleged that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia — but still used the “Dossier” to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Trump’s campaign.
The DOJ inspector general later investigated Strzok, and found that he had texted FBI lawyer Lisa Page — with whom he was having an extramarital affair — messages that were “not only indicative of a biased state of mind but imply a willingness to take official action to impact a presidential candidate’s electoral prospects.” The DOJ inspector general added, “This is antithetical to the core values of the FBI and the Department of Justice,” the report said. The inspector general also criticized Strzok for not following up on new Hillary Clinton emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop in the run up to the 2016 election.
Patel said he believed the DOJ purposely left his name unredacted in the affidavit in retaliation.
“I’m the Russiagate investigator who exposed their corruption. We got Strzok fired, we got Comey fired, we got McCabe fired. We got 14 other people at the FBI and DOJ including Bruce Ohr fired or retired early, and Lisa Page. Now their bosses are back in charge and these people know the documents we found. Same with Weissman because when he was Mueller’s guy, they had access to all of those documents… . So it’s not a coincidence that these same people are now banding together to attack the one guy that exposed their corruption,” he said.
Patel said the decision to not redact his name comes immediately after the FBI has been investigating death threats against him for the past 10 months. “They have the emails. They’re nasty. They’re disgusting,” Patel said. However, he said on the same day the FBI decided to end its investigation on the death threats, the DOJ released the affidavit with his name on it.
“They decided to end the investigation regarding my death threats, and so it continues. Hatred and racist threats keep coming in,” he said.
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