Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

JASON LEWIS: Kash Patel Will Clean Things Up At The FBI

Kash Patel campaigning for Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt in Las Vegas, Nev., Oct. 28, 2024. (Screen Capture/CSPAN)

“But I’m carrying the weight of all the useless junk

“A modern man accumulates,

“I’m a statistic in a system

“That a civil servant dominates.”

—Billy Joel, Running On Ice

Lest you thought this was going to be easy.

No sooner had President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter — which he repeatedly said he would not do — than the D.C. swamp continued its contrived concern over President-elect Donald Trump’s “controversial” appointments. You have to wonder if Hunter was starting to buckle over sentencing and perhaps willing to turn state’s witness.

Regardless, he gets a sweeping pardon all the way back to 2014 when he started collecting checks from a Ukrainian energy company. And no need for Hunter to worry about any “advice and consent” from a few pusillanimous Republican senators now willing to throw Trump’s nominees under the bus.

So much for that quaint little notion that no one is above the law. Unless, of course, an outgoing pardon for every J6 protestor is forthcoming. I would not bet on it. So Biden will leave a two-tired system of justice fully intact.

Indeed, it took an election mandate to finally get special counsel Jack Smith to drop the phony “insurrection” and classified document charges against Trump that should have never been brought.

So now comes legal beagle Kash Patel to clean things up at the FBI and the swamp is fit to be tied. Patel was an investigator under Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (when I was in Congress) and uncovered disturbing bureau corruption over the infamous ‘Steele dossier.’

The Durham Report corroborated what Patel and others had to say about James Comey’s FBI using a fabricated “dossier” as the pretext for secret FISA surveillance warrants to eavesdrop on Trump officials.

As we’ve covered in Jason’s Newsletter before, most everyone knew of Hillary Clinton’s alleged plan to “vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.”

The Federal Election Commission would assess Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign (along with the DNC) the typical fine for misreporting the “Steele dossier” as “legal services.” Yet Trump’s penalty for accurately reporting a non-disclosure agreement was a bizarre and discredited state conviction by an overtly partisan Manhattan prosecutor.

Instead of outrage and eternal vigilance, the usual suspects are busy creating distractions abroad and hoping criticism of Trump’s new team at home gets in the way of accountability for those responsible for the most egregious abuse of power in recent memory.

To recap — IRS employees leak Trump’s tax returns and FEMA managers decide to deny post-hurricane help to MAGA homeowners, but it’s time for another Clintonesque “move on” movement? Yep, and it will be led by the same media folks who claimed “no evidence has emerged to show the president benefited from Hunter Biden’s endeavors, nor that he wielded government authority to favor them.”

These are the so-called journalists who defamed the Nunes Memo drafted in party by Patel that exposed the unprecedented “Russian collusion” conspiracy. As I said in this video two years ago, “Who’s going to pay?”

The Republicans have taken the House, albeit just barely, and finally some hearings and investigations are taking place into the insanity that has befallen the nation. But it didn’t happen by accident and neither will getting to the bottom of it.

No one will—if people like Kash Patel, who actually know where the bodies are buried, aren’t allowed to find them. Perhaps that explains some of the bipartisan opposition to his appointment as the next FBI Director.

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has not seen a war he did not want to prosecute, is aghast at the thought of Patel in charge, comparing him to (who else?) the head of Stalin’s Soviet secret police. This from a fellow who, if history is any guide, will soon be calling for American troops to be back on the front lines in Syria to finish overthrowing Bashar al-Assad now that the latest Al Qaeda-linked insurgency has weakened him.

Patel represents the tip of the spear and that is why the knives are out for any nominee who happens to be an outsider looking to make actual changes. Notwithstanding recent Supreme Court progress overturning things like Chevron deference, the administrative state buttressed by a booming federal workforce is where the swamp gets its sustenance.

Its beneficiaries took extreme measures to derail another Trump administration because they knew exactly what to expect from it. As I wrote in Party Animal: the Truth About President Trump, Power Politics & the Partisan Press:

“A Trump executive order made exceptions to the ‘extensive procedures’ that must normally precede disciplinary measures against federal employees. That, and our passage of the VA Accountability Act, were the proverbial shots across the bow. Comprehensive civil service reform was on deck for a Trump second term, and I pledged to help in the Senate.”

For years, big government’s goal was to convert more federal non-career employees to career employees. Trump had proposed just the opposite, creating a new Schedule F employee engaged in policy-making positions who would be exempt from bureaucratic immunity if they tried to subvert the chief executive.

The EO removed civil service “protections” for only a few thousand more political appointees, a tiny fraction of the 2.3 million strong federal payroll. But it was a warning and these “public servants” weren’t about to roll over on guaranteed job security, a defined-benefit pension plan (paid for by taxpayers without one) and a pay scale far higher than their private sector counterparts.

Just don’t mention a Pentagon with nearly 800,000 civilian employees that has failed its seventh audit in a row or the fact so many post-COVID federal employees aren’t showing up for work that government agencies don’t utilize half their headquarters office space.

After all, this Patel character is dangerous.

Former Rep. Jason Lewis (R-Minn.) writes at jasonlewis.substack.com and is the author of Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics & the Partisan Press now out in paperback.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.