Kash’s Corner: A Blueprint for Durham and Accountability for the Crossfire Hurricane Scandal
In the investigation into the Crossfire Hurricane scandal, what powers does Special Counsel John Durham have that the inspector general did not? What might come out of Durham’s investigation—which is still ongoing?
If Kash Patel were special counsel, what would he do?
And what declassified materials have still not been released?
Jan Jekielek: Hello everyone, welcome to this week’s episode of Kash’s Corner. Kash, we have something that’s very much up your alley to talk about this week. I know both of us read this, what Glenn Greenwald calls a mega-viral thread. And indeed, it was mega-viral thread done by Daryl Cooper.
It explores how the Russia collusion hoax or operation essentially changed the perception of MAGA voters, or perhaps of a lot of conservatives in America on a whole set of institutions that are part of the U.S. government.
One of the things that Darryl observes is that people were following all the information that was coming out of the corporate media about Russia collusion. These are people that would have eagerly supported any sort of prosecution that might have happened at the time.
But because of the work that you and Congressman Nunes did at the House Intelligence Committee, and the IG [Inspector General] Report that came out subsequently, they increasingly realized that the system really wasn’t working, and in the process they became incredibly disillusioned.
This is something that I’ve heard from many people that I know who were MAGA voters over the past few years. Let’s talk a little bit about Durham. Because Durham, to this day is acting as special counsel looking into the origins of this whole Russia collusion investigation.
Today, what we’re going to ask you to give us some insight into what he might be doing, because a lot of people might not even know that he’s even on the job right now.
Kash Patel: Jan, it’s great to be back and I’m looking forward to another exciting episode with you. And just as a simple reminder to our fan base, we’re going to give a very special shout out to an inspirational fan of Kash’s Corner at the end of the show.
Backing it up a little bit, I would say the American people, the majority have felt that accountability is something that should be applied equally to those in government, as it is to those outside of government, when they break the law.
Now, it’s been proven beyond any doubt, as you said, that the Russiagate narrative, the Russia collusion narrative was a total fraud— a fraud upon a federal court, on federal judges, on the attorney general, on the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and most importantly, on the American people. That is why there’s such energy and drive to understand why accountability is lacking.
Now with John Durham, you have to remember, there’s John Durham, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut, with almost 10 years in that role. Bill Barr, in the spring of 2019, brought him in, while he was the U.S. Attorney in Connecticut, to look at all of the things related to the Russiagate hoax that we had uncovered on the House Intelligence Committee with Chairman Nunes and that were subsequently validated by the IG’s independent report.
So Darryl was going for a year plus on that matter. Then towards the end of the Trump administration, Bill Barr appointed John Durham to another role, special counsel.
Mr. Jekielek: Now, let me stop you for a second. So one thing about the IG report, and this was paraded a lot in the corporate media, the IG report didn’t find there was an issue with the predication, or the origins of the whole Russia collusion operation.
Mr. Patel: Let’s just remind everyone of the limited powers of an inspector general. One, they do not have subpoena power. And only people employed in government at the time of the inspector general’s report are required to sit down with them and answer questions if they want to.
They have no authority outside of that, they do not have a grand jury power, and they do not have subpoena power. So a lot of the individuals in question, the Comeys, the McCabes, the Strzoks, the Lisa Pages, they were all fired or resigned or retired early as a result of our HPSCI, [United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence] House Intelligence Report.
We were able to show the American people the ways in which they abused their authority. So an inspector general’s report is limited. But I would say this, and I know most of the media wanted to ignore this, he found 17 errors in the four federal warrant applications against the Trump campaign.
Any one of which, he said, was sufficient to overturn each individual warrant. And that was the Inspector General. And two warrants eventually were entirely reversed by the Department of Justice.
So that is a significant finding by the inspector general. But if you want to know what actually happened, you need to have criminal investigative powers, which the IG does not have, but a John Durham would.
Mr. Jekielek: So John Durham is still around as special counsel now. Actually he’s left his role as a U.S. Attorney for Connecticut. But we really haven’t heard anything from him.
Mr. Patel: So a quick reminder on special counsels. He’s in place and the special counsel regulations outlined by the attorney general at the time of the appointment say what John Durham is allowed to investigate.
Essentially, he’s allowed to investigate the entire origins of the Russia collusion narrative, and all the individuals involved. He has all the authority that a Department of Justice prosecutor has— grand jury, petit jury, subpoenas, national security letters, and the like.
So it’s a tremendous amount of power, and he has the investigative capability of FBI agents, federal law enforcement and local law enforcement to help him.
He’s still in place because the special counsel’s role has not ended. It can only end when he finishes his submission to the attorney general as to recommend charges, and/or submit a written report for the public to read once the attorney general has signed off on that report as well.
So neither of those things have happened. Obviously, John Durham has not been removed as special counsel. He’s still there. I don’t know what he’s doing. But I know what I would do.
Mr. Jekielek: That’s something that we’re going to need to talk about today.
Mr. Patel: All right.
Mr. Jekielek: We have heard that there’s a number of people—I think this was from Attorney General Barr when he was in the role, there’s a number of people that are not under investigation. I think Clapper was one of them. There are others that are not coming to mind as examples.
Mr. Patel: If I were still a federal prosecutor, as I was at the Department of Justice running some pretty complex national security cases, I would basically run this entire prosecution investigation as if it were a giant conspiracy.
Because there’s no way in the world that one medium level attorney at the FBI, Kevin Clinesmith, was the only person who orchestrated the greatest political fraud in American history. There had to be others involved.
I’m not just saying that as an assumption. I’m saying that, because we proved it, over and over again, during the House Intel report and also during the revelations in the Inspector General Report.
Here’s what I tell people that always ask me, “Where’s the accountability? Where’s the prosecutions?” I say, “Look, let the man finish his job,” the man being John Durham.
But also you have to remember the congressional oversight investigation that we ran under Chairman Nunes on the House Intel Committee led to the firing or termination of 17 senior government officials. That includes an FBI Director, a deputy FBI Director, very senior FBI and DOJ officials and other individuals in federal government.
That is a tremendous amount of resignations, terminations and actual firings at that level which, actually, has never occurred in U.S. history. Even with Watergate, there weren’t that many individuals taken down by a congressional oversight investigation. So that is step one.
Step two, is for the DOJ to pick this thing up and use their extensive powers with grand jury and criminal authority to look at the individuals involved. There’s a number of folks I would look at, and we can talk about how I would go about it.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s go back to what we actually know, what is public record. As you mentioned, 17 people were removed from their roles in various ways, including being fired. Is that all we’re going to see?
Mr. Patel: I surely hope not, as a former member of the Department of Justice. Because the purpose of the DOJ is to punish individuals across America that violate federal statutes. But their bigger role, their more important role is to punish those within government at the highest levels who violate federal law.
That is a role that the department has always taken seriously and hopefully still is, with John Durham. So I’m holding my breath on that one.
But outside of John Durham, the American public has to know that a federal judge—there’s a saying, when I was a public defender or a prosecutor—that no one is more powerful than a federal district court judge.
Federal district court judges have immense power when they are reviewing matters that appear before them, including federal warrants, search warrants, and in this case, a FISA warrant, which is just a foreign intelligence surveillance warrant, another form of a search warrant.
There has to be the highest level of authorization and approval to spy on a presidential campaign, and a federal judge who authorized that warrant.
Now we know there are four warrants authorized by four federal judges. Each of those can haul every individual involved with that warrant, from the attorney general to the FBI director to his entire team before his court and say, “We now know there was a fraud committed upon this court. I am initiating contempt proceedings,” which are federal offenses.
Mr. Jekielek: That’s something we should revisit. There were two of these FISA warrants that were invalidated. That is something that’s very rare, as I understand it.
Mr. Patel: So reversing a federal judge, if you ask a federal judge, they’ll probably tell you that’s one of the things that they don’t appreciate the most. Because they’re basically being told the decision you made to issue this search warrant or to issue this verdict in this case was wrong, was incorrect, either in law, in fact, or both.
So when I was running the investigation for Chairman Nunes and I first went to them with the possibility that, not only was a federal judge lied to, but also the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is a specialized version of the most sensitive matters in the national security apparatus.
Even I agreed, at first blush, “How could that have happened in America? That’s not what happens here.”
So we had to dig and get evidence. And as you said, we were able to show the intentionally fraudulent material that was submitted to the federal judge in the application.
But equally important was what was known to the government and that was not submitted or withheld from that federal judge.
And for the Department of Justice to invalidate, to reverse two federal search warrants against the president of the United States, because they agreed that what we found was accurate, is significant in and of itself. It should have caused those four judges in the FISA court to act on their own while the Department of Justice was figuring out what to do.
Mr. Jekielek: So why wouldn’t they? What would be the reason a judge wouldn’t act in this very, very unusual case, let’s call it.
Mr. Patel: Maybe embarrassment, or they don’t want to call more light to the matter, or they don’t want to be the ones recognized by the American public as having been duped by the FBI and the Department of Justice.
But those aren’t sufficient reasons for a federal judge to fail in the performance of his duties. They have all the information they need to initiate contempt proceedings.
Rewinding the clock a little bit—when we were working on this investigation on the hill, we sent classified letters to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, to the federal judges in charge of this process outlining the various fraud and intentional misrepresentations and withholding of exculpatory evidence to the FISC in two different settings. Each time, we were sternly rebuked.
So these federal judges on the FISC responded to those two separate letters, and basically deflected their duty by saying, “Go look at the Department of Justice.” “No, we’re looking at you who signed off on this warrant and approved it in your court, in your presence. You’re the ultimate arbiter, not the Department of Justice, or the FBI.”
The first time they just thought we were nuts, because we were saying these crazy things. And we had to have been nuts.
The second time when we put all of our actual factual findings in another letter, they didn’t reply to us for some time and then deflected yet again and said, “Someone else should look at this.”
Mr. Jekielek: So now we have special counsel Durham working on that,. Until he decides to finish, he’s on the job.
Let’s do a kind of a thought experiment here. You’re someone that’s intimately familiar with a lot of different elements in this case, obviously. Not everything, by any means, but why don’t you put on a special counsel hat. Tell me, what would you do here?
Mr. Patel: This would be fun. If that were actually to come to terms, people might be terrified. But if I were special counsel, going back to my federal prosecutor days, and my federal public defender days, I would look at, one; whether or not there was an overarching conspiracy.
Because as I said earlier, no one person could pull this off alone, it’s impossible. And two; I would look at all of the findings of the House Intel work, and also the IG Report that demonstrated multiple levels of failures in duty, intentional or otherwise, by people as high as director of the FBI, the deputy director of the FBI, the head of counterintelligence for the FBI, Peter Strzok and others on down.
I would immediately run two parallel investigations, one; a conspiracy. Two; I would look at the separate statutes that were substantively violated by the actions of one, two, three, four, five, six or more people to look at the underlying actions in that conspiracy. I would be running two investigations.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s start with the conspiracy side. What would that look like?
Mr. Patel: On its face, people say, “Conspiracy, you’re talking about made-up stuff.” No, conspiracy is a federal crime. If you break the law, you have to show a substantive act, an overt act in support of the conspiracy.
What we found was that multiple people in roles as high as the director of the FBI, the deputy director, FBI and others, withheld information from a federal judge and/or lied to an inspector general, and/or lied under oath at congressional testimony, and/or were the ones in charge of verifying that search warrant that certified everything in it was accurate and verified, which the law requires, knowing that the opposite was true. That means it was a fraudulent warrant, and they submitted it before a federal judge.
Those are the things I would be looking at as to who all the players are in that space. Those names are very common by now. As we alluded to earlier, 17 people were removed from office because of our investigation. So I would start with those 17 people.
Mr. Jekielek: So that’s the conspiracy side. What about these individual statutes that you’re talking about?
Mr. Patel: I’m not a constitutional lawyer or have any of those statutes memorized. But when you submit something to a federal judge, you as the prosecutor, and the FBI agent who signs the warrant says, “All these facts are true,” you are basically held to a standard that says if you lie to the federal judge, it is a federal offense.
There’s a statute for that, so you can be prosecuted there under. You can also be placed under contempt of court proceedings, which is separate. You don’t need the Department of Justice for that. That’s just initiated by a federal judge.
I would love for any one of these federal judges to initiate contempt proceedings, but I have not seen or heard about that happening, which is a separate failure, in my opinion.
Then I would also be looking at substantive crimes, such as Clinesmith. He purposely, intentionally deleted the word, “not,” from an email that was used in a FISA application in reference to Carter Page.
That is a substantive crime. There is no way, in my opinion, he did that on his own. There is no way other people in the FBI did not tell him to do it, or that other people did not know about it.
Every one of those people in that chain of command with that knowledge is liable, as liable, if not more liable than Kevin Clinesmith. I would prosecute those individuals for lying to a federal court, like they did with Kevin Clinesmith.
Mr. Jekielek: To quickly refresh everyone’s memory, the removal of that one word basically changed the entire meaning of the email.
Mr. Patel: Completely. It was basically saying, “Did Carter Page assist a federal government agency in the past?” They made it as out to be that Carter Page did not assist the federal government agency in the past, which goes to the individual’s credibility.
Carter Page was the target of the search warrant. So to intentionally delete or add a word, as you said, completely changes the narrative, and is illegal, as we were shown by the only prosecution we’ve seen in this case.
But there are others too I forgot to mention. While you’re running these two parallel investigations and prosecutions, I would also run a leaks investigation.
That is as to whether or not classified information was leaked, and by whom. Now, we know it was leaked, because the media, when reviewing cases or matters that involve leaks of classified information during this Russiagate hoax, went apoplectic.
They discharged their duty of journalistic integrity and intentionally disclosed classified information, as was shown with so many individuals in the mainstream media. And they didn’t care.
That’s a separate matter, the media side of it, which I’m not going to take up. That they were willing to do so is just so far beyond the pale of journalism, that it actually hurts the national security of our country. But only the American public can really deal with that.
But the individuals in the media were fed this information by someone with a security clearance in the United States government. That’s the only way they could receive this information. By individuals at Department Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Who are these individuals? Remember, the information they were leaking was known by a very small universe of people, not everybody with a clearance had access to this information.
So you can narrow down the list to 15, maybe 20 people. You can ask, “Was the director of the FBI involved? Was the deputy director of the FBI involved? Was the head of counter-intel involved? Was a lawyer at the FBI involved?. Who at the DOJ was involved? Who were other individuals involved in the investigation?”
Then you can look at their access and look at where they were. You can look at when they had access to this information. Then I would look at their phones, their emails, their workflows, their private emails, meetings they had with individuals in the media, contacts they had with individuals in the media, all around the time of the disclosure in the media.
That’s a leak of classified information. That is a federal offense, punishable by over a decade in prison, off the top of my head. It’s a pretty serious matter.
But no one’s been prosecuted for a leak of classified information. However, I hope, John Durham is utilizing his authority to look at that—to look at whether or not James Comey disclosed classified information when he leaked the Comey letters, as they are now commonly referred to, disclosing private conversation with the president of the United States—an executive privilege matter there too.
Comey has admitted publicly to saying he did that, so that a special counsel Mueller would be appointed to oversee the actions of his, Comey’s FBI, because he had been shortly thereafter terminated by that.
So it’s sort of a retaliatory effort, which is a telltale sign of someone in authority disclosing information. But I would be looking at that pretty hard. I would be looking at his deputy to see if he did it.
And I would be looking at all the others that were removed for violations of either the internal regulations or just because they flat out knew themselves that they broke the law and decided to leave government service, so they wouldn’t be subject to the inspector general’s investigation.
Mr. Jekielek: We were talking about this thread earlier by Darryl Cooper. A lot of the people that were seeking accountability in this case, the American public, people I’ve spoken with, they’ve said things like they don’t believe anything can even come of this Durham investigation.
I can say that the people I’ve spoken with feel demoralized, and feel like the institutions have failed them. This has been replicated in many, many, many examples. What do you think?
Mr. Patel: The Russia conspiracy, the Russiagate hoax, was the first big investigation that broke the American public’s confidence in our government institutions. Then when we thought that nothing like this could ever happen again, as you mentioned, there were other instances.
Not just the Russia hoax and the impeachment stuff, but there were things like the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, which is a duty of the legislative branch of government to confirm an individual for the highest court in the land, and then to have all of these false allegations presented to the United States Congress, and to have them trumpeted out as if they were hard truth and fact. When they were disproven, it destroyed the American people’s confidence in our institutions.
Because our institutions just don’t lie in the executive branch. It’s not just the DOJ and the FBI, but it’s also the judiciary, the federal judges, the FISC, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and the legislative branch, Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives.
When you take all the events that we’ve been talking about, they tie across all three branches of government. Now you see why the American public has lost confidence in our U.S. government as a whole, writ large, to hold itself accountable.
It’s very unfortunate that we are at this stage. They’ve been assisted, of course, by a majority of people in the media, who do not want to talk about the truth. They do not want to talk about violations of law.
What I always tell people is to juxtapose a separate analogy. Imagine Hillary Clinton won the election for president the United States. Then imagine if during that election cycle president elect or then candidate Trump hired a private law firm in the United States, who would then hire a former spy of one of our allies to dig up dirt against Hillary Clinton.
And that dirt proved to be false, and made up, and paid for by her opposition. Then all that information was packaged up and submitted to a federal court. And a federal judge said, “Yes, I’m going to not only spy on President Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but I’m authorizing the spying on her as a president twice over when she’s in office.”
Imagine the Department of Justice would have signed off on that, and the FBI would have signed off on that. Imagine what the media and the American public reaction would have been if the tables were turned.
That’s the best example I have to show the hypocrisy of the media that has aided everything from Russiagate hoax, to the impeachments, and to the Kavanaugh hearings on Capitol Hill.
That is why the other half of America has totally lost faith in the American government to hold itself accountable.
Mr. Jekielek: So what about Durham?
Mr. Patel: As I said, if I were Durham, the leaks investigation is something I would be looking at. The substantive crimes committed by all the individuals from the FBI Director on down is something I’d be looking at.
Did every one of those individuals who testified before Congress, and almost every one of them did under oath, did they lie to Congress? Because we have transcripts where we can compare what they said under oath versus the information they wrote and swore to in search warrant applications in FBI reporting and DOJ reporting. Were there crimes committed there?
Then, of course, there is the overarching conspiracy. As you know, Jan, when we’re talking about conspiracy, when that word comes up, I always think and I fully believe that no one person caused the Russiagate hoax to transpire.
We have evidence of that. We have the director of the FBI and the deputy director of the FBI, saying completely opposite things in terms of what they knew, and when they knew it.
We also have the head of counterintelligence saying to his lover, actually, when she asked him about whether or not Trump was going to win, he literally said, “No, no, we are going to stop it.”
Imagine that the head of counterintelligence for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in America, who is in charge of investigating a presidential campaign says, “We are going to prevent that man from becoming president.”
Mr. Jekielek: At least that’s how it’s interpreted.
Mr. Patel: What I would say, just looking at that statement Peter Strzok made, I would say look at the rest of the evidence surrounding that statement, the meeting in Andy McCabe’s office, the famous insurance policy meeting.
Look at the information that was declassified, subsequent to both the House Intel reporting and the inspector general’s reporting to see who else was acting in conjunction with Peter Strzok, Andy McCabe, and Lisa Page as they huddled in the deputy director’s office to talk about insurance policy.
What did they do in the next week or two after that, in support of that insurance policy? Does that information exist? I would go out and get it. I would bet that information is in a FISA application that hasn’t been disclosed yet, or in FBI reporting that hasn’t been made public yet. But if I were John Durham, I would be looking at all of that.
The last thing I would do is I would be utilizing our grand jury system. As a federal prosecutor, we have very wide authority given to us by the legislature, and one of them is the grand jury.
The grand jury basically decides whether or not you have enough information to bring a case forward and actually charge someone. The threshold in a grand jury is just 51 per cent to 49 per cent of the 17 to 34 jurors that you have in that room that you are presenting information to.
It’s not the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, that requires a conviction in criminal court. But it’s the step that allows you to get to the charging document, and that eventually gets to that later step.
You submit evidence through a federal agent who testifies before a grand jury and says, “This is the information we’ve collected.” You present it to them, and they basically take it under advisement and say, “Yes, we think that there might have been a crime committed.” That’s all you need for grand jury to issue an indictment or a bill, as we call it.
So in this case, I would use a grand jury to lock in all the substantive evidence, all the documentary evidence, all the classified evidence, all the unclassified evidence, all the media reporting, and everything you can find. I would put that into a grand jury, so that it’s on the record, sworn under oath by an FBI agent.
Once you do that, it’s there forever, basically, until the grand jury is terminated. Because some of these conspiracy cases can go on for years, so you can use that same grand jury for years.
The other thing I would do in the grand jury, with all the 17 individuals that I alluded to earlier, plus others, is to subpoena every one of those individuals to appear before the grand jury.
Each one of those individuals has a right under the Constitution to take the fifth, as it’s commonly known, or to walk into a grand jury and say, “I’m not going to provide any information that might self-incriminate,” and put that person in jeopardy. So that’s a right established by the Bill of Rights, and I fully support it.
But as a former federal prosecutor who ran conspiracy cases, what you do is you give immunity to one of the witnesses, or one of the conspirators involved in your overarching conspiracy, and then they can no longer be prosecuted for any crime, and they have to testify in the grand jury against the other individuals.
If I were running this case, the individual I would give full immunity to is Lisa Page, who is the former assistant general counsel at the FBI, who is involved in the FISA application process. She was having an affair with the head of counterintelligence who was leading this investigation, who was very close with Andy McCabe, Deputy Director of the FBI. He, himself, requested Lisa Paige to be one of the attorneys involved in this investigation. She, herself, had extensive dealings with the likes of James Comey in the Department of Justice.
If I were prosecuting this case, I would give her immunity in the grand jury, and probably full-on immunity throughout the rest of the case and say, “We need to know what happened. We represent the American public. We have to restore faith in the American public’s trust in the institutions of the Department of Justice and the FBI, in this instance. We need you to tell us what happened.” That’s what I would do.
Then that person would be required to cooperate because they are no longer under the power of prosecution and conviction, which is the whole purpose of taking the fifth.
Mr. Jekielek: Fascinating. So as we finish up, special counsel Durham, from what you’re saying, may have already completed a report that we might not know about.
Mr. Patel: He might have. I don’t think he has. And just so we’re clear for our audience, the Special Counsel regulations require that every special counsel produce a report to the Attorney General, step one.
But everybody in the media and everyone that I’ve been talking to over the last year, year and a half is looking for this report, looking for this report and looking for this report.
I remind them, “The report is a component of the special counsel.” But with the furor in which the American public has reacted, and the degree to which they have lost faith in our institutions at the DOJ and the FBI, I believe that faith can only be restored by actual indictments, which is the other role of the special counsel.
As a special counsel he has grand jury authority and the authority to bring charges just like Mueller did. Bob Mueller brought a couple of cases as special counsel. That’s the actual, true purpose of a special counsel.
John Durham has that authority. He’s got that in track one. In track two, the regulations require him to produce a report to the attorney general, as I said. Now, that report is completely under the auspices of the attorney general to publicize it or not, or to redact the entire thing and put out one page.
So Merrick Garland is the only one, per the special counsel regulations, who can disclose that report. But what I stress to people is that the report is secondary.
I worry less about the report, and whether that’s going to be submitted, knowing John Durham and knowing the work he did under the rendition program, as counsel, as U.S. Attorney overseeing that prosecution and investigation. I believe he will produce a comprehensive report to Merrick Garland.
My overarching concern, as a former federal prosecutor at DOJ, who handled Benghazi for the Department of Justice and also as a former federal public defender, is that accountability must be meted out not just for those we get to oversee from the Department of Justice, but internally within the Department of Justice.
That is what has cost the American public so dearly. That is the reason they have lost faith in our institutions. The only way you get it back—and I firmly believe that crimes were committed during the Russiagate hoax by individuals and groups of people—is those crimes have to be prosecuted. And only special counsel, John Durham, has the ability to do that.
Mr. Jekielek: So Kash while you were a DNI with Ric Grenell, you declassified a whole bunch of material, some of which no one has ever seen other than you and perhaps a handful of others. What happened with that?
Mr. Patel: That’s a great point, Jan. A way that the American people faith can be restored in its institutions is not just by a special counsel report or special counsel prosecutions, but also by what Devin and I believe to be at the heart of why we took on the Russiagate hoax and accountability.
Instead of us, the U.S. government telling the American people what we found, why don’t you just let them read it for themselves.
So declassification is a significant component that we didn’t talk about that we started, while we were on the hill together at House Intel, Devin and I. Then we continued that work when Ric and I were running the intelligence community.
And we felt it. I still feel that today that there is a whole slew of documents that have been identified, that could show the American people what actually happened.
To this date, I don’t know why those documents have not been made public. We tried, and we got a bunch out, we got a handful of documents out. As Louis Brandeis used to say, sunshine is the best disinfectant.
So why not just let all these documents out? The Russiagate hoax is over. Nothing else is happening involving that. The American people can then go and look into it themselves and say, “What happened here?”
They can read this FBI report, they can read the search warrant application, they can read about this old source that was paid all this money, and provided all this great intel that turned out to be fake, and fraudulent—and that was intentionally relied upon by the highest levels of our government to perpetrate this massive fraud.
That’s a key component to restoring faith in our institutions. It’s not just reports. It’s not just prosecutions, but it’s declassification of all the material that the government collected and created during this massive fraud that needs to be put forth, so Americans can read it.
Mr. Jekielek: How much of what was declassified is actually out there right now? How much of it could be out there?
Mr. Patel: It is going all the way back to 2015 and 2016 with the House Intel investigation, which Chairman Nunes and I and our team did, to fast forward, all the way until President Trump left office.
I would say within that period between what we did at Congress, what Ric and I did at DNI, what John Ratcliffe continued at DNI and the work of others, we probably put out 30 per cent of the information that should be out there.
People have always told us, “You’re going to harm sources and methods, you’re going to destroy relationships, you’re going to hurt America.” The mainstream media, of course, ran with that empty epitaph. But there’s ways to do it, and we did it.
We released more information than has ever been by United States institutions in any point in our history on such a sensitive matter. We did it in a way that didn’t kill anyone. No source was harmed. No national security interest was jeopardized. And no relationship was ruined with our foreign allies.
The remaining 70 per cent was documented as to what should be declassified for the American people. That entire amount of material was actually declassified at the end of the Trump administration. But I don’t know what happened to it. I don’t know why the American people haven’t seen it.
I just know that it was very methodically done to protect sources and methods like we had done for years. And the counter-narrative to that was always you’re going to harm America and America’s interests.
But as we’ve shown, the American people are owed that information, and there’s a safe way to do it. I hope that binder is made public someday very soon, because it would inform the American people of exactly what happened over those years of investigations and the failures of many of our institutions, such as DOJ and FBI.
Mr. Jekielek: Who can actually do that, release that 70 per cent that you don’t know what happened to?
Mr. Patel: Ultimately, either the president of the United States can do it himself, or individuals like the attorney general who holds the authority to do that after a review is conducted by the equity holders. The equity holders are just the people that created those documents.
They are people in the intelligence community, and people at the FBI. You give them the ability to review and say, “Don’t release this, release this,” and that ultimately funnels up to the decision maker. That person is responsible for revealing that information to the attorney general or the president.
Mr. Jekielek: Without getting into details, because I know you can’t, what would this 70 per cent of the documents show?
Mr. Patel: As you said, I can’t talk about the substance, but I can tell you what I think they would show. They would show fraud, corruption and abuse at the highest levels of the very institutions we’re talking about. The FBI, the DOJ, and parts of the intelligence community.
Above all, it would show these institutions being embarrassed by a few bad actors at the senior-most levels, which is unheard of in the United State’s government history.
That is the exact reason why those documents are not being released, but it’s also the exact reason why they should be released, so the American public can read them for themselves and see how bad this embarrassing conduct was, and whether or not it was actually criminal.
Mr. Jekielek: Kash, we’ve had a pretty robust episode here. It’s time for our shout out.
Mr. Patel: This week, shout out goes to Josh, who goes by the moniker The Dirty Truth on Twitter, who is an inspirational American. Josh is handicapped and doesn’t have the use of his hands. But he’s able to put out clips of videos through the assistance of audio devices and video devices on his Twitter account. We appreciate you for putting out clips of Kash’s Corner in the past, and we hope you continue to do so, Josh. Thanks for being a supporter.
Mr. Jekielek: All right, everyone. We’ll see you next week on Kash’s Corner.
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