Sarah Fitzpatrick has a story describing that Kash Patel refuses to tell anyone at the FBI why he’s hopping on a plane to fly to Russia this week.
Current and former FBI officials familiar with the matter told me there was a quiet campaign to urge senior leadership to cancel the trip. When that and other efforts to pass apprehensions up the chain went unanswered, some shared their worries with Congress. Now a pair of senior House Democrats are taking the unusual step of asking the FBI director to scrap the visit, which is reportedly set to begin next week: “In the interest of national security, we ask you to reconsider. Call off this trip,” they wrote in a letter that I obtained. The letter is signed by Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Representative Jim Himes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. Patel has not replied to the letter and the FBI has not publicly confirmed his travel plans. Neither the FBI nor the White House responded to my multiple requests for comment.
The story notes that Kash has, with Trump, spent a decade trying to dismiss Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
But it doesn’t mention that Kash has used his position in the Deep State — first as babysitter for John Ratcliffe, then as FBI Director — to collude with Russian spies to frame Donald Trump’s adversaries, first Hillary Clinton and then more recently Jim Comey.
As Chuck Grassley exposed last year, documents shared with the FBI in 2016 discussed framing Hillary Clinton, based on her criticism of Donald Trump’s coziness with Russia. Kash appears to have discovered the documents when undermining the Russian investigation in 2017; right wingers on HPSCI got a look at them in 2018; and then Kash had John Ratcliffe declassify them in 2020 to create a basis for the John Durham investigation.
But the documents Kash was attempting to use to claim that Hillary tried to frame Trump (which is not what they said anyway) were fabrications. They were fabricated starting on July 26, 2016, to distract from growing discoveries tying Guccifer 2.0 to Russia.
Even though Durham showed they were fabrications (he called them “composites”), Kash kept using those Russian fabrications to try to frame Trump’s adversaries. Jim Comey’s confused answer about the fabrications was one of the things Trump charged Comey for last year. And there’s no way Todd Blanche could charge the Grand Conspiracy without relying on Comey’s confused answer, either.
Last year, after Charlie Savage laid out what I also did — that Kash and John Durham had been chasing Russian fabrications for years — Kash panicked, and endorsed Sean Davis’ propaganda about these reports in an attempt to cling to his use of Russian fabrications.
That’s a problem. For the same reasons I laid out in this video about the misleading way Chuck Grassley declassified the document, it means that when Kash gets on a plane to visit Russian spies this week, they already have his nuts in a vice, because they know — and have proof — that he has been relying on Russian fabrications to frame people.
The entire logic of the Durham Report holds that it is a crime to knowingly rely on Russian disinformation — or false claims at all — to try to frame someone.
That is the crime the FBI Director continues to commit.
And Putin’s spies have proof that is what Kash is doing.
John Ratcliffe and Kash Patel — and Durham Himself — Committed the Crime John Durham Was Hunting
How Chuck Grassley’s Politicized Redactions Gave Putin Leverage over Trump
The SVR Fabrication Necessitates Reconceiving the 2016 Russian Influence Operation
Did the Comey Dismissal Render Kash Patel’s Grand Conspiracy “Just Someone Else’s Fantasy”?
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