Golly Darnit, Did Kash Patel Mess It All Up AGAIN?
Also, he is the perfect guy to make peace with Ukraine. Definitely.
No surprise, the helpers President Donald Trump collected for his second term make the incompetents of his first term look like the starting lineup of the 1980 US Ice Hockey team. And now it appears FBI Director Kashyap Pramod Patel made another serious and dangerous blunder, telling Trump that a person of interest was in custody for the mass shooting at Brown University on Saturday, leading Trump to post that wrong information when once again it was the wrong guy.
Sure, Patel is a clown and scammer, a peddler of scammy “COVID spike protein” supplements, author of a fawning children’s book series in which a magical wizard named Kash helps King Trump defeat Hillary Queenton. He $pells his own name with a dollar $ign. But he really did go to law school. A low-tier one (Pace), but still. And he passed the bar and worked as a public defender and prosecutor in the Counterterrorism and National Security divisions, until he left the Justice Department to work for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence as an aide to Devin Nunes, investigating if the FBI did WIRE TAPPS to Trump.
The point being, the guy knows what the law is and how prosecutions work. (At least on paper, in theory.) He knows that announcing a suspect is in custody when one is actually not creates a danger to the public.
But he also knows that everything is a pageant for President Gameshow Host, who must be the center of attention at all times!
So Patel claimed there was a person of interest in America’s 465th mass shooting this year, which killed two (so far) and injured nine at Brown University on Saturday. Donald J. Trump Truthed that a suspect was in custody, and was subsequently forced to retract the untrue Truth.
How truthfully embarrassing!
The news of a person of interest also came as news to the Providence police, who had not announced anything, being too busy trying to do their jobs with students bleeding out all around them and a shooter on the loose. Therefore they had made no statement to “reverse.”
But based on Patel’s “tip,” the police arrested the person Patel claimed the FBI had tracked by cell phone. But then they were forced to release said suspect, for lack of evidence. And now as far as anybody knows, the shooter is still out there.
Hey, it’s just like when Patel bungled the arrest of Charlie Kirk’s shooter! Police arrested the wrong guy, Patel announced it, and was forced to retract his “suspect in custody” statement 90 confusing minutes later.
Patel’s more pressing concern at the time, it seems, was making sure FBI patches were affixed to the women’s FBI jacket they found for him to wear, so he would look properly the part while peacocking all over the crime scene.
The man actually charged with Kirk’s murderer ended up being caught a mere 27 hours later, after his own family and roommate turned him in.
Trump’s got a lineup of conspiracy theorists, failed beauty queens, talking heads from Fox News and Russian television and parking garage lawyers, because they are the only people who will work with him, and dumb enough to think they won’t go under the bus if Trump should decide he needs a speedbump. But there is also more to it! Behold the paragraph on “competence and merit” from his batshit National Security manifesto:
Competence and Merit – American prosperity and security depend on the development and promotion of competence. Competence and merit are among our greatest civilizational advantages: where the best Americans are hired, promoted, and honored, innovation and prosperity follow. Should competence be destroyed or systematically discouraged, complex systems that we take for granted—from infrastructure to national security to education and research—will cease to function.
The paragraph is about DEI, which is exactly what Trump is trying to do, but for his MAGA loyalists. And the plan for maximum dysfunction sure seems to be working, except that Attorney General Pam Bondi can’t purge the remaining competents fast enough. Those still around have been snitching like crazy about Patel’s entitled idiocy and corruption, like using the taxpayer jet to go see his country singer girlfriend perform.
But even Trump and Bondi seem a little bit concerned that a pair of halfwits leading the FBI could become a problem. After FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino cried on Fox & Friends about how hard it was to work an actual job, then reportedly got into a screaming match with Bondi over how claiming the Epstein files actually did not exist had embarrassed him in front of his conspiracy-theory-addled podcast audience, in August Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey was installed as co-deputy, to do the deputy-ing “with” Dan Bongino, and to help Patel out.
Doesn’t seem to be working.
But while it’s been rumored for months now that Patel is on his way out, Trump has vowed to not fire anyone in his inner circle this time around, so as to deny the media the satisfaction of any “scalps.” And it seems Trump still does have a lot of confidence in Bongos and Kash, for whatever reason. So much that they have reportedly been meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s lead negotiator, Rustem Umerov! Who himself is suspected of corruption.
Why on earth would domestic law enforcement officials be involved in peace negotiations with Ukraine? Who knows, but according to testimony from Fiona Hill during Trump’s first impeachment, for some reason Patel had discussions with Rudy Giuliani before the Trump administration’s suspension of $400 million in military aid to Ukraine. Weird! (Patel denied being a back channel to Ukraine, and claims he only talked to Giuliani about personal things.)
And Patel actually had Trump convinced that he was the resident Ukraine expert at the National Security Council.
Loyalty is the most important thing around these parts. One can serve Donald Trump or the truth, but not both at the same time.
Let us hope the Brown University shooter’s family is as civic-minded as that of Charlie Kirk’s accused killer, because that kind of luck seems to be Providence’s only hope, at least as far as Kash Patel’s FBI is concerned.
Everything is fine!
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