Kash Patel Giving Lie Detectors To Smoke Out FBI Agents Who Make Fun Of Kash Patel
Who knew jackbooted authoritarianism would be so insecure and pathetic?
There are huge and important and scary stories out there to talk about.
We need to talk about the Department of Justice whistleblower Erez Reuveni, who was forced out after he was honest with a judge about how they had deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia totally by accident, and after he appeared insufficiently committed to defending Donald Trump’s/Pam Bondi’s/Kristi Noem’s Nazi Dumbass Sparkle Motion deportation game in court.
Reuveni told the New York Times:
“If they can do this sort of thing to Abrego Garcia, to 238 people that nobody knows, and send them to CECOT forever with no due process, they can do that to anyone,” said Mr. Reuveni. “It should be deeply, deeply worrisome to anyone who cares about their safety and their liberty, that the government can, without showing evidence to anyone of anything, spirit you away on a plane to wherever, forever.”
On Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show last night, he openly encouraged all American citizens — all — to start carrying a passport, and even better, a passport card, to be able to prove at all times that they’re citizens, and yes, that card will get you into Canada or Mexico if you need to get the fuck out fast.
So yes, we need to talk about that. You should read Reuveni’s full Times interview, and this Reuveni interview from Ruth Marcus in The New Yorker, and also enjoy watching Pammy Jo Bondi flail around pissed off at this alleged “disgruntled employee.” Why yes, he’s disgruntled! He’s watching the Justice Department he was devoted to become a dumbass roid-raged fucking clownshow of losers and incels devoted to nothing besides carrying out Donald Trump’s Nazi agenda and exacting revenge for Trump’s microdicked petty grievances.
Any patriot would be “disgruntled,” we think!
But it is Friday morning, so why don’t we talk real quick about a huge and important and scary story that is ALSO really fucking easy to laugh at?
Yes, let’s make fun of Kash Patel, that stupid, needy, self-conscious, try-hard fuckface.
Because while the Times has that Reuveni interview, and while it has the story of Trump’s DOJ/FBI fluffers leaking fantastical stories about investigations into James Comey and John Brennan, which the Trump administration is desperately hoping will distract MAGA mouthbreathers from the Epstein secrets they’re never getting, the Times ALSO has the hilarious, yet terrifying, yet hilarious story that Kash Patel, FBI director and author of enemies lists and children’s books about “Hillary Queenton,” is giving agents lie detector tests to make sure they’ve never made fun of Kash Patel or called him a dorkweenus behind his back.
Yesssssssssssss, America is SO BACK.
Usually if the FBI uses a polygraph with an FBI employee, as the Times’s Adam Goldman notes, it’s probably because they’re worried that person literally might have betrayed America. (The actual America, not “Donald Trump thinks he’s synonymous with America, therefore if you didn’t vote for him, you are a traitor.”) Sometimes they use them in normal times for security clearances.
But in the extremely masculine-insecure Trump administration, in Kash Patel’s FBI, they are being used on the rank-and-file to find people who secretly think mean things about Kash Patel.
Since Kash Patel took office as the director of the F.B.I., the bureau has significantly stepped up the use of the lie-detector test, at times subjecting personnel to a question as specific as whether they have cast aspersions on Mr. Patel himself.
In interviews and polygraph tests, the F.B.I. has asked senior employees whether they have said anything negative about Mr. Patel, according to two people with knowledge of the questions and others familiar with similar accounts.
If you work at the FBI and you have made any true statements to your husband or wife or a bartender about how the bureau is being run by a world-historical dipshit who isn’t qualified to clean the toilets in the J. Edgar Hoover building, you in danger, girl.
It gets more embarrassing, for Kash Patel:
In one instance, officials were forced to take a polygraph as the agency sought to determine who disclosed to the news media that Mr. Patel had demanded a service weapon, an unusual request given that he is not an agent.
Yes, and if you start laughing when they ask you that question on the polygraph, because of how the question reminded you of how fucking pathetic that was, you’re going directly to Alligator Alcatraz.
The Times says “dozens” of people have had to take the lie detectors, but it’s not clear how many have had to promise to Jesus that they haven’t made fun of Kash to their mom. But regardless, their sources say — we are paraphrasing here — that this is highly fucked up, and reflects how hyper-sensitive Patel is to his precious image. (Spoiler, his image is a joke.)
Here is an on-the-record quote about how pathetic this is:
Disparaging Mr. Patel or his deputy, Dan Bongino, former officials say, could cost people their job.
“An F.B.I. employee’s loyalty is to the Constitution, not to the director or deputy director,” said James Davidson, a former agent who spent 23 years in the bureau. “It says everything about Patel’s weak constitution that this is even on his radar.”
But that’s not all the ways they’re testing for loyalty, or for agents’ willingness to affix their names to shitty work if it aligns with the directives of the shitty humans Donald Trump has staffed the bureau with.
Because golly, so many issues can come up with FBI leadership that is this degree of oversensitive and cucked!
For example, what if somebody at the FBI is secretly is friends with Peter Strzok, who still upsets Donald Trump all these years later because of Russia Russia Russia? We talked this week about how that’s exactly what happened to Michael Feinberg, by all accounts an incredibly talented special agent, who was pushed out because Peter Strzok is his buddy. As the Times reported earlier this week, they threatened Feinberg with a polygraph too. He even wrote about it himself this week in Lawfare.
It came from Dominique Evans, who had recently been put in charge of the Norfolk field office:
[S]he told me, I would be asked to submit to a polygraph exam probing the nature of my friendship with Pete, and (as I was quietly informed by another, friendlier senior employee) what could only be described as a latter-day struggle session. I would be expected to grovel, beg forgiveness, and pledge loyalty as part of the FBI’s cultural revolution brought about by Patel and Bongino’s accession to the highest echelons of American law enforcement and intelligence.
Instead, he fucking quit-fired himself and preserved his integrity.
Anyway, read the whole thing, it’s horrifying.
But you get to make fun of Kash Patel in your mind the whole time, so there’s that.
Just don’t try to take a polygraph about it, he will find out you made fun of him in your mind!
And that is ILLEGAL.
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The Republicans wanted to run the government like a business.
So, now, we have professional career FBI agents being treated the same as Amazon Warehouse employees and clerks at Dollar General by managers who act like Elon Musk on a ketamine bender.
I constantly call it Alligator Auschwitz. Let those assholes try to correct me, and get sucked into explaining why it's not a concentration camp.
Because I count exactly zero convicted felons in that facility.
I also use the term "Dixie Dachau", which you ought to, too.