As a senior House Intel investigator and Trump administration official, Kash Patel helped unearth critical misconduct by the intelligence officials who carried out the Trump-Russia probe.
In his first extended interview since leaving government, Patel tells Aaron Maté that still-classified documents expose more malpractice, as well as major evidentiary holes in the pivotal — and largely unquestioned — claims of a sweeping Russian interference campaign to elect Trump in 2016.
According to Patel, the release of these critical documents was “continuously impeded.” “I think there were people at the heads of certain intelligence agencies who did not want their tradecraft called out, even though it was during a former administration, because it doesn’t look good on the agency itself,” Patel says.
Among the tradecraft that Patel criticizes is the hastily produced and highly consequential “Intelligence Community Assessment” of January 2017, as well as the FBI’s reliance on Crowdstrike — the DNC contractor that generated the Russian hacking allegations despite later admitting, behind closed doors, that it lacked concrete evidence.
Patel also discusses other aspects of his time in the Trump White House: a secret mission to Syria; Trump’s record on foreign wars; and the January 6th riot at the Capitol.
Guest: Kash Patel. Former senior government official in the Trump administration, where he served as senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, and chief of staff to the acting Secretary of Defense. Previously, Patel served as a top investigator on the GOP-led House Intelligence Committee, where he was instrumental in exposing US intelligence misconduct in the Trump-Russia investigation. Also served as a national security official in the Obama-era Justice Department and Pentagon.
Read more:
Aaron Maté’s July 2019 report on the flaws in Mueller’s claims of sweeping Russian interference: “CrowdstrikeOut”
HPSCI March 2018 report: “Report on Russian Active Measures”
Aaron Maté on Crowdstrike’s secret admission of no “concrete evidence” in Russian hacking claims:
“Bombshell: Crowdstrike admits ‘no evidence’ Russia stole emails from DNC server”
“Hidden Over 2 Years: Dem Cyber-Firm’s Sworn Testimony It Had No Proof of Russian Hack of DNC”
VIDEO
TRANSCRIPT
AARON MATÉ: Welcome to Pushback. I’m Aaron Maté.
Joining me is Kash Patel. He is a former senior official in the Trump administration who served in several top roles, including as the Deputy Assistant to the President, the Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council, the chief of staff to the Acting Secretary of Defense, and previously he served as a top aide on the House Intelligence Committee when it was chaired by Republican Devin Nunes, where he was instrumental in exposing US intelligence conduct behind the Trump-Russia investigation.
Kash Patel, welcome to Pushback.
KASH PATEL: Aaron, thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate you doing this. Let’s have some fun.
AARON MATÉ: I appreciate the opportunity. You had a front row seat to several major stories of the Trump era. I want to start with Russiagate because that’s where I first heard of you. You helped expose the conduct of intelligence officials who carried out the investigation, including the instrumental role of the Steele dossier and the surveillance warrant on Carter Page, the former Trump campaign volunteer. And I want to get your response to actually how the media portrayed you, because when you were discussed in media accounts in several outlets, it seemed like it was a requirement to describe you as someone who was working to discredit the Trump-Russia investigation. I want to just get your response to that, how you saw your role behind the scenes, and your overall thoughts on the Trump-Russia investigation itself.
KASH PATEL: Well, thanks for allowing me the opportunity to speak about it like that. I don’t think anybody has ever really asked me to do that, so I really appreciate it.
So, I went on as a senior staffer for the House Intel Committee and not in Devin’s personal office. And long and short of it was, I didn’t really want to go over to The Hill, but Devin had said, ‘Hey, somebody with your background as a public defender and a national security prosecutor and knows how to investigate and take depositions, we sort of need someone to run this investigation.’ At the time neither of us thought it would get much coverage. We were just, like, we’ll do the investigation, we’ll make a report and we’ll put it up in Congress for the records, and that’ll be that. But I guess we were both really wrong on that one.
As the investigation unfolded, and the agreement I made with Devin, I said, ‘Okay, I don’t really want to go to The Hill, but I’ll do the job on one basis: accountability and disclosure. Everything we find—I don’t care if it’s good or bad or whatever from your political perspective—we put it out so the American public can just read it themselves.’ And he agreed to that right away. So, I said, ‘Okay, then we’re up and running.’ But then the media came in and, I think the first portrayal of me in the media, because my name as a staffer was leaked, which is generally verboten, unheard of, but was leaked, and they called me a genocidal dictator in that article—Torquemada—and I thought that was—I don’t know how to even describe that—but I felt really upset that my family name was being portrayed as someone who had killed thousands of people during the Spanish Inquisition.
AARON MATÉ: Huh, huh.
KASH PATEL: That was the first big, breaking news story. I don’t know if it was big; it was just the one that put my name out there, which I also was not expecting any of the media to be on me personally, as a staffer. That was a little surprising.
AARON MATÉ: And what were you actually doing behind the scenes, then, that you think would have elicited this attack on you?…
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