Dear Joe Rogan, Kash Patel Played You – Mother Jones

Mother Jones illustration; Andrew Leyden/Zuma; Louis Grasse/PxImage/Zuma

Dear Joe Rogan,

I don’t know you. We’ve never met, and I am not a regular listener of your podcast. But I have the impression you are a man who does not like to be played. I regret to inform you that Kash Patel played you.

When the FBI director was on your show last month, he made multiple statements that were false or misleading. Given that you’re a proponent of truth-telling, I expect you will be troubled to learn this.

Let me start with Patel’s remarks about what he derisively calls “Russiagate.” A good chunk of your two-hour-long conversation was devoted to this topic, a personal obsession of Patel. As he has done for years, Patel presented to you and your audience a highly skewed and false narrative. “All roads lead to Russiagate,” he declared. “That’s where it all started.” He meant that his entire critique of the so-called Deep State and the supposedly corrupt Joe Biden gang stems from the Trump-Russia scandal. So it can be rather instructive to look at his claims about this foundational matter.

During the podcast, Patel gave you the “90-seconds” version of this controversy:

Can you imagine a time in the United Staes of America in the 21st century, where a political party would go overseas and acquire fake foreign intelligence from a foreign intelligence officer funded by donations to that political party in the United States of America, then take that material, package it, walk it to the FBI, literally, and say, ‘Hey, we need you to surveil the opponent of our political party who happens to be running for the president of the United States”? Then convince the FBI to go to a secret federal FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court that I used to use to manhunt terrorists and say, ‘Hey I need you to wiretap essentially all the comms in and around Trump camp because of the material we gave you.’ And then have that FBI lie to the federal court and the judge in that warrant application, which is a felony, and intentionally remove information of innocence from that application just to get it above the threshold so the judge would sign it. That’s Russiagate.

Much in this description was inaccurate. The political party Patel was referring to—the Democrats—did not hand that opposition research to the FBI and request surveillance of Donald Trump, and the FBI did not seek to wiretap “essentially all the comms” of the Trump camp. It requested a wiretap on one former Trump campaign adviser.

But more to the point, Joe, what Patel was referring to was merely one slice of the much larger Trump-Russia affair. And this is Patel’s magic trick. It’s a diversion. He wants you and others to fixate on the issue of a search warrant and not pay attention to the bigger story: Russia attacked the 2016 election to help Trump, and Trump aided and abetted Moscow by denying this assault, thus providing cover to Vladimir Putin.

For years, Patel and other Trump allies have deflected from these basic facts by focusing solely on what’s become known as the Steele dossier and how it was used by the FBI to obtain that surveillance warrant for Carter Page, a little-known foreign policy adviser for Trump’s 2016 campaign.

As you know, the dossier was a collection of memos that Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence official and Russia counterintelligence specialist, wrote during the 2016 election on possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Steele, who had previously worked with the FBI, was commissioned to do so by Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm that was being paid by a lawyer for the Clinton campaign to dig up material on Trump. Starting in June that year, Steele sent periodic reports to Fusion GPS that contained unconfirmed information, much of it gossip and speculation from unidentified sources about internal Russian politics and juicy but unsubstantiated tidbits on Trump and his campaign. Weeks later, Steele began sharing these documents with his FBI contact.

The first of these research memos alleged that Russia had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting TRUMP for at least five years.” It noted that Trump and his inner circle had accepted “intelligence from the Kremlin” on his Democratic rivals. It claimed that Russian intelligence had compromising information on Trump that could be used to blackmail him (including what would come to be known as the “pee tape,” which supposedly showed Trump instructing prostitutes to perform a “golden showers” show in his hotel room). The report stated that the Kremlin’s cultivation of Trump included offering him real estate deals in Russia. Another of Steele’s memos cited a source saying there was a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that Paul Manafort, the campaign chair (who had a history of working for a Russian oligarch and Moscow-friendly Ukrainian politicians) was overseeing this arrangement.

Steele’s memos remained a secret until I revealed their existence in a story I reported in Mother Jones on October 31. One of the owners of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, had shown me a copy of the documents and set up an interview for me with Steele, with the provision that I could not cite Steele by name. My article disclosed that a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence had provided the FBI with memos contending the Russian government had for years attempted to co-opt and assist Trump and that the FBI was looking into these allegations. (I did not report the details of the unsubstantiated lurid claims about Trump’s personal behavior believing that would not be fair to him.)

My story on the Steele memos received some attention, but it did not have much impact on the overall coverage of the race in the final week. (By the way, because of my reporting on the Steele documents, I’ve been pulled into some right-wing conspiracy theories about all this. If you’re interested, you can read about that here.)

Let’s back up a bit: Unknown to the public during the 2016 campaign was that in late July the FBI had opened up an investigation—dubbed Crossfire Hurricane—to determine whether Russia was trying to covertly intervene in the election and whether there had been contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians related to this. (The bureau had already been investigating the hacking of Democratic Party computers—an operation attributed to Moscow.) As part of this investigation, the FBI applied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act federal court for a warrant to spy on Page, the Trump campaign adviser, who had had curious interactions with Russian officials during a trip to Moscow.

For those who don’t know, this was S.O.P. It’s generally tough to get a warrant for surveillance on an American citizen—as it should be. The bureau has to file an extensive application with this court to win such permission. In its application for the Page warrant, the FBI cited the Steele memos. This was an egregious mistake. The documents contained unconfirmed scuttlebutt about Page from a foreign source. And as Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz later noted in a 2019 report, the application was loaded with other errors. Nevertheless, in late October 2016, the FISA court approved the secret warrant—and would in subsequent months approve re-authorizations of this warrant.

This was FBI wrongdoing. Patel is correct about that. An FBI lawyer even pleaded guilty to doctoring an email that the bureau used to win FISA court approval to eavesdrop on Page after the 2016 campaign was over. Much of FBI misconduct regarding the application for the surveillance of Page was laid out in that 478-page report issued by Horowitz. (For those in your audience who want to do their own research, the report can be found here.) By the way, the Horowitz report noted that the Steele dossier was only used in the surveillance application regarding Page. There were no other FISA warrants sought by the FBI in this investigation.

Discussing his effort as a congressional investigator to uncover FBI malfeasance related to the Page surveillance, Patel told you, “What I had unearthed was the biggest political criminal scheme ever perpetuated by portions of the FBI leadership and other people in the intelligence community in coordination [with the media].”

Sounds like hype to me. But you be the judge.

Patel, Trump, and others have beat the drum about the FBI’s misuse of the Steele dossier to draw attention from Putin’s assault on the 2016 election and Trump’s complicity. They claim that there is nothing to the Russia “witch hunt” or “hoax”—and that the entire fuss was kicked off by the Steele dossier, which was a Democratic dirty trick. That is, the Dems orchestrated the entire “Russia, Russia, Russia” business with the Steele documents.

That’s not true. Who says so? Many sources. We can start with Horowitz. His report concluded, “We found that Crossfire Hurricane was opened for an authorized investigative purpose and with sufficient factual predication.” It also found no “documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced…[the] decision to open Crossfire Hurricane.” In fact, his report noted that the Steele dossier had nothing to do with the FBI’s launch of the Russia investigation. That inquiry began after the FBI learned that another Trump campaign foreign policy adviser named George Papadopoulos had told an Australian diplomat that the Trump team had been informed that Moscow could assist it by anonymously releasing information damaging for Clinton.

So it wasn’t a political witch hunt engineered by the Dems. You know who else says this? Special counsel John Durham, who was appointed in 2019 by then-Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the Russian investigation.

Durham found flaws in the probe, but he concluded that the FBI inquiry “could have been opened more appropriately as an assessment or preliminary investigation” and not a “full investigation,” as it had been. In other words, the bureau did not improperly launch this investigation but assigned it the wrong level of seriousness. Durham, too, did not report uncovering any “political bias” regarding the FBI’s investigation, though he did assail the bureau for “confirmation bias.”

Now let’s look not at the investigation but the thing itself: what happened in 2016. Several government investigations have concluded that Russia mounted a covert operation to hack and leak Democratic emails and other materials to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Trump.

Trump and Patel, though, deny this. In a recent documentary, Patel said that the the FBI and the rest of the US intelligence community that investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election “knew it didn’t exist.” For his participation in this documentary, Patel was paid $25,000 by a Ukrainian-American-Russian filmmaker who has worked on a Russian propaganda project financed by Putin’s presidential office. Joe, I wish you had asked Patel about that payment. Maybe you can next time he’s on. Here are the details.

It’s rather odd that Patel would deny Russia clandestinely intervened in the 2016 election. When he was investigating what he calls “Russiagate,” he was a Republican staffer on the GOP-run House intelligence committee, which in March 2018 released a report on the Russian attack that opened with this line: “In 2015, Russia began engaging in a covert influence campaign aimed at the U.S. presidential election. The Russian government, at the direction of President Vladimir Putin, sought to sow discord in American society and undermine our faith In the democratic process.” Yet Patel won’t acknowledge even the existence of this Russian operation. Joe, why is that? Why isn’t he—or you—pissed off that Russia messed with our election? Why is the FBI director covering for Putin?

I know you like to get to the bottom of things. In this case, that would mean spending time with the 966-page report released by the Senate intelligence committee in 2020. This is the most comprehensive account of what Russia did in 2016—and it’s bipartisan. In fact, Republican Marco Rubio, now Trump’s secretary of state, was chair of the committee when the report was released. He and other Republicans on the panel endorsed its findings. So it ain’t Democratic spin or a phony narrative cooked up by the liberal press and Deep State that hates Trump.

There’s a lot of mind-blowing stuff in this report. But here are the basics:

The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process…

While [Russian military intelligence] and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.

You and your listeners ought to give those passages a good read. The committee—including such Republicans as Rubio, Tom Cotton, and John Cornyn—was saying the Russian assault was real and that Trump assisted Putin by echoing Moscow’s denial. What’s more, these Republicans were confirming that Trump had been indifferent to an attack on the United States by a foreign adversary and had even sought to exploit it.

Oh boy. I ask you, Joe: What’s worse—the FBI screwing up one FISA application or Trump helping Russia subvert an election for his own benefit? Is it a close call?

I’m guessing that about now you are thinking, “Well, what about all that talk of collusion?” Democrats and some in the media did spend a lot of time claiming that Trump colluded with Russia in this attack. Special counsel Robert Mueller, reported that he found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia. But his report did detail extensive contacts between the campaign and Russian operatives who tried to influence the election. As Mueller testified to Congress, “We did not address ‘collusion,’ which is not a legal term.” Trump and his loyalists seized on the absence of criminal charges to claim full exoneration. That was spin.

On the issue of collusion, Joe, I would, once more, direct you to that lengthy GOP-backed bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report. Its many revelations include the disclosure that Manafort, when he was chair of Trump’s 2016 campaign, covertly met with a former business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik whom the committee characterized as a “Russian intelligence officer,” and he handed over inside campaign information.

Check out this line from the report: “Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.” Trump’s top campaign aide hobnobbing with Russian intelligence. Isn’t that scandalous? Why does that not interest Patel?

The committee noted it had “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the [Russian intelligence’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” That’s big: Trump’s campaign chief was in close contact with a Russian intelligence officer who might have been tied to Putin’s covert attack on the 2016 campaign to help elect Trump. Moreover, the report reveals that the committee found “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was connected “to the hack-and-leak operations.” Might one call this collusion?

This was not the only possible collusion. Several government investigations, include the Senate intelligence committee’s, confirmed that in June 2016, top officials of the Trump campaign—Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner—met in Trump Tower with a Russian intermediary after being informed she was bringing them dirt on Clinton as part of a secret Russian government effort to help Trump. The information she handed over was apparently not useful. But by agreeing to this meeting, the Trump campaign signaled to Moscow it was just fine with Russia mucking about in the election. Collusion? I dunno. But it’s certainly getting cozy with an enemy.

And consider this: After that Trump Tower meeting, when the news broke that Russians had hacked into Democratic Party computers and 20,000 pages of the pilfered material was leaked right before the party’s convention to hurt the Clinton campaign, Trump Jr. and Manafort publicly insisted that Russia had nothing to do with it. They had been informed Moscow was scheming to covertly boost Trump. Yet here they were backing up Putin’s assertion that Russia had nothing to do with the the hack-and-leak operation. They were lying to protect Russia. Collusion? If not, perhaps complicity?

Joe, if you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably tiring from all these details. I know this whole affair can seem convoluted. But for my money, it remains damn important. It’s the original sin of the Trump presidencies. And I wonder why the current FBI director, whose brief includes countering Russian covert actions targeting the United States, doesn’t seem to care that Putin screwed with an American election.

Patel calls Russiagate “the disinformation seed that started it all.” In a way, I agree. Trump’s betrayal in 2016 helped him reach the White House. Remember when WikiLeaks released John Podesta’s emails, which were hacked by Russian ops, to draw attention from Trump’s “grab ’em’ by the pussy” video? During the final weeks of the campaign, the dissemination of those swiped emails generated a ton of negative news stories for Clinton, which certainly contributed to her ultimate defeat.

Over the past nine years Trump and loyalists like Patel have done their mightiest to cover up Trump’s foul deed—his aiding of the Russian attack—pushing a competing narrative that lets Putin and Russia off scot-free.

During the podcast with Patel, you appeared to accept his version of all this at face value and expressed outrage at the FBI’s misuse of the Steele dossier: “It’s so crazy,” you said, “that someone could do something like that and a whole enormous group of people could do something like that with no repercussions….You were part of something that was one of the biggest scandals in political history. But because it was targeted toward Trump people look the other way.”

And you blasted the left:

The disturbing thing to me is how people on the left are willing to look the other way….If the federal government is doing this, and they’re doing this to someone you consider an enemy, what’s to stop them from doing this against your candidate. This is unprecedented behavior that is tolerated and coordinated with the media. That’s dangerous for the country. But people are so ideologically captured. They’re so locked into their party. By any means necessary. We gotta get Trump out. And they push that narrative so hard that they’re willing to do a very un-American thing.

I wonder if you can take a critical look at your embrace of Patel’s self-serving narrative and at the Trump gang’s unrelenting effort to hide Trump’s involvement in Russia’s assault on the United States. I know that might be tough to do. But I would love to see you have Patel back on the show after you read through those reports I cited above. He sure can sound convincing—unless you know the facts.

While I have you: Two other small things regarding your chat with Patel. At one point, he said, “We are on track to have the lowest…murder rate ever…We’re already down 20 percent from last year.” You asked him how he achieved this, and Patel explained that he was following the policy “let good cops be cops,” suggesting the Biden administration had not focused on stopping crime. I contacted the FBI and asked for statistics to back up Patel’s claim of a 20-percent decline. It responded, “The 2024 and 2025 statistics on the murder rate have not been publicly released yet.” The most recent numbers cover 2023, and those show a 11.6 drop in the murder rate. In fact, the murder rate peaked in 2020, during Covid, when Trump was president, and it has been decreasing since then. Any decline in murders is good news, but Patel made it seem as if the Trump administration had scored an unprecedented achievement, when this drop (assuming Patel’s stat is accurate) may well be part of a historical trend.

Also during the podcast, Patel brought up a claim he has many times made: that Trump “preemptively authorized” the deployment of 10,000 to 20,000 National Guard troops before January 6—and these troops were rejected by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser. You seized on this to suggest these Democrats were somehow behind the riot: “So they wanted it to be chaos?” (Patel did not dispel that notion and replied, “I will leave it to you on that.”) But does it make sense that Pelosi or any other Democrat would want to cause a riot that might interfere with the certification of Biden’s electoral victory? What would be the point? In any event, the acting defense secretary at that time, Chris Miller—a Trump appointee—has testified there was no Trump order to ready military personal ahead of January 6: “I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature,” Miller told Congress.

There were other assertions that Patel made during his time with you that could be similarly challenged or debunked. But by now you get my drift. He didn’t deserve the free ride you provided him. I realize it’s popular to blast the Deep State and portray the Biden crowd as nothing but evil and corrupt—and to depict “the media” as craven accomplices in assorted schemes to undermine Trump. This is Patel’s hymnal. But if you critically scrutinize many of his claims, you will find they don’t hold up or are not the full story. Patel deserves factchecking as much as any government official. Perhaps more so, given he’s been running a con for years, insisting the Russia scandal was not real.

You’re an influencer with a massive audience. So I hope you’ll take the time to read up on the Trump-Russia affair. You know, do your own research. There’s a ton of material. Being informed these days can take a huge amount of effort, especially when Patel and others are out there pushing disinformation. But I assume you’ll agree that whatever our differences we all believe that an accurate flow of information is what’s best for our country and necessary to ensure a sound future for American democracy.

If you want to discuss any of this, Joe, I’d be delighted. My DMs are open.

All best,

David

If you appreciate kick-ass journalism and analysis, sign up for a free trial subscription to Our Land, David Corn’s twice-a-week newsletter at davidcorn.com.