Kash Patel: The Keystone Cop Choking Our Republic

A joke who would just be a punchline if he weren't so dangerous

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Donald Trump has long produced sycophants of such stupendous mediocrity that one marvels not merely at their survival, but at their ongoing power. Mr. Kashyap Patel, Trump’s Director of the FBI, is the latest example.

It would be difficult to imagine a man less suited to run a federal agency —unless, of course, one has glimpsed at the rest of the current Trump Cabinet, which increasingly resembles a low-class variety show curated by Steve Bannon after three bourbons.

To say that Patel is a bumbler is to libel honest incompetents the world over. Patel is something more extreme —a man who, when given a match, doesn’t merely drop it in the gasoline but insists it is actually lemonade, lights it anyway, and then lectures the fire chief on the virtues of deregulation.

Take, for example, the gruesome assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk—a tragedy of real political consequence and human cost.

The case immediately demanded forensic rigor, tight-lipped professionalism, and the kind of strategic discretion that one would expect from whoever is running our nation’s top investigative body.

Instead, what did we get?

Patel, thumbs ablaze (though not definitively opposable), took to X (Twitter) and blurted out that a suspect was in custody—two hours before law enforcement agents finished collecting the security footage from the Utah Valley University crime scene.

When the truth inconveniently emerged that first day (no suspect, no arrest, no idea who killed Charlie Kirk) Patel was forced to make a mortifying retraction. This is not just a failure of leadership; it is a failure of basic adult thinking.

The FBI never “caught” Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer. A day and a half after the shooting, the suspects dad and pastor turned him in. Then, the FBI director and Trump administration sat on the news of the arrest for nine hours so that Patel’s boss, Old Man Orange, could break it on Fox and Friends.

Later that same day, in his own rush to promote himself and play armchair prosecutor before a panting audience of half-literate MAGA cultists, Patel went on Fox News and blithely disclosed details that any half-witted defense attorney will now use to argue for mistrial, tainting the public record before the yellow police tape had been removed.

If justice is blind, Patel seems determined to gouge out its remaining eye—even if both of his can’t seem to focus on the problem.

But we should not be surprised.

Patel is the same man whose first order of business as FBI Director was to fire agents whose primary sin was doggedly investigating two things that inflame Trump world: the January 6 insurrection and Russia’s curious fondness for the 2016 GOP Presidential nominee.

In a saner era, firing career FBI agents because they pursued criminal investigations would be called obstruction of justice. Under the Trump administration, it’s called "cleaning house."

Patel’s résumé is not a record of public service but rather a document of ruin.

His fingerprints are smeared across every scandal Trump couldn’t bury in term 1.0 -- Ukraine phone call shenanigans, National Security Council circus acts, even an attempt to moonlight as CIA deputy director with no prior experience.

Patel has always seemed to float through the corridors of Trumpian power not like a statesman, but like a fumbling drunk in a glass shop, cursing the products for breaking after he stumbles and knocks them over.

Yet none of this compares to the gob smacking mendacity Patel displayed before Congress this past week. Patel testified that Jeffrey Epstein trafficked young girls only to himself, no one else. Seriously.

Patel really insisted, under questioning from Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, “there is no credible information, none – if there were, I would bring a case yesterday – that he (Epstein) trafficked to other individuals.”

Never mind that Epstein was convicted of sex trafficking and that Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison for trafficking minors to someone. Also never mind that during the Biden administration, Patel repeatedly insisted Epstein trafficked young girls.

Or that Patel broadcast MAGA conspiracy theory claims about a democratic party pedophilia ring.

But now, as Donald Trump’s FBI director and presidency protector, Patel insists the investigation information shows Jeffrey Epstein only trafficked girls to Jeffrey Epstein.

One wonders how the victims—those whose sworn accounts, corroborated by evidence and upheld in courts of law—felt hearing that their abuser ran a solo operation and did not force them to satisfy anybody else, as had been brutally seared in their memories.

Perhaps Patel believes that the dozens of flight logs, cell phone records, photographs, and testimonies were all part of an elaborate avant-garde performance art piece. Or perhaps, more plausibly, Patel is simply lying.

This is the creepy and deranged man at the helm of the FBI. He is clearly a partisan fixer who mistakes loyalty for law and propaganda for policing.

Under Patel, the FBI is not merely politicized. It has become parodied, diminished, and transformed into a theater of the absurd where investigations begin with hash tags and end with Fox News exclusives.

There was a time when the role of the FBI Director demanded at least a passing familiarity with law enforcement, institutional integrity, and, dare we say, truth.

Today, under Trump, it merely demands that one kiss the ring, bark on command, and smear the Constitution in the name of devotion to Dementia Don. Which even includes his attempts to set up state-run media (we’re trying to provide at least some of the response to this).

Mr. Patel is not an anomaly. He is the perfect mascot for a Trump administration that is fueled by narcissism, delusion, incompetence, and cruelty.

The tragedy is not just that Kash Patel holds power. It’s that so many Americans are content to let him keep it.

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