The New York Times dropped a popular article accusing Patel of lying about the department’s 2016 investigation into then-candidate Trump away of Thursday’s Senate Judiciary confirmation hearing for Kash Patel, the president’s candidate for FBI producer.
In their headline, Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman,  , and , Alan Feuer accuse Patel of having “repeatedly devalue the function of the very firm he is set to guide by making false statements” about the FBI’s fake investigation into Trump for supposed cooperation with Russia. Patel is the ideal candidate to clean up the commission because of their knowing of the FBI’s problem and determination to “undercut” their political witch hunts, which is lost on them.
They continue, noting that Mr. Patel’s practice of propaganda is in stark opposition to Mr. Trump’s request to have him lead the nation’s top agency tasked with discovering what is true. It’s a misguided say coming from Savage and Goldman, two Russiagate soldiers who have been invested in the fake from the beginning. ( Goldman received a Pulitzer Prize for his contribution to it. )
Given their own contributions to helping the FBI create a national outcry over false claims about Trump and Russia, the writers ‘ claim that the FBI is still in the company of “figuring out what is real” is ridiculous. Kash Patel, who was one of the earliest people to introduce the Russia hoax while working for then-Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Rep. Devin Nunes, took down the false tale that Savage and Goldman helped make, so it’s no wonder they haven’t forgiven him for it.
The Hurricane Investigation Using The Crossfire
A quick recap: The Clinton plan requested opposition research in the form of the Steele dossier, a collection of badly sourced stories about Trump, including allegations of sexual activity being committed in Moscow, when Donald Trump was running for president in 2016. Three weeks after the Steele report was shopped to the FBI, the FBI opened an inspection, named Crossfire Hurricane, into Trump and his campaign, seeking to detect evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia to take the 2016 election. Special Counsel John Durham discovered that the FBI lacked a justification for launching the inspection after the Steele report was later discovered to be false. Carter Page and other users of the Trump campaign were also spied on using the fake Steele report.
The Times writers singled out a few remarks Patel made about the Russia ruse which they said were “false or false promises”. Their charges are so absurd that they don’t merit a line-by-line refutation, but I didn’t stop myself from believing them.
The Steele dossier, according to Patel, is considered the “linchpin” of Russiagate and the “linchpin for the entire operation,” according to CIA Director John Ratcliffe and others who have watched the Russia hoax grow. Patel even accused former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper of lying when Clapper claimed — as the Times investigators do in their account — that the Steele document was never actually the basis for the release of the research.
According to the New York Times, Patel is false because Durham based his conclusion on information Durham obtained that the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was initiated at the request of the Australian government and not the Steele dossier. That is the FBI’s story, according to the New York Times. However, Durham’s 2023 report outlines a timeline of events that casts some doubt on it.
More than three weeks prior to the FBI’s discovery of the information provided by the Australian diplomats and the start of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation on July 31, 2016, Durham wrote in a letter claiming” the FBI possessed the earliest Steele reporting claiming Russian efforts to support the Trump campaign.”
On July 5, 2016, Christopher Steele allegedly gave his FBI agent” salacious information about Donald Trump’s alleged sexual activities during trips to Moscow.” Steele sent his handler more gossip, this time relating to Trump campaign staffer Carter Page, on July 19. On July 28, the handler sent both reports to the assistant special agent in charge of the New York Field Office, who Durham refers to as ASAC-1. The handler informed Durham’s investigators that ASAC-1 “advised him that FBI leadership was now aware of the existence of the reports” the same day.
The Crossfire Hurricane investigation was opened three days later.
Because the FBI said the Australian intelligence served as the foundation for its investigation and Steele’s handler sent the allegations up the FBI chain of command the same day as Savage and Goldman ignore this evidence.
Instead, they cherry-pick the fact that, for some reason, the dossier wasn’t sent to the specific team conducting the Crossfire Hurricane investigation until September 2016, despite the fact that FBI leadership was allegedly aware of Steele’s allegations before the investigation was opened.
” In order to believe The New York Times ‘ point of view”, a former congressional staffer involved in Russia collusion investigations told The Federalist, “you’ve got to believe that]FBI investigators ] open up the investigation, totally ignorant of the fact that their own organization, the FBI, is in contact with Christopher Steele, who’s given them these explosive allegations about exactly what they want to investigate”.
There are compelling arguments against the FBI’s claim that the Crossfire Hurricane investigation wasn’t based on the Steele dossier as the Times claims. Even if the Steele dossier rumors that Crossfire Hurricane was based on a tip from the Australians were so influential in the investigation and the subsequent accusations of Trump, the Times ‘ claim that it wasn’t a “linchpin” is false at worst and a distinction without a difference at best. Once it became obvious to everyone that the Steele dossier was worthless, Savage, Goldman, and the rest of the corporate press shifted to pretending it wasn’t central to the conspiracy theory they all helped propagate, in order to keep the conspiracy theory alive.
The congressional staffer claimed that they were all focused on strengthening the dossier and strengthening Carter Page’s claims before it completely started to unravel as a result of what Nunes and Kash were doing. The mainstream media attempted to remove the dossier from the rest of the Russia hoax and the rest of the investigation as the dossier’s credibility deteriorated more and more.
FBI Spying on Carter Page
Patel’s various statements about the FBI’s use of the Steele dossier to spy on Carter Page are also controversial to Savage and Goldman. According to former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, the FBI obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ( FISA ) warrants to spy on Page, which the Times does not dispute.
While working for Nunes, Patel drafted what became known as the” Nunes memo”, a four-page list of problems with the FBI’s FISA warrant applications. Savage and Goldman blatantly believe that the Nunes memo was mistaken because a later inspector general report discovered even more errors in the warrant applications than Patel had reported.
Savage and Goldman then attempt to disprove some of Patel’s assertions regarding the Carter Page FISA warrant application, some of which are also included in the Nunes memo. For example, Patel has stated that the FBI would use media reports, which were based on leaked information from Steele in the first place, to “bolster its investigations” and that one specific story by Michael Isikoff was used” to justify part of their FISA warrant application on Carter Page”.
Savage and Goldman contend that this is false, and that the Isikoff story was not “mentioned” in order to” corroborate the Steele dossier’s claims” but was simply “mentioned” to make the fact that Page denied the story. They do not explain why the warrant application covered the allegations in Isikoff’s story for roughly four pages, of which Page’s denial is roughly five and a half lines. But regardless of how exactly the story was used, it was obviously included in the warrant application because the FBI thought its inclusion would be useful for making its case.
Savage and Goldman also assert that Patel’s assertion that the FBI “never told the FISA judge” that the Steele dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign was “misleading” was also “misleading.”
The exclusion, according to them, was not significant because “it is the custom in such applications not to refer to Americans” by name and because the warrant application contained a footnote claiming that the source “was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit” Trump. Setting aside the absurdity of that excuse, there’s no reason the warrant application — which referred to Trump as” Candidate# 1″ — couldn’t have disclosed that the dossier was bankrolled by” Candidate# 2″.
Finally, Savage and Goldman accuse Patel of lying by pointing out that the FBI could eavesdrop on any communications Page received, even if they were sent by Trump himself or by other campaign staff members.
Savage and Goldman refute Mr. Patel’s claim that the FISA order allowed the F. B. I. to “do all the spying they could need” on everyone else in the campaign because” the orders allowed the bureau to collect the contents and metadata about only phone calls and emails to and from Mr. Page, not those of other people around him”. The Times correctly stated that the warrant covered “phone calls and emails to” rather than “from” Page, which is the precise point Patel was making, using language that anyone would interpret as being exactly that.
Veteran Russian spies Savage and Goldman
Savage and Goldman’s alarm about Patel probably stems from the fact that he helped take down the false narrative they helped spread.
He assisted in their being exposed. The media was completely behind this,” the congressional staffer continued. ” So the idea of having him as head of the FBI is not real pleasing to a lot of these people”.
Savage and Goldman continued to support the Russia hoax as it crumbled rather than taking responsibility for it. They and Katie Benner claimed, along with the Durham report, that Durham had “failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry,” a claim that was obviously false months before the report was made public. Even then, in January 2023, they continued to paint Trump as in collusion with Russia, and even suggested that Durham’s probe might have been corrupted by Russian “disinformation”.
They even went so far as to accuse Durham and former Attorney General Bill Barr of using the attorney representing Stefan Halper, one of the” sources” of the Trump-Russia allegations that lied to the FBI.
When FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith admitted fabricating evidence in the FISA warrant application, Goldman was the one who broke the news and made sure to soften the blow. They wrote sympathetically about Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, whom Durham would prosecute for spreading lies about Trump and Russia to the FBI. Savage and Goldman even “gave Sussmann’s team an assist in getting ahead of the news,” as The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland noted.
If you’re still unsure whether Savage or Goldman are deep state apologists, remember that Goldman was the official undercover agent for the FBI’s investigation into Joe Biden’s classified documents scandal and that Savage also falsely claimed that Hur had found “insufficient evidence to charge Mr. Biden.”
( The third person in the hit piece’s byline, Alan Feuer, isn’t a Russia hoax veteran like the other two, and was presumably included to help with the non-Russiagate parts of the hit job. He is still complaining that Trump’s DOJ was unable to entice him into a courtroom before the 2024 election, even though he is on the record.
Few people are aware of the extent of Kash Patel’s and the FBI’s abuses during the Russia hoax. That’s probably why Russia collusion hoaxers like Savage and Goldman don’t want him running it.
The Federalist’s editor of elections is Elle Purnell. Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum have all covered her work. She received her B. A. in government from Patrick Henry College and a journalism minor. Follow her on Twitter at @ellepurnell.
