Kash Patel’s Podcast Problem
Prior to being a nominee to run the FBI, Patel appeared on a white nationalist’s program—multiple times.
“Factions of Republican lawmakers at war over how to slash federal spending,” Politico reports, “are scrambling to recruit Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to their cause”:
The competing campaigns to win over the two DOGE leaders are the latest indicator that Republicans are poised to struggle next year to unite around plans to deliver on campaign promises and Trump initiatives, not only on spending cuts, but also on policies such as sweeping tax reform and immigration. And both sides will repeatedly endeavor to earn Trump’s favor, knowing that could be the deciding factor in who wins the battle.
And how better to do that than by lobbying Trump’s quasi-governmental billionaire pals? Scenes from a very healthy, very normal Capitol Hill. Happy Friday.
Pod Help Us
by Andrew Egger
In the years between the first Trump administration and the announcement of his nomination as FBI director, Kash Patel kept a regular schedule of Trump-happy podcast interviews to hawk his books, solicit donations to his causes, and keep his brand fresh. No platform, it seemed, was too kooky for him. In 2021 and 2022, he made no fewer than six appearances on the show of anti-vaccine maniac Stew Peters, who is widely regarded as a white nationalist.
Peters is one of the foulest and most conspiratorial goons in the alt-right podcast space. His big break came in 2022 with the noxious film Died Suddenly, which argued that the COVID-19 vaccines were causing mass death that authorities were covering up. But he’s perhaps most notable for his shockingly violent rhetoric: He’s repeatedly called for the public executions of Anthony Fauci, Alejandro Mayorkas, and Hunter Biden.
In February 2022, Peters appeared at an event hosted by white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes to proclaim that Fauci “should be hanging at the end of a noose somewhere,” sparking cheers and chants of “hang him up” from the crowd. Patel appeared on Peters’s podcast two days later.
In his appearances, Patel joined in Peters’s regular diatribes against our supposedly depraved elites. Episode titles included “Vaxxed Mind Control Zombies Advocate for WWIII With Russia to Save Zelensky’s Fake Democracy,” “Biden Wants War: Warmongering Elites Salivating Over Conflict With Putin,” and “Kash Patel to Kyle Rittenhouse: Sue Biden, I’ll Help.”
“You’ve got a great show,” Patel told Peters on one sign-off. At another, he was similarly effusive: “Always love coming on your show.”
Patel’s last appearance on Peters’s show came in March 2022, but the two continued to travel in many of the same far-right circles. Patel would become a fixture of Michael Flynn’s ReAwaken America tour, a series of events NPR memorably described as “part conservative Christian revival, part QAnon expo, and part political rally.” Peters has done his part to keep the ReAwaken America tour in the news, routinely making his usual capital punishment threats from its stages: “We are going to have permanent accountability, with extreme prejudice.”
While he’s never called for executions (that we know of!), Patel’s own rhetoric of political retribution grew ever more prominent as he openly campaigned for a role in the upcoming Trump administration.
“Whether they’re in government, whether they’re in the private sector, civilians, and yes, even if they’re in the media, if they participated in a conspiracy to rig elections and break the law or do other corrupt activities, you’ll be prosecuted,” Patel told right-wing personality John Solomon earlier this year. On yet another podcast, the Jeff Dornik Show, he proclaimed “the mainstream media conspirators” to be “the weaponized arm of the deep state operators and government.”
Patel’s history of making threats against journalists and other Trump foes is coming into sharper focus now that he is on track to become the head of the FBI. And as senators weigh the merits of confirmation, it’s worth exploring the company that Patel kept. (The Trump transition declined to comment.)
Patel’s deep history of involvement and appearances on these types of podcasts (a Bulwark review showed he went on dozens and dozens and dozens of these programs) underscores just how tight he is with this community—he’s not some sort of transplant trying to win over their audience.
Still, there are some areas of tension. More recently, it appears that Peters and Patel have had a falling out. Not over the appropriate degree of force with which the Trump administration should crush its enemies—the far right recognizes this is an area in which reasonable people can disagree—but over a more fundamental geopolitical fault line: Israel.
In recent years, Peters has been among the splinter of the MAGA faction who have radicalized more and more intensely against Israel. He rolled his eyes over Patel’s recent suggestion that “America must wake up and prioritize Israel”: “Trump has a new fascination with Indians in his new administration,” Peters noted.
Nevertheless, Peters was holding out hope: “If Kash Patel is a real one,” he tweeted this week, “most current FBI agents and their command staff will be in custody on DAY 1.”
Capitulation Doth Make Cowards Of Them All
by William Kristol
It may be worth pointing out that it’s not just Kash Patel’s past actions and statements that suggest he should not be one of the chief law enforcement officers of the United States. Patel seems to be intent on bringing his disqualifying behavior right up to the present.
Two days ago, on Wednesday, December 4, an attorney for Patel wrote to Olivia Troye, a former senior aide to Vice President Pence, threatening legal action if Troye didn’t retract comments about Patel’s unfitness to serve as FBI director.
MAGA world hates Troye because she courageously quit her senior position on Vice President Mike Pence’s staff in the summer of 2020 in order to speak out about what she had seen at the Trump White House. Her warnings of chaos and dysfunction, and deception and deceit, were confirmed by countless subsequent reports.
Troye served in the Trump White House with Patel, and in fact, she told me yesterday, had daily interactions with him. Her assessment of his work, of his lack of judgment, and of his dishonesty is similar to those expressed by other former Trump administration senior officials who worked with Patel, such as Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Deputy National Security Adviser Charles Kupperman.
Troye’s statements are also well within the bounds of normal and protected speech about public figures. As Sen. Chris Murphy put it, “Troye criticized Patel on TV. That’s all.”
But Patel and his MAGA handlers know what they’re doing. They want not just to bully Troye, but to intimidate others from reporting what they’ve seen and from speaking their minds. The point isn’t to win the lawsuits, but to use civil actions to make it costly for their critics and to exact retribution against past opponents.
Patel sent this letter after having been nominated by Trump to head the nation’s top law enforcement agency. So, as Sen. Murphy put it, Patel is “basically telling us with this suit that if he’s in charge of the FBI, he’s using whatever tools he has to come after people who criticize MAGA.” Patel’s letter is thus an indication of a couple of paths—both nuisance civil suits and politicized government actions—that MAGA world could take to try to silence and punish critics over the next four years.
As Troye’s lawyer, Marc Zaid, told my colleague Sam Stein: “They practice lawfare far more than the Democrats whom they accuse of doing it.”
Patel’s letter was sent Wednesday. On Thursday, long-time Republican Sen. John Cornyn expressed his respect for Patel, and strongly suggested he’d support his nomination. Cornyn is up for reelection in 2026 and faces a likely primary challenge from the MAGA wing of the party.
Cornyn is a former justice of the Texas Supreme Court and Texas attorney general. I know Cornyn, or at least I knew him before Trump. He’s an establishment Republican if there ever was one. And I know that he knows better than to think Patel is even a marginally acceptable choice to head the FBI.
But one day after Patel demonstrated, once again, that he manifestly lacked the character and judgment to head the FBI, Cornyn bent the knee.
Hamlet famously worried:
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.
Today it is Trump who makes cowards of them all.
Today it is the hue of Republican resolution that is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of fear.
And so some brave souls like Olivia Troye have risked everything to stand up to Trump, and the John Cornyns of the world will risk nothing.
Quick Hits
THAT’S NOT OUR JOB: Sen. Tommy Tuberville, one of Donald Trump’s staunchest Senate allies, isn’t pleased with how some of his colleagues seem inclined to evaluate Trump’s cabinet picks on the merits rather than rubber-stamping them through. “Who are we to say that we’re a better vetter and picker of people than Donald Trump?” he said in a brief interview yesterday with CNN. Tuberville went on:
Donald Trump did all the vetting they needed to do on Pete Hegseth. And I just can’t believe—we even have people on our side saying, ‘Well, I’ve gotta look at this, gotta look at that.’ What they’re doing is throwing rocks at Donald Trump. They’re not throwing ‘em at Pete Hegseth. They’re throwing ‘em at Donald Trump, because they’re saying, well, we don’t believe you did the right vetting and we don’t believe he can do the job. Wait a minute, that’s not our job to do that. That’s the Democrats’.
SURE, WHY NOT? You may have seen headlines in recent days over a batch of raw milk being recalled in California after testing positive for bird flu. But Mark McAfee, the CEO of the recalled brand, is suggesting the whole thing is political, according to Politico: “What they don’t want is for raw milk to thrive, and that’s a political decision they made years ago,” he said of the Food and Drug Administration. “It’s a new angle to try and discourage us.”
Politico notes change may be on the horizon. McAfee “says he was asked by [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s] running mate Nicole Shanahan to apply for a role at the Food and Drug Administration as a ‘raw milk adviser.’”
Wake us up, please.
FOR PETE’S SAKE: President-elect Trump has decided to lift a finger—small but firm—to help out his embattled defense secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth. In a post on Truth Social this morning, he said that Hegseth’s “support is strong and deep, much more so than the Fake News would have you believe.” Trump’s kept a very low profile on the confirmation fights, so far. But he is going on Meet the Press this weekend, so perhaps we’re in a new phase.
Cheap Shots
I'll gladly quit drinking Tuesday for a Cabinet post today.
Am I the only one who has a hard time getting his head around a sub-continental Indian supporting White Supremacy? Or is Patel just now realizing that he is, really, actually white and it is our eyes that see him differently? Although, according to his bio in Wiki, "Kash Patel was born in Garden City, New York to Indian Gujarati parents who had immigrated to the United States through Canada from East Africa."