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Politics|F.B.I. Pick Pushed False and Misleading Claims About Trump Investigations
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/us/politics/kash-patel-trump-fbi-inquiries.html
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Kash Patel, Donald J. Trump’s choice to run the bureau, has made a series of spurious assertions about the Russia, Jan. 6 and classified documents inquiries.
- Jan. 23, 2025, 10:49 a.m. ET
Kash Patel, President Trump’s pick to lead the F.B.I., has repeatedly undercut the work of the very agency he is set to lead by making false statements related to its criminal and counterintelligence inquiries into the president.
His demonstrably spurious claims, shared in podcasts and in his book, “Government Gangsters,” served to delegitimize the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, stoke baseless suspicions that the F.B.I. helped instigate the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and muddy the waters of the inquiry into Mr. Trump’s refusal to return classified documents after leaving office.
Mr. Patel’s pattern of peddling misinformation is at sharp odds with Mr. Trump’s proposal to put him in charge of the nation’s premier agency charged with figuring out what is true.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Patel, Erica Knight, took issue with the basic thrust of this article, while making some further misstatements on his behalf.
The origins of the Russia investigation
The root of Russia-gate is the Steele Dossier paid for by the Hillary Clinton for President Campaign and the DNC. … The fake dossier was the linchpin for the whole operation. This was yet another detail the Deep State tried to hide when Obama’s former director of national intelligence James Clapper went on to CNN and said that the dossier was not used to start the investigation. It was a flat-out lie, but it did serve Clapper’s true purpose, which was to help his Deep State allies at the F.B.I.
— “Government Gangsters”
Mr. Patel has repeatedly cast aspersions on the F.B.I.’s investigation into the nature of ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. To portray the inquiry as politically motivated, he has falsely described the facts and circumstances by which the F.B.I. decided to open it.
