berg80
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- Oct 28, 2017
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It was an investigation long sought by Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, and it was announced not in court papers, but through a haze of cigar smoke on Joe Rogan’s podcast in early June of last year.
Mr. Patel’s prized criminal inquiry, known as “the grand conspiracy case,” sought to tie together actions by a group of people that President Trump blamed for various investigations into him, going back to the examination of possible ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, and extending into events surrounding the 2020 election and the criminal prosecutions of Mr. Trump in 2023 and 2024. In the view of Mr. Trump and his supporters, there was a “deep state” cabal that had sought across multiple administrations and agencies to bring him down.
Mr. Patel told Mr. Rogan he had found a secret room of evidence inside F.B.I. headquarters confirming his long-held suspicions.
“You know how I caught these guys?” Mr. Patel asked. “Because these guys were so arrogant, they would write everything down, and I found the documents.”
To Mr. Patel, those documents, found in government burn bags — large brown paper bags with red and white stripes used to store papers designated for destruction — justified a sweeping investigation of former officials. To the former officials and the career investigators who looked at the evidence, the papers in the burn bags were nothing like a smoking gun. The administration’s efforts to find prosecutors willing to pursue such theories became a defining feature of the Trump administration’s politicization of the Justice Department — and the internal resistance to it.
New details of how that period unfolded show how Mr. Patel’s drive to target critics of the president set off cascading crises with U.S. attorneys’ offices, derailed distinguished careers and undercut the Justice Department’s credibility with judges. This account is based on interviews with multiple people with knowledge of the effort, all of whom requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
www.nytimes.com
Kash found the documents. Awesome. Where are they? Why haven't they been used to bring charges against those mean people who were out to get trump?
It's not hard to predict what the response will be from trump's followers. The tell is right here.......This account is based on interviews with multiple people with knowledge of the effort, all of whom requested anonymity. That one sentence gives trump aficionados license to ignore the entire matter.
Hours after he was sworn in, Mr. Gilbert got a phone call from Mr. Patel that would wreck his new job. On his first day, when most employees are still getting their work email set up, the new U.S. attorney was told by Mr. Patel to pursue the grand conspiracy.
Mr. Patel instructed him to investigate how classified documents had been placed inside the burn bags found inside Room 9582 of F.B.I. headquarters.
Some of the documents related to events from 2016 and 2017 that Mr. Patel wanted examined, specifically the actions of James B. Comey, who was the F.B.I. director at the time, and John O. Brennan, who had been the C.I.A. director. Mr. Patel wanted both men investigated for lying to Congress and suggested that the documents supported charging them.
His call to Mr. Gilbert was unusual. F.B.I. directors do not typically assign U.S. attorneys to open cases. Such a directive, particularly for high-profile investigations, would normally come from Justice Department headquarters. And investigations that involved purported lies to Congress were assigned to prosecutors in Washington, not in Roanoke, Va.
It was also strange to give such a weighty assignment to a U.S. attorney with little authority to question orders because he was still awaiting confirmation by the Senate. (After this article was published online, an F.B.I. spokesman, Ben Williamson, disputed that Mr. Patel had assigned the case involving Mr. Comey to Mr. Gilbert.)
But the administration had good reason to think of Mr. Gilbert as a loyal and willing hunter. A lifelong Republican with strong ties to Virginia’s G.O.P. leaders, he had given up a powerful position in the state legislature to become the U.S. attorney.
The premise of the “grand conspiracy” was that Mr. Comey and his allies had concocted the F.B.I.’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential contest to damage Mr. Trump, and that conspiracy extended into the 2020 election and the 2022 appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate him.
Mr. Patel’s prized criminal inquiry, known as “the grand conspiracy case,” sought to tie together actions by a group of people that President Trump blamed for various investigations into him, going back to the examination of possible ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, and extending into events surrounding the 2020 election and the criminal prosecutions of Mr. Trump in 2023 and 2024. In the view of Mr. Trump and his supporters, there was a “deep state” cabal that had sought across multiple administrations and agencies to bring him down.
Mr. Patel told Mr. Rogan he had found a secret room of evidence inside F.B.I. headquarters confirming his long-held suspicions.
“You know how I caught these guys?” Mr. Patel asked. “Because these guys were so arrogant, they would write everything down, and I found the documents.”
To Mr. Patel, those documents, found in government burn bags — large brown paper bags with red and white stripes used to store papers designated for destruction — justified a sweeping investigation of former officials. To the former officials and the career investigators who looked at the evidence, the papers in the burn bags were nothing like a smoking gun. The administration’s efforts to find prosecutors willing to pursue such theories became a defining feature of the Trump administration’s politicization of the Justice Department — and the internal resistance to it.
New details of how that period unfolded show how Mr. Patel’s drive to target critics of the president set off cascading crises with U.S. attorneys’ offices, derailed distinguished careers and undercut the Justice Department’s credibility with judges. This account is based on interviews with multiple people with knowledge of the effort, all of whom requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
How the Drive to Find a Conspiracy Against Trump Rocked the Justice Dept.
The push to investigate what the president’s allies saw as a “deep state” cabal intent on taking him down set off cascading crises, ended careers and undercut the department’s credibility with judges.
Kash found the documents. Awesome. Where are they? Why haven't they been used to bring charges against those mean people who were out to get trump?
It's not hard to predict what the response will be from trump's followers. The tell is right here.......This account is based on interviews with multiple people with knowledge of the effort, all of whom requested anonymity. That one sentence gives trump aficionados license to ignore the entire matter.
Hours after he was sworn in, Mr. Gilbert got a phone call from Mr. Patel that would wreck his new job. On his first day, when most employees are still getting their work email set up, the new U.S. attorney was told by Mr. Patel to pursue the grand conspiracy.
Mr. Patel instructed him to investigate how classified documents had been placed inside the burn bags found inside Room 9582 of F.B.I. headquarters.
Some of the documents related to events from 2016 and 2017 that Mr. Patel wanted examined, specifically the actions of James B. Comey, who was the F.B.I. director at the time, and John O. Brennan, who had been the C.I.A. director. Mr. Patel wanted both men investigated for lying to Congress and suggested that the documents supported charging them.
His call to Mr. Gilbert was unusual. F.B.I. directors do not typically assign U.S. attorneys to open cases. Such a directive, particularly for high-profile investigations, would normally come from Justice Department headquarters. And investigations that involved purported lies to Congress were assigned to prosecutors in Washington, not in Roanoke, Va.
It was also strange to give such a weighty assignment to a U.S. attorney with little authority to question orders because he was still awaiting confirmation by the Senate. (After this article was published online, an F.B.I. spokesman, Ben Williamson, disputed that Mr. Patel had assigned the case involving Mr. Comey to Mr. Gilbert.)
But the administration had good reason to think of Mr. Gilbert as a loyal and willing hunter. A lifelong Republican with strong ties to Virginia’s G.O.P. leaders, he had given up a powerful position in the state legislature to become the U.S. attorney.
The premise of the “grand conspiracy” was that Mr. Comey and his allies had concocted the F.B.I.’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential contest to damage Mr. Trump, and that conspiracy extended into the 2020 election and the 2022 appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate him.
