Transcription
In the East, the desire to create a slush fund to reward political loyalists doesn't appear to start and stop with Donald J. Trump.
Shocking new reporting by MSNow's Ken Delanian finds that embattled FBI Director Kash Patel stands accused of using more than $1 million in taxpayer funds to reward the FBI agents who went after Patel's enemies and who covered up Kash Patel's misbehavior in office, weakening our nation's chief law enforcement agency in the process.
Our Ken Delaneyan reports this about a letter that ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, Congressman Jamie Raskin, sent to Kash. Raskin's letter describes as quote, "a curated group of agents who are willing to carry out your unlawful, partisan and personal orders." It went to agents on Patel's security detail, quote, "circumventing the mandatory maximum pay caps established by statute, by issuing these side payments, your office may be knowingly breaking the federal law," the letter says.
In some cases, nearly $8,000 payments have been made to multiple individuals every two-week pay period despite many of the beneficiaries of your beneficiaries of your selective generosity already maxing out on a federal employee salary. The letter goes on to say it it is unclear exactly how much each of the agents has received, but adds this, quote, "We can confirm that numerous loyalist employees have received at least five such payments in consecutive pay periods amounting to nearly $40,000 per agent. We can also confirm you have depleted this reserve at such a frenzied rate that some of the payments have bounced back from exhausted accounts."
Here's more from that stunning letter from Congressman Jamie Raskin. Quote, "We know the agents on your director's advisory team, perhaps better known as the payback squad, given their reported willingness to pursue political targets and overlook pesky legal obstacles like probable cause, have received a significant amount of these funds. These payback squad lieutenants have repaid your of your corrupt generosity by polygraphing FBI employees, including members of your security detail and information technology personnel suspected of not fully participating in the cover-up of your excessive drinking habits and erratic behavior, such as the famous episode in which you locked yourself out of your computer, panicked, and then told staff and allies that you had been fired. For their part, the agents on your security detail have also witnessed your indiscretions when joining you on date nights and bro trips alike. It is not clear whether these bonus payments have simply been a corrupt attempt to slide cash to friends, or whether they are also meant to ensure the silence of the agents who witnessed your inebriation and accompanying professional negligence and misconduct. Either way, these freelance awards appear to constitute gross mismanagement of public funds and an abuse of authority by the director's office."
The FBI has not responded to MSNow's request for comment on Congressman Raskin's letter. But it is just the latest episode that raises new alarms about Kash Patel's conduct and willingness to upend the FBI for his personal purposes. Kash Patel has hollowed out the FBI. He has repeatedly fired agents in key security positions for political purposes, a series of purges which Ken Delaneyan has called, quote, "without precedent in the modern of the bureau, yet another member of the Trump administration weaponizing his position and putting Donald Trump's agenda and his own grievances ahead of our country's security."
Is where we begin today with some of our favorite reporters and friends. The aforementioned justice and intelligence reporter Ken Delanian joins us. Also joining us, former Assistant Special Agent in Charge at the FBI, our the statement for national security and intelligence analyst Michael Feinberg.
Ken Delanian, it's an incredible piece of. It's an incredible letter on Congressman Raskin's part. It's probably an obvious question, but does it, can you surmise if it's a whistleblower? I mean, it reads like someone from the inside has provided some sort of accounting of cash payments.
Yeah, that's absolutely right, Nicole. They didn't use the whistleblower, the House Democrats didn't, but that's certainly how it appears that they got some information. And of course, in the letter, they demand a series of documents and disclosures related to these payments, which they're not going to get unless and until they win back the House and next year start issuing subpoenas. It's going to be really interesting to see how all that unfolds. But this is troubling. I'm going to pick the one that jumped out at me. If Kash Patel is awarding $8,000 per paycheck bonuses to, that's a lot of money for a rank and file FBI agent on a government salary. And these are people who have been under the microscope because, they are deeply concerned about Kash Patel's drinking. The Atlantic reported that there have been occasions where they had trouble waking him up to go to his morning meetings, and he's denied all of that. He's sued The Atlantic, they stand by their story. But what Jamie Raskin was wondering and allowed in the letter, what we're raising the question about is, is this an attempt to keep these folks on side or to silence them or to engender loyalty so they are not? These are sworn agents who are obligated to report misconduct that they're aware of, but they are in a horribly difficult position. And if they're getting paid a little bit extra on the side, that's just, I think it just adds to the complexity of this, and it's really not how government is supposed to work. You know, CEOs may hand out bonuses to their favorite employees, but the director, I think the director of the FBI is not supposed to do that. And Raskin is also raising the question about whether these payments may be illegal, Nicole? I mean, $4,000 a week is that is not just a bonus. I mean, that's an additional salary. I mean, that's an additional.
Michael Feinberg, your initial reactions and then we'll dive into the specific allegations here?
Yeah, look, in a word, system is not foreign to the FBI. It's pretty normal for agents to get cash and words through a variety of mechanisms. The numbers and the frequencies being reported by Ken, however, are highly unusual. And what's also unusual are the people to whom these awards are going. The director's advisory team, for people who don't know, is the invention of Kash Patel. It is a rogues gallery of mostly former agents who have been embittered and angry at what they see as the leftward tilt of the organization under Chris Ray. And so Cash Patel has brought back a number of agents who retired or who were fired, who were very active in the magosphere. And he's given them jobs and he's giving them his personal investigations from what's been reported. One of them was a staffer in Jim Jordan's office, another was a retired special agent in charge who attempted to help John Durham undermine the Russia investigations of Donald Trump during the first term. These are not normal agents. This is not the normal staff, and these awards are not how the bureau normally functions.
I want to ask you, Ken Delaneyan, about this payback squad. The term is throughout Raskin's letter. Are you able to confirm that such a term is used by Patel himself to describe this loyalist sort of squad within the FBI? I mean, that has so many alarming connotations throughout history, throughout the world.
It sure does, Nicole. Look, I've not heard that term. That was a notice reporting on that. But it's been pretty obvious that something like a payback squad has existed since the time Kash Patel was sworn into office. I mean, and they've made no secret about it. Todd Blanche has boasted on national television about the fact that Kash Patel has sought to purge every FBI agent who worked on, for example, an investigation of Donald Trump. And, you know, it seems like not barely a week or two goes by that Carol Lennig and I are reporting on the latest political firing inside the FBI. There was another one I heard about today, actually, a counterterrorism, a senior counterterrorism agent who was fired. And we, again, I've said this a million times, we've never seen this in the history of the bureau, even in the Hoover days, it wasn't this profound, the extent to which the director of the FBI is using, you know, for personal and political reasons, and ideological reasons, going after career public servants for simply doing their jobs, for working on cases that they were assigned to. That's a little bit to work on. And, you know, we know from Brian Driscoll's lawsuit, the lawsuit by former acting director Brian Driscoll, he said in order to keep his job, this is one of the things he had to do. He had to fire agents who had gotten crosswise with Donald Trump. The Trump White House looks disfavorably on. The reason this may be going on in the Department of Agriculture, the reason we're reporting on it so intensively because it the F.B.I. is because the F.B.I. is an extremely powerful organization that has a lot of influence on American life and we rely on it to protect us from terrorist attacks, for example, and complex criminal.