Trump lackey’s ‘deep state’ conspiracies rooted in courtroom dressing-down by judge
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, former House GOP intelligence staffer and Pentagon chief of staff Kash Patel, is notorious for his embrace of far-right conspiracy theories and his paranoia about the “Deep State” being out to get conservatives, alongside his vows to “come after” journalists and government officials who stand in Trump’s way. But it turns out some events in his past may have shaped that anger and resentment, CNN reported on Monday.
In particular, wrote Evan Perez, Zachary Cohen, and Holmes Lybrand, there was an incident in a Texas courtroom in 2016 where Patel got attacked by a federal judge and accused of the very antics he now sees in everyone else.
Early in that year, said the report, Patel, then a mid-ranking prosecutor at the Justice Department, “had just landed from a trip to Tajikistan as part of his job with the DOJ’s National Security Division when he turned up at a Texas courthouse to join the government trial team in a federal counterterrorism case. Though it had been proceeding for weeks, it was Patel’s first time showing up in person as part of the prosecution” — and the judge, Lynn Hughes of the Southern District of Texas, immediately dressed him down.
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“Who is this Patel guy?” Hughes demanded to know. He criticized Patel’s attire as inappropriate for the courtroom, accused him of being a “spy” for the DOJ, and said he didn’t add a “bit of value” to the prosecution team, saying, “You’re just one more nonessential employee from Washington” and ordering it be put in the court record that Patel was unqualified to be part of the proceeding.
According to the report, Patel never got over this incident — and he was furious at his DOJ colleagues for not doing enough to stick up for him, believing that the whole thing was a setup by the establishment to sabotage his career in law enforcement.
“We were actually supportive and sympathetic,” said a former associate. “But he had a conspiracy theory that the US attorney’s office had set him up and he wanted us to get vengeance.”
Patel, one of the most controversial picks for Trump’s new administration, would replace Christopher Wray, an FBI director Trump himself appointed in 2017 after he fired James Comey, but who has come to be seen as an enemy by MAGA world for not stopping the various criminal investigations of Trump’s conduct.
He has been known for associating with the blood-libel QAnon movement, and has laid out an extensive list of enemies and supposed Deep State actors in his book, which even includes a number of Republicans.
