![](\"https:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/resizer\/v2\/HUSEDFEZQJHRRHHC7I74TDOL5A.png?smart=true&auth=1e972abd3a3c297e2f89f81fa31ba21ed0093b1f34a9604bb386dbfc5095e82b&width=1200&height=630\")
<\/div>\nA former Republican strategist offered an on-air defense of President-elect Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s FBI chief nominee amid criticism over his praise of far-right conspiracy theories\u2014but his fellow panelists were having none of it. <\/p>\n On Thursday night, CNN Newsnight<\/i> host Abby Phillips played a sequence of clips in which Kash Patel was heard praising both adherents to and the central figure of the QAnon<\/a>, which posits the existence of a satanic, pedophilic cabal pulling the strings of power in Washington, DC.<\/p>\n \u201cWhether it\u2019s the Qs of the world, who I agree with some of what he does\u2014and I disagree with some of what he does\u2014if it allows people to gather and focus on the truth and the facts, I\u2019m all for it,\u201d Patel said in the montage. \u201cYou got to harness that following that Q has garnered and just sort of tweak it a little bit. That\u2019s all I\u2019m saying.\u201d<\/p>\n ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Scott Jennings, an informal adviser to Sen. Mitch McConnell<\/a>, swiftly cited \u201cliterally an on-the-record denial of connections, right, from the Trump transition between Patel and this.\u201d<\/p>\n Panelists Mondaire Jones, a Democratic lawyer, shot back: \u201cBut we just saw footage of it?\u201d<\/p>\n His comments were followed by Philips\u2019, who said, \u201cI don\u2019t know about connections to QAnon, because it\u2019s not really a real thing, but he\u2019s talked favorably about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Earlier in the broadcast, Jennings attempted to defend Trump\u2019s choice of Patel to head up the FBI as a figure who would restore some of the public trust that\u2019s been lost in the domestic intelligence agency over the past decade. <\/p>\n \u201c10 years ago, the FBI had a 59 percent approval rating. Today, it\u2019s like 41 percent. There\u2019s a lot of restoration work that needs to be done to restore public confidence in this agency,\u201d he said. \u201cIt probably does need a change agent, an outside change agent, and the Republicans right now, they like this nomination. There\u2019s a long way to go, but they like it right now.\u201d<\/p>\n Phillips had a quick rejoinder for that too, telling Jennings: \u201cThis is kind of like how, you know, you tell everybody that elections are rigged and then when confidence in elections go down, we\u2019re like, \u2018Everybody, we need to change elections.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Jennings replied, \u201cAre you saying the FBI hasn\u2019t made any mistakes?\u201d <\/p>\n Philips answered, \u201cI\u2019m just saying, when you spend years and years telling everybody the FBI is corrupt, they\u2019re going to believe you.\u201d<\/p>\n Scott Jennings tried to downplay Patel\u2019s praise of the right-wing conspiracy movement after watching the prospective FBI chief laud its cult-like following.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":175120,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"Default","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"na-reason":[],"post-attribute":[5322],"rss-search-query":[5331],"fix":[],"internal_tag":[],"news_source":[950],"class_list":["post-387244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-qanon","post-attribute-rss-retriever","rss-search-query-qanon","news_source-daily-beast"],"acf":{"acf_admin_rating":"","acf_processed_datetime":"2024-12-08 01:22:50","acf_embedded_images_datetime":"2024-12-08 01:22:51","acf_activity_log_php":"\u2022 2024-12-08 01:22:51.383 process_post() news source, source link, word count, 1 category endorsed, 1 nixed, status raised, 5 fields \u2022 2024-12-08 01:22:28.030 initialize_post() 4 fields","acf_added_datetime":"2024-12-08 01:22:27","acf_sort_by_datetime":"2024-12-07 04:20:00","acf_initialized_datetime":"2024-12-08 01:22:28","acf_source_url":"https:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/cnn-panelist-mondaire-jones-rips-panelist-scott-jennings-denial-of-kash-patels-qanon-praising\/","acf_endorsed_category_ids":"3","acf_nixed_category_ids":"2729","acf_ai_datetime":"2024-12-08 01:22:50","acf_duplicate_post_ids":"","acf_duplicate_check_datetime":"2024-12-08 01:55:12","acf_original_category_ids":"3","acf_original_tag_ids":"","acf_original_news_source_id":"5327","acf_word_count":"416","acf_rss_search_query":"","datetime_initialized":"2024-12-08 01:22:51","activity_log_php":"\u2022 2024-12-08 01:22:51.374 cr_do_the_update() news source from 'bing-news' to 'daily-beast'\n\u2022 2024-12-08 01:22:51.364 cr_initialize_post() 1 ACF fields\n\u2022 2024-12-08 01:22:51.306 cr_do_the_insert() inserted into DB\n\u2022 2024-12-08 01:22:51.293 cr_initialize_post() 1 ACF fields\n\u2022 2024-12-08 01:22:51.279 cr_initialize_post() 6 ACF fields","activity_log":"","colormag_colored_category":"[cr-colormag-colored-categories]","archived_post_and_news_links":"[cr-archive-and-news-links]","datetime_added_to_ml_db":"2024-12-08 01:22:51","news_source_original_url":"https:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/cnn-panelist-mondaire-jones-rips-panelist-scott-jennings-denial-of-kash-patels-qanon-praising\/","news_source_base_url":"thedailybeast.com","cv_custom_url":"https:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/cnn-panelist-mondaire-jones-rips-panelist-scott-jennings-denial-of-kash-patels-qanon-praising\/","original_image_id":"","embedded_image_ids":"","datetime_fixed":"","datetime_added":"","duplicate_post_ids":"","datetime_checked_for_duplicates":"","embedded_image_datetime":"","original_categories":"","word_count":"","word_count_datetime":"","datetime_for_latest_news_sort":"","levenshtein_matches":"","levenshtein_datetime":""},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/qanon-008.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387244"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":387245,"href":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387244\/revisions\/387245"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387244"},{"taxonomy":"na-reason","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/na-reason?post=387244"},{"taxonomy":"post-attribute","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post-attribute?post=387244"},{"taxonomy":"rss-search-query","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss-search-query?post=387244"},{"taxonomy":"fix","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/fix?post=387244"},{"taxonomy":"internal_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/internal_tag?post=387244"},{"taxonomy":"news_source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conspiracyresource.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news_source?post=387244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}