Good News, Maybe

Kash air guitar dance moves. Vvia India Abroad.

This is something I landed on completely by chance, and I have no idea who else knows about it, except to the extent that the Establishment Media don't seem to, or at any rate they aren't talking about it, involving Mr. Kash Patel, the Devin Nunes staffer who ended up playing a peculiarly ambiguous role in the Trumpery, alongside the equally ambiguous Ezra Cohen-Watnick, of getting cycled into Trump administration jobs where nobody wanted him or seemed to know what he was supposed to be doing, leading to a certain amount of paranoia in which I myself was, not to put too fine a point on it, participating, especially after Mark Esper suddenly got fired as secretary of defense (on 9 November, 2020, shortly after the November 2020 election) and Patel suddenly got posted to the Pentagon as chief of staff to Esper's acting replacement, Christopher Miller, and we all started wondering why (Trump had floated the idea of making him deputy director of the FBI before, and acting CIA director after that).

As with so many other still-mysterious aspects of the Trump presidency, there’s a riddle at the center of Patel’s many activities. Beyond the basic goal of advancing Trump’s personal agenda, was there a larger mission? Was there a systematic plan, for example, to gain control of the nation’s intelligence and military command centers as part of Trump’s effort to retain the presidency, despite his loss in the November 2020 election? Or was this a more capricious campaign driven by Trump’s personal pique and score-settling without a clear strategy?

I was imagining things less grand and horrifying than that; I was thinking of him and his fellow minions rifling through the files drawers of DOD and pulling incriminating documents, to keep them out of the hands of the huge investigations that would no doubt be engulfing them all  after President-elect Biden was sworn in. Maybe something like the documents he was wishing for in February 2021:

LOL https://t.co/D12T0IMMMW or maybe Kash Patel found the documents didn't show anything like what he was looking for, just like John Durham in his just-aborted investigation of the same bullshit story.

— Yaslight (@Yastreblyansky) February 27, 2021

Which didn't immediately result in his exposure, of course, but it wasn't for lack of thoughts and prayers, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, on the basis of a reminder from our very good blogfriend Jim Tarrant/Astamari, I happened to Google old Kashyap Pramod Patel, and was interested to find him still in the thick of things Trumpy, and indeed in the idea of national security documents lifted from the Trump administration just as it was giving way to a legitimate replacement, and more than that:

I remember, Kash Patel! A quick check finds he's still part of the entourage, and probably on the team that stole all those documents from the White House and took them to Mar-a-Lago https://t.co/qlULx3jTEi

— Yaslight (@Yastreblyansky) May 11, 2022

He was explaining, to the fearless journalists at Breitbart, his own personal knowledge of those 15 boxes of presidential documents, including classified material, that had disappeared during the presidential transition in January 2021 and ended up at Mar-a-Lago until they were discovered by the National Archives!

And explaining, to be exact, not what the Trumpies have been saying since the discovery, that the thing was one of those silly mistakes that always happen when you're moving out of the apartment you've been in for the last four years, but that it wasn't actually classified:

Kash Patel, a former top Trump administration official, told Breitbart News on Wednesday that a report claiming classified materials were found at Mar-a-Lago is misleading and that the documents were actually already declassified by then-President Donald Trump, but the classification markings had not been updated.

Trump had actually declassified it all, you see, as presidents are entitled to do any time they want, but the gang forgot to re-stamp all the packages.

“The White House counsel failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings, but that doesn’t mean the information wasn’t declassified,” Patel said. “I was there with President Trump when he said ‘We are declassifying this information.'”

“This story is just another disinformation campaign designed to break the public trust in a president that lived on transparency. It’s yet another way to attack Trump and say he took classified information when he did not,” he added....

“It’s information that Trump felt spoke to matters regarding everything from Russiagate to the Ukraine impeachment fiasco to major national security matters of great public importance — anything the president felt the American people had a right to know is in there and more.”

That is, it was just the kind of stuff we'd conjectured Kaahyap Pramod Patel might be stealing from his privileged position in the Defense Department, now claimed to have been secretly declassified, but never actually released to the American people during the year it spent at Mar-a-Lago, in spite of the right of the American people to know [it] is in there and more, because why?

I'm guessing because our guesses of two years ago were more or less right and it is in fact incriminating material that the Trumpies obviously had not declassified and keep hoping to keep out of the public eye as long as the boss is alive. It's Patel himself who stole it! 

And now that the Justice Department has convened a grand jury to investigate it, we're starting to get an inkling of why. He seems to be confessing to a great many more allegations—that he really was scouting the Pentagon looking for Trump-incriminating documents\. I can definitely imagine so many great reasons "from Russiagate to the Ukraine impeachment fiasco" go account for that that I can hardly stand it, I'll tell you right now.