Kashy Patel and the Room of Requirement

 

Hogwarts Level 7, with the Room of Requirement, by mvm5600/DeviantArt. 

Had a weird sighting of FBI director Kash Patel a week or so ago, in The New Republic:

Sources told Fox News Digital Wednesday that FBI Director Kash Patel had discovered multiple burn bags filled with sensitive documents stashed away in a secret room at the agency.

Stashed away in a what? The TNR writer flatly called it nothing but a "far-fetched attempt to distract from the president's ties to the alleged sex trafficker" Jeffrey Epstein, and moved on to making fun of Trump for talking about Epstein anyway, in response to a press question about Patel's discovery, but my impression was that he thought Epstein was really what the question was about:

“Well, I want everything to be shown. You know, as long as it’s fair and reasonable I think it will be shown and it should be shown, and I think [Patel] feels that way, and I think Pam feels that way,” Trump said....“But it’s gotta be stuff that really doesn’t hurt people unfairly, because you have so many people involved. And if they can do that in a fair way, I think it’s great. I think it’s really great. The whole thing is a scam...”   

I think Trump doesn't, or didn't, know about Patel's secret room. Or at least didn't know enough to expect a question about it at the presser. I suspect it's a bit of Patellerie of a kind we've wondered about before that he hasn't seen a particular need for Trump to know about (yet), because it's not quite ripe. There are a lot of things Trump doesn't need to know about, like the outcome of the dinner with Bondi and Patel that was supposed to take place at the vice president's office to discuss the Epstein matter (publicity drove the dinner to the White House instead, but there's still no indication the president showed up for it). Patel has tried the story out, though, according to the New York Post version of the story, sometime in late June, on the Joe Rogan show:

 “When I first got to the bureau, [I] found a room that [former FBI Director James] Comey and others hid from the world in the Hoover Building, full of documents and computer hard drives that no one had ever seen or heard of,” he said. “They [l]ocked the key and hid access and just said, ‘No one’s ever gonna find this place.'”

That's a fascinating detail about the hard drives. Is that going to be where the Hunter Biden laptop ended up? But the crown jewel of this chamber of secrets according to The Post is something else:

Horowitzmas

Via.

Glad to see I called it (19 November):

A lot of faithful Trumper paranoids have been looking to this report [Inspector General Horowitz's report] to prove to the world that the Trump-Russia investigation was actually a conspiracy among the "angry Democrats" who are naturally in charge of the FBI's counterintelligence activities to take down Trump's presidency (it had to wait for Trump to become president to go into real action, though you'd think it would be more efficient to just stop him from winning, but apparently the sinister cabal was expecting Hillary to win, like everybody else, and this conspiracy roping together the forces of the FBI, CIA, intelligence services of UK, Italy, and Australia, and possibly the White House, was just an "insurance policy"), and they've been waiting for this thing to come out with increasing excitement.

Not that any of this is going to happen. As with his report on Andrew McCabe, Horowitz will make an attempt to be pissy about some of the people Trump is after but nobody is going to be anywhere near locked up, because they didn't do anything wrong (Marcy Wheeler has suggested there may have been cut corners in the warrant on Dr. Page, but added that whatever they did has been done much more abusively to many, mostly Muslims, in recent years, and it's kind of ridiculous to single out this particular case of somebody who obviously needed to be watched and who had practically no remaining connection with the Trump campaign at this point anyway).

Well, almost. Actually the FBI did 17 things wrong, apparently, by the (just possibly a tad self-serving) account of former director James Comey: