Patel: Alternative media, honest lawyers will check swamp tyranny

FPI / November 17, 2021

Trump insider Kash Patel, who led Rep. Devin Nunes's House Intelligence Committee investigative team, drew on his in-depth knowledge of Russiagate in an interview with the Washington Exposé podcast. The hosts noted that Patel has been in the Left's crosshairs ever since helping expose the truth about a narrative that continues to be relentlessly-disseminated after being proved false.

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Independent media played a key role in dismantling the Trump-Russia lie concocted by the deep state, Kash Patel told Washington Exposé.

In an era of censorship and propaganda, such alternative platforms are needed to fight back against and expose the Big Government/Big Tech/Big Media axis of disinformation, he said.

Although the Trump-Russia narrative was decisively refuted, it was not destroyed as a scant few Big Media outlets came clean and actually corrected the record on their reporting. Others, however, continue to push the lie of Trump-Russia collusion to this day.

Last week, the contents of phones that were seized by the FBI during a raid on the home of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and employees were promptly leaked to and then published by The New York Times, O’Keefe attorney Harmeet Dhillon noted.

"Harmeet Dhillon, who is a wonderful conservative attorney and a dear friend of mine, ... she got an enormous victory in federal court. She actually interceded and said 'hang on a minute, you can't have that stuff.' And you know what a federal judge did, she agreed with her. Thank God we have warriors like her and the James O'Keefes of the world, because you need them to combine forces and it's just an example of what you can do and how you can fight back against this sort of over-the-top overreach from government."

It is also independent media, along with former President Donald Trump and the Republicans who still have a spine, that continue to investigate and shine a light on the 2020 election while so many in the GOP run away from what voters still consider a primary topic. Big Media and Big Tech, meanwhile, continue to stick to the narrative of the "Big Lie" and suppress any news of election fraud, no matter how significant.

As for breaking through the Big Media propaganda machine, Patel said getting through to liberal journalists such as Matt Taibbi and The Crowdstrike's Aaron Maté. That "is how we're going to win," Patel added.

Patel said he and Maté "could not be politically more diametrically opposed," but added, "I've done multiple podcasts with him, why, because he cares about the Russiagate criminal enterprise. He cares that so many journalists are morally bankrupt. ... When we keep breaking through to guys like that, that's how we're going to win. Because they have a separate audience from yours."

It was Taibbi, meanwhile, who recently slammed MSNBC's Rachel Maddow for defending Russiagate amid the recent revelations out of John Durham's investigation.

While the Wall Street Journal's newsroom generally sides with the Big Media narrative, its opinion pages have been more open to objective reality. Columnist Kimberly Strassel weighed in today with some corrective perspective on Russiagate:

"Special counsel John Durham’s indictments have turned any number of narratives on their heads, including the question of which 2016 presidential campaign was in bed with Russians. It wasn’t Donald Trump’s.

For five years, that’s been the story line. The original claim was that Russians had “cultivated” Mr. Trump as an asset and held blackmail evidence over his head. When those over-the-top accusations fell apart, Democrats shifted to arguing that Mr. Trump and his associates had secretly colluded with the Kremlin to win the election. The press strove mightily to unearth nefarious Trump campaign contacts with Russians, though it came up with little of substance.

Contrast this to the many Russians routinely interacting with Hillary Clinton campaign contractors and surrogates, as documented by Mr. Durham’s latest indictment. Only one of them is the defendant, Igor Danchenko, the Russian national who turns out to have been the primary source for the Steele dossier, and whom Mr. Durham now charges with lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Think on that: The Clinton campaign ultimately paid a Russian to gin up the core allegations against Mr. Trump. The means by which that money flowed are convoluted, though the indictment makes the connections. It notes the Clinton campaign paid its law firm, which paid the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, which paid Christopher Steele, who “retained Danchenko as a contractor.” Whether or not Mrs. Clinton was aware of any of this, there is no question her campaign got a Russian assist.

Mr. Danchenko, meanwhile, got a lot of his information from other Russians, including a Russian “sub-source” who the indictment notes was a supporter of Mrs. Clinton. This subsource at one point asks a Clinton surrogate to “[T]ell her please she [Clinton] has a big fan in [Country-1]” (bracketed text in original), and in an email to a Russian associate lays out her hopes for a job in a Clinton administration State Department. Again, more Russians providing information that fueled an FBI investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s opponent.

Mr. Danchenko also obtained dossier dirt from a Clinton surrogate, public-relations executive Charles Dolan. The indictment delves into Mr. Dolan’s own deep and extensive ties with the Russian government. It notes he “spent much of his career” with a focus on Russia. That included helping handle from 2006 to 2014 “global public relations for the Russian government.”

The indictment also lays out Mr. Dolan’s frequent interaction with senior Russians in the lead-up to the 2016 election. As part of a planned October conference in Moscow, Mr. Dolan “attended at least three meetings at the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and communicated with Russian Embassy staff, including Russian Ambassador-1 and Russian-Diplomat-1.” He also communicated with the press secretary and deputy press secretary in the Kremlin."

Durham's indictment of Igor Danchenko, the lead source for Christopher Steele's bogus Trump dossier, exposed not only close advisers to Hillary Clinton who pushed the discredited allegations in the dossier, but the liberal think tank the Brookings Institution.

Brookings appears often in accounts related to the Russian collusion scandal. "Even in Washington’s inbred environment, the layers of connections to Brookings are remarkable in the three Durham indictments and accounts of the effort to create a Russian collusion scandal," law professor Jonathan Turley noted.



The revelations about Brookings provides "another example of hypocrisy," Patel told Washington Exposé. "Oh, you can't have conservative or moderate think tanks, but we can have the Brookings Institute. We can employ the Fiona Hills of the world and perpetuate an impeachment of a president falsely and perpetuate possibly the biggest criminal enterprise in U.S. presidential history with her (Hill's) involvement and Christopher Steele, Danchenko, and Charles Dolan."

Patel continued: "Americans hate the two-tiered system of justice and hypocrisy on the Left. And they're seeing it in the media and they're seeing it with facts today. And what they want is accountability and I think that's what we're getting with John Durham. If we can focus on those two arguments and those two positions, we're going to win all day."

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