the only good thing about being in the swamp is you get to sit in the dojo that Steve Bannon built and that's where I'm operating right now in my trump Mania t-shirt because that's what it's all about that is Cash Patel that's the man Donald Trump nominated to run the FBI he's never worked for the FBI but he does host Steve benn's War Room podcast a lot where he loves to share conspiracy theories the Chinese the CCP um help fund portions of the Biden campaign get the Sergeant at Arms to go out and arrest Mar
Garland they want everything and every way to rig this system just like the censorship regime we're going back to Wuhan we're going back to corv Origins and we're going back to another form of a mega virus that can take out China's enemies they're in on it with the mainstream media the Biden Harris Walt campaign and of course the FBI like so many guys in Trump World Patel just can't stop talking which you know game recognize game these folks are mostly made of podcasts at this point and from the little I've heard what he's been saying
is pretty out there joining me now as someone who has spent a lot of time listening to those podcasts Zach bamp is a senior corresponded Vox where he covers democracy in the far right his latest piece is titled I listen to hours of Trump's FBI pick on Steve bannon's podcast oh boy um Zach thank you for doing this uh genuinely important work I guess what's first your sort of Top Line about what you came away thinking about the qualifications and worldview of this individual yeah cash Patel uh may or may not have significant experience with
government depends on how you assess his time in the Trump Administration what he does have is a very very paranoid worldview I think that's probably the best word to describe it I mean he is constantly drawing connections between one threat and the other you know an external threat to American Security and uh whatever problem he has with the Biden Administration Or democrats at the moment all of which circles back to a kind of personal threat against Donald Trump who he sees as really the Lynch pin of the American Republic at least in the way that
he talks about things on this podcast you're right the overwhelming impression is that Patel is a man whose entire worldview revolves around paranoid conspiracy theories specifically conspiracies against both America and Trump which for him are one and the same it's I thought this was a really interesting observation I'm I'm I'm reading the Beverly guge poer prize winning biography of Jer Hoover right now in some ways prompted by what's going on he says it's a specific kind of obsession that reminds me of the FBI's first director Jer Hoover a man who infamously abused his power to
persecute political enemies tell me more about that um so Hoover had basically built his worldview after this kind of fear of post World War II fear of foreign infiltration and of attacks on American soil he was worried about for instance kamakazi attacks happening inside the United States after uh what had happened on the Pacific front during the war and he believed the Soviets are responsible and this sense that the Soviets were infiltrating American government in order to execute these these actual kinetic plots against the United States in addition to whatever else the Soviets wanted to
do uh really defined what Hoover was concerned about and led him to see Soviet agents basically anymore and what Patel does is there's no one overriding threat like the Soviets but he strings together a few different enemies right China at some points Iran at other points sometimes even you know drug dealers bringing people cross borders uh and all of them are linked back in varying ways to the Democratic party and domestic enemies right so you play that clip of him talking about China funding Biden there's no real evidence for this right like his argument is
a report I believe I try to trace it back that House Republicans had put out that suggested maybe there had been some foreign money going through act blue the Democratic crowdfunding platform that's not really good evidence to say China is funneling money to the Biden campaign uh but it's important for him to make this argument because it creates a justification to be able to say when I go after them as FBI director right it is different from when they went after me which is what he believes happened uh when the government was under Biden's control
yeah I want to I want to play two clips here one is about using the sort of model that he used when he was a staffer on the intelligence committee to essentially fight this media War through leaks and use of official documents that he he says he wants to sort of uh uh export as a kind of model for fighting back against Trump's enemies take a listen this is how we won Russia gate we not only used Congress we used the White House we used the power of educating the American public with the the corruption
author's own documents from FBI and doj and it can be done Steve just think about that we did that at one place in the FBI mainly and a little bit of doj just think about what you can do if you do it all at once at DOD at the CIA at the NSA at the doj at the FBI at treasury at State and the list goes on basically the idea of using government documents in your possession for official purposes as a tool of essentially selective leaking for propaganda yeah I mean his view is that the
domestic enemy is literally the enemy right that there's not a meaningful distinction in many ways between threat and a domestic one and so when you take that view when you believe you know he wrote a book that he called government gangsters it's called government gangsters he's Hawking it all the time on these podcasts and and the argument of the book it's very literal right the American government is a kind of mob operation that is directed at Republicans and Donald Trump that's designed to entrench its own power and keep the Deep state in power personally he
even has a literal enemies list in the appendix of the book where he lists 50 odd people who he believes are part of this nefarious group of government gangsters the Deep State uh and Patel believes that they have weaponized the State against Republicans and the only way to fight back is to weaponize the State against them right and that doesn't mean you know playing by the rules or within the normal Le of bounds it means doing whatever you need to do in order to make sure you win the political war there's other another clip where
he sort of sort of promises to go after to the media whether civil or criminally this one has gotten a fair amount of attention a threat I think I take literally although this is clearly someone who wants to be a media figure give them like a four or five out of 10 as a broadcaster but not terrible Zack ban thanks a lot thanks Chris
