John Bolton’s Shots At Kash Patel Are A Sign Of Panic In DC

John Bolton’s jeremiad against Kash Patel in The Wall Street Journal this week is a case study in how the Washington swamp is panicking over the incoming Trump administration, especially President-elect Trump’s plans to drastically reform the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department.

Like the recent barrage of attacks against Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Defense, the panicked opposition to the nomination of Patel for FBI director has nothing to do with Patel himself and everything to do with undermining Trump’s second-term agenda.

A quick glance at Bolton’s argument bears this out. Bolton — the perfect specimen of a Washington swamp creature if ever there was one — relies on false statements and outlandish innuendo to argue that Patel is somehow unfit to take the place of outgoing FBI director Christopher Wray, who announced his resignation on Wednesday. 

The most glaring false statement made by Bolton is that Patel wasn’t a senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council. In fact, Patel served as the Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the NSC, as his bio on the Department of Defense website clearly states. What’s more, the WSJ itself last week ran a piece in support of Patel for FBI director by former Trump White House national security advisor John O’Brien, who correctly notes that Patel “served as the National Security Council’s senior director for counterterrorism.” 

Bolton moves on from that obvious lie to cite none other than Fiona Hill, the NSC intelligence analyst who was a star witness in the first impeachment of President Trump and a central player in the Russia collusion hoax. During the impeachment hearings, Hill claimed that Patel was engaged in various Ukraine-related activities in 2019, which Bolton decries as “unrestrained freelancing” — a charge Patel has repeatedly denied. In March 2023, Patel even filed a $23 million defamation suit against Politico for knowingly spreading false claims that Patel was a “Ukraine whisperer” who fed lies to Trump about Ukraine. 

It’s telling that Bolton would invoke Hill, whose role in the Russia collusion hoax is a case study in why Trump needs loyal lieutenants like Patel in key administration roles to clean up deeply corrupt federal intelligence agencies. During closed-door testimony in October 2019 to the House lawmakers and investigators for the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Hill was asked whether she was aware of any interaction between Christopher Steele and the Ukrainians. Hill stated emphatically that she had “no knowledge whatsoever of how he developed that dossier. None. I just want to state that.”

But Special Counsel John Durham’s November 2021 indictment of Igor Danchenko, the “primary sub-source” of Steele’s infamous dossier, revealed that Hill herself had introduced Danchenko and Steele back in 2010. How could Hill have had “no knowledge” of how Steele developed his dossier when she was responsible for connecting him with its primary source? At the time, House Republicans investigating all this said they were looking into whether Hill may have committed perjury in her impeachment testimony.

None of that seems to matter to Bolton, though, who blithely cites Hill as a reliable source and then pivots to repeating a discredited smear of Patel designed to portray him as a threat to national security. Bolton repeats an accusation made by former Defense Secretary Mark Esper in his memoir that Patel misled administration officials about whether airspace-transit clearance had been granted for a 2020 Seal Team 6 hostage rescue mission in Nigeria, placing the mission in jeopardy.

The State Department is responsible for obtaining clearance is these situations, and Patel relayed to his boss, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Tony Tata, that clearance had been granted. As Tata himself said recently, Esper’s account of what happened is pure fiction. “Kash operated within the chain of command by relaying a message from the State Department to me, which he believed to be true,” Tata told the Washington Times last week. “I communicated that authority, along with several others previously confirmed, to the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs and [Special Operations Command] commander, among others.”

In the end, the chairman and other senior officials decided to go ahead with the mission even though they had not received final confirmation from the State Department about airspace-transit clearance, saying, “we could turn the planes around if we didn’t confirm the clearance.” The rescue mission turned out to be a success, and Tata credited Patel’s role in the effort.

Bolton ignores all this and takes Esper’s account as fact, which is what you’d expect from a guy who wrote a cartoonishly self-congratulatory 500-page memoir of his time in the Trump administration that included detailed quoted conservations but, amazingly, no notes. 

Indeed, for as much as he presents himself as the consummate national security insider professional, Bolton (who himself couldn’t get confirmed in his role as national security advisor and was recess-appointed by Trump) is just channeling the impotent rage and paranoia of the deep state in his lazy attacks against Patel. Having run out of arguments, Bolton and his fellow swamp dwellers are now resorting to personal attacks against Trump’s nominees as a backhanded way of trying to hobble Trump’s reform agenda. 

It’s not going to work this time. The last eight years, and especially the last four, have unmasked the deep state’s willingness to engage in any deception and abuse of power, however blatant, to maintain the status quo in Washington. People like Bolton understand that Trump’s second term is going to be focused on reforming the corrupt power structures inside the federal bureaucracy that for too long have operated with no accountability. Patel will be effective in this endeavor, which is the real reason Bolton and the corporate media are coming after him.  

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.