NYT Still Won’t Admit Kash Patel Was Right About Russiagate

Ahead of Thursday’s Senate Judiciary confirmation hearing for President Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel, The New York Times dropped a hit job accusing Patel of lying about the bureau’s 2016 investigation into then-candidate Trump.

In their lede, Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Alan Feuer accuse Patel of having “repeatedly undercut the work of the very agency he is set to lead by making false statements” about the FBI’s sham investigation into Trump for supposed collusion with Russia. Lost on them is the reality that Patel’s understanding of the FBI’s corruption and willingness to “undercut” their partisan witch hunts make him the perfect candidate to clean house at the bureau.

“Mr. Patel’s pattern of peddling misinformation is at sharp odds with Mr. Trump’s proposal to put him in charge of the nation’s premier agency charged with figuring out what is true,” they continue. It’s a mendacious claim coming from Savage and Goldman, two Russiagate veterans who have been invested in the hoax from the beginning. (Goldman was rewarded for his part in it with a Pulitzer Prize.)

The reporters’ suggestion that the FBI is still in the business of “figuring out what is true” is laughable, considering their own roles in helping the FBI generate a national frenzy over false claims about Trump and Russia. Kash Patel, who was one of the first people to expose the Russia hoax while working for then-Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Rep. Devin Nunes, took down the false narrative that Savage and Goldman helped create, so it’s no wonder they haven’t forgiven him for it.

The Crossfire Hurricane Investigation

A quick refresher: In 2016, when Donald Trump was running against Hillary Clinton for president, the Clinton campaign commissioned opposition research that took the form of the Steele dossier, a collection of shoddily sourced rumors about Trump, including allegations of sexual activities committed in Moscow. Three days after the Steele dossier was shopped to the FBI, the FBI opened an investigation, named Crossfire Hurricane, into Trump and his campaign, seeking to uncover evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia to steal the 2016 election. The Steele dossier was later shown to be bogus, and Special Counsel John Durham found the FBI lacked justification for launching the investigation. The fraudulent Steele dossier was also used to obtain a warrant to spy on members of the Trump campaign, including Carter Page.

The Times reporters singled out a few statements Patel made about the Russia hoax which they said were “false or misleading claims.” Their accusations are such nonsense they don’t deserve a line-by-line rebuttal, but they’re also such nonsense I can’t resist.

Patel described the Steele dossier as the “root” of Russiagate and the “linchpin for the whole operation,” a view that is shared by CIA Director John Ratcliffe and everyone else who watched the Russia hoax unfold. Patel also accused former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper of lying when Clapper claimed — as the Times reporters do in their story — that the Steele dossier was not actually the basis for the launch of the investigation.

The New York Times says Patel is wrong because the FBI maintained, and Durham concluded based on information the FBI gave him, that the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was initially opened based not on the Steele dossier but on a “tip from the Australian government about the Trump campaign and Russian hackers.” The New York Times is correct that that is the FBI’s story. However, Durham’s 2023 report outlines a timeline of events that casts some doubt on it.

“The FBI possessed the earliest Steele reporting claiming Russian efforts to assist the Trump campaign,” Durham wrote, “more than three weeks prior to the receipt of the information provided by the Australian diplomats … and the opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation on July 31, 2016.”

According to Durham, Christopher Steele provided “salacious information about Donald Trump’s alleged sexual activities during trips to Moscow” to his FBI handler on July 5, 2016. Steele sent his handler more gossip, this time relating to Trump campaign staffer Carter Page, on July 19. The handler sent both reports to the assistant special agent in charge of the New York Field Office, whom Durham refers to as ASAC-1, on July 28. The handler told Durham’s investigators that on the same day, ASAC-1 “advised him that FBI leadership … was now aware of the existence of the reports.”

The Crossfire Hurricane investigation was opened three days later.

Savage and Goldman ignore this evidence because the tip from the Australian government came on the same day Steele’s handler sent Steele’s allegations up the FBI chain of command and because the FBI said the Australian intel was the basis of its investigation.

Instead, they cherry-pick the fact that for some reason, the dossier wasn’t sent to the specific team doing the Crossfire Hurricane investigation until September 2016, even though FBI leadership was apparently aware of Steele’s allegations before the investigation was opened.

“In order to believe The New York Times’ point of view,” a former congressional staffer involved in Russia collusion investigations told The Federalist, “you’ve got to believe that [FBI investigators] open up the investigation, totally ignorant of the fact that their own organization, the FBI, is in contact with Christopher Steele, who’s given them these explosive allegations about exactly what they want to investigate.”

There are compelling reasons not to incuriously give the benefit of the doubt to the FBI’s story that the Crossfire Hurricane investigation wasn’t based on the Steele dossier, as the Times does. But even if the initial launch of Crossfire Hurricane was based on a tip from the Australians, the Steele dossier rumors became so foundational to the investigation and the subsequent smears of Trump, the Times’ claim that it wasn’t a “linchpin” is false at worst and a distinction without a difference at best. Once it became obvious to everyone that the Steele dossier was worthless, Savage, Goldman, and the rest of the corporate press shifted to pretending it wasn’t central to the conspiracy theory they all helped propagate, in order to keep the conspiracy theory alive.

“They were all in on boosting the dossier, and boosting the dossier’s claims about Carter Page, until the dossier completely started falling apart thanks to what Nunes and Kash were doing,” the congressional staffer said. “As the dossier’s credibility eroded more and more, the mainstream media’s reaction to that was to try to amputate the dossier from the rest of the Russia hoax and the rest of the investigation.”

FBI Spying on Carter Page

Savage and Goldman also take issue with several statements of Patel’s relating to the FBI’s use of the Steele dossier to spy on Carter Page. The fraudulent Steele dossier was the basis on which the FBI obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to spy on Page, as former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe has admitted, and which the Times does not deny.

While working for Nunes, Patel drafted what became known as the “Nunes memo,” a four-page list of problems with the FBI’s FISA warrant applications. Hilariously, Savage and Goldman insinuate that the Nunes memo was wrong because a later inspector general report found even more flaws with the warrant applications than Patel had complied.

Savage and Goldman go on to try to debunk some of Patel’s claims about the Carter Page FISA warrant application, several of which are also made in the Nunes memo. For example, Patel has stated that the FBI would use media reports, which were based on leaked information from Steele in the first place, to “bolster its investigations” and that one specific story by Michael Isikoff was used “to justify part of their FISA warrant application on Carter Page.”

Savage and Goldman contend that this is untrue and that the Isikoff story was not included in the warrant application to “corroborate the Steele dossier’s claims” but only “mentioned” to introduce the fact that Page denied the story. They do not explain why the warrant application recounted the claims in Isikoff’s story for the better part of four pages, of which Page’s denial constitutes five and a half lines. But regardless of how exactly the story was used, it was obviously included in the warrant application because the FBI thought its inclusion would be useful for making its case.

Savage and Goldman also claim it was “misleading” for Patel to observe that the FBI, despite knowing the Steele dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign, “never told the FISA judge” that fact in the warrant application.

While his statement is true, they argue, the exclusion was no big deal because “it is the practice in such applications not to refer to Americans” by name and because the warrant application included a footnote speculating that the source “was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit” Trump. Setting aside the absurdity of that excuse, there’s no reason the warrant application — which referred to Trump as “Candidate #1” — couldn’t have disclosed that the dossier was bankrolled by “Candidate #2.”

Finally, Savage and Goldman accuse Patel of lying for pointing out the fact that spying on Page meant the FBI could spy on any communications Page received, even if they were sent by other members of the campaign, or by Trump himself.

“Mr. Patel’s claim that the FISA order empowered the F.B.I. to ‘do all the spying they could need’ on everyone else in the campaign is also false,” Savage and Goldman contend, because “the orders allowed the bureau to collect the contents and metadata about only phone calls and emails to and from Mr. Page, not those of other people around him.” The fact that, as the Times admits, the warrant extended to “phone calls and emails to” and not merely “from” Page is exactly the point Patel was making, using language that anyone would interpret to mean exactly that.

Savage and Goldman Are Veteran Russia Hoaxers

Savage and Goldman’s alarm about Patel probably stems from the fact that he helped take down the false narrative they helped spread.

“He helped expose them. [The media] were all in on this thing,” the congressional staffer added. “So the idea of having him as head of the FBI is not real pleasing to a lot of these people.”

As the Russia hoax fell apart, instead of taking responsibility for falling for it, Savage and Goldman continued to prop it up. They, along with Katie Benner, claimed months before the Durham report became public that Durham had “failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry,” a claim that was demonstrably false. Even then, in January 2023, they continued to paint Trump as in collusion with Russia, and even suggested that Durham’s probe might have been corrupted by Russian “disinformation.”

They even went so far as to rely on the attorney representing Stefan Halper, one of the “sources” of the Trump-Russia allegations who lied to the FBI, to attack Durham and former Attorney General Bill Barr.

When FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pled guilty to fabricating evidence in the FISA warrant application, it was Goldman who broke the news and made sure to soften the blow. They wrote sympathetically about Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, whom Durham would prosecute for spreading lies about Trump and Russia to the FBI. When Sussmann was indicted by Durham, Savage and Goldman even “gave Sussmann’s team an assist in getting ahead of the news,” as The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland noted.

If you’re still not convinced Savage and Goldman are deep state apologists, recall that Goldman was the one whom the FBI worked with to downplay the Hunter Biden investigation, and Savage downplayed Special Counsel Robert Hur’s findings about Joe Biden’s classified documents scandal, falsely claiming Hur found “insufficient evidence to charge Mr. Biden.”

(The third person in the hit piece’s byline, Alan Feuer, isn’t a Russia hoax veteran like the other two, and was presumably included to help with the non-Russiagate parts of the hit job. He is nonetheless on the record complaining that Biden’s DOJ was not going to succeed in dragging Trump into a courtroom before the 2024 election.)

There are few people who understand the magnitude of the abuses committed by the FBI during the Russia hoax as well as Kash Patel. That’s probably why Russia collusion hoaxers like Savage and Goldman don’t want him running it.

Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.