The FBI director, Kash Patel, blamed the Biden Justice Department and FBI’s 2022 “invasion” of President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on the “total weaponization” of both law enforcement agencies dating back to the Obama administration.
Speaking with Fox Business News host Larry Kudlow on Wednesday, Mr. Patel said there was “no constitutional basis” and “no lawful predicate” for the Justice Department and FBI to have authorized and carried out the Mar-a-Lago raid.
“It was a total weaponization and politicization by the FBI and DOJ and the Biden administration dating back to the Obama administration that led not only to Russiagate as you opened up with, but to the invasion of Donald Trump’s private home in Mar-a-Lago,” Mr. Patel told Mr. Kudlow..
The August 8, 2022, FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, during which armed FBI agents looking for classified documents penetrated the bedchamber of Melania Trump as well as the private rooms of her and Mr. Trump’s teenage son, Barron, enraged Mr. Trump. Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed a few weeks after the Mar-a-Lago raid, ultimately charged Mr. Trump with multiple felonies over the documents, but a judge threw out his case, and Mr. Smith gave up when Mr. Trump won re-election.
A 2023 investigation by the GOP-controlled House Judiciary Committee found that the raid was planned, authorized and carried out well outside the norms of federal law enforcement. Perhaps most notably, FBI officials told the committee that their guidance – that Mr. Trump first be asked to voluntarily hand over the documents – was ignored.
Mr. Patel told Mr. Kudlow on Thursday that he had been “ridding” the bureau of its former leadership structure he maintained was responsible for this “weaponization.”
Last week, Mr. Patel and one of his co-deputy directors, Daniel Bongino, dismissed several senior FBI officials who had previously worked on investigations involving Mr. Trump.
“Every single person that has been found to have weaponized or participated in that process has been removed from leadership positions, and if and when we find any others that are involved in this, as you notice, in a 37,000 person agency, we are going to take swift action just like we have,” Mr. Patel told Mr. Kudlow.
Much of the so-called “weaponizing” occurred in 2021 and 2022 when it seemed inconceivable to many that Mr. Trump would ever return to power. Among those fired last week was special agent Walter Giardina, who in 2022 arrested the sometime Trump White House trade adviser, Peter Navarro, at a Washington airport on contempt of Congress charges. Mr. Navarro, then 74, served four months in prison for refusing to cooperate with the Democrat-controlled January 6 committee. Mr. Navarro at the time called Mr. Giardina and another special agent “kind Nazis.”
In his termination letter to Mr. Giardina, Mr. Patel said the special agent “exercised poor judgement and a lack of impartiality in carrying out duties, leading to the political weaponization of the government.”
Also fired was Christopher Meyer, a former pilot in the FBI’s Special Flight Operations Unit who regularly flew Mr. Patel on an FBI plane. Prior to Mr. Meyer’s firing, a former special agent, Kyle Seraphin — a member of “The Suspendables,” a group of ex-agents who say they were punished by the bureau for conservative views — claimed he spoke with a Trump administration official about Mr. Meyer’s involvement in the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago classified document’s investigation and other cases.
An attorney for Mr. Meyer told CBS News that the former special agent was involved in the FBI’s January 6 investigation but not in the Mar-a-Lago documents search.
Also dismissed was the former acting FBI director, Brian Driscoll, who resisted helping former acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, in identifying those FBI employees who were involved in the January 6th investigation and declined to dismiss eight senior executives on the Justice Department’s urging. But Mr. Driscoll remained in the FBI after Mr. Patel’s confirmation, taking on a new role as head of the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group, or CIRG.
On August 4, Mr. Driscoll refused to fire Mr. Meyer on Mr. Patel’s orders because “ he did not get what he considered a satisfactory answer from Patel” on the reasons for Mr. Meyer’s dismissal, according to CBS News.
Mr. Driscoll was eventually dismissed by the FBI Associate Deputy Director, J. William Rivers, although reportedly was not given a reason why.
A special agent in charge for Las Vegas, Spencer Evans, was fired not for investigating Trump but for his handling of Covid-19 mandates during the pandemic.
“You demonstrated a lack of reasonableness and overzealousness in the implementation of COVID-19 protocols and policies,” Mr. Patel wrote in his dismissal letter to Mr. Evans, which has been reviewed by the Sun.
Mr. Evans was fired earlier this year as part of the Department of Justice’s review of Mr. Wray’s top officials, though he was later rehired.
“It appears that they mistakenly believed he was eligible for retirement, because everyone else on that list were eligible, and did, retire,” Mr. Evans’s attorney, Mark Zaid, tells the Sun.
After discovering Mr. Evans was ineligible for retirement, he was instead reassigned to an unspecified role in the FBI’s large Redstone Arsenal campus in Huntsville, Alabama, which at one point was to be the new home of its vaunted National Academy. Those plans were eventually nixed by Messrs. Bongino and Patel, citing “insufficient infrastructure.”
Kyle Seraphin, a former FBI agent, accused Mr. Evans of denying him religious accommodations that would excuse him from receiving a mandatory Covid-19 vaccination. Mr Seraphin is among a group of ex-agents who call themselves “The Suspendables” for being punished by the bureau for political reasons.
In a post on X in April, Mr. Seraphin said he had been asked by Mr. Patel — then a nominee for FBI director — about the “people in the FBI who were problems.”
Mr. Seraphin identified Mr. Evans, whom he called “a Deep State shill,” as one such person.
“Kash said ‘Gone,’” Mr. Seraphin wrote on X.
“If you look at the totality of the record is at least publicly available, it would give the appearance that the existence of the Suspendables and their complaints, which they had been making for months, publicly and privately, had zero impact until the convenience is needed to take action against at least Spencer for, I think, deflection purposes,” Mr. Zaid tells the Sun.
In January, a deputy assistant attorney general, George Toscas, who pushed for the Mar-a-Lago raid despite concerns from FBI agents that doing so was risky, was reassigned to the Justice Department’s Office of Sanctuary Cities Enforcement.
When asked by Fox Business News why Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence was raided, Mr. Patel believed it was “creating a crime where one did not exist.”
“It was made up, it was completely false, it was completely unconstitutional pursuant to our judicial courts,,” Mr. Patel told Fox Business News. “We know there was no reason. Now, it’s time for accountability.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
