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March 19, 2021 - Epoch Times
43:48
The Inside Story of How Spygate Was Uncovered—Lead Investigator Kash Patel Tells All
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Prosecution 101.
Follow the money.
In 2018, the explosive Nunes memo detailed how the FBI relied on uncorroborated evidence to justify spying on the 2016 Trump campaign.
I basically told Devin, if I'm wrong, you can just fire me.
No big deal.
Critical to this entire Spygate investigation was one man, Kash Patel.
A former DOJ terrorism prosecutor during the Obama administration, he knew the DOJ inside and out.
He was personally recruited by Congressman Devin Nunes.
We wanted to make sure that memo was bulletproof.
Not a single one of them could tell me under oath that they had evidence of any kind of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy.
Today he shares with me what it was like to lead the investigation for the House Intelligence Committee while facing obstacles at every turn.
I don't think I've ever told anyone this.
This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Kash Patel, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thanks for having me.
I really appreciate your time.
Kash, you know, you're, I guess, one of the stars of the film, The Plot Against the President, and of course, the book by Lee Smith.
That's when I first became aware of you.
So tell me about the beginnings of this.
I've interviewed Congressman Nunes about this.
Your involvement and what you discovered.
I was looking to get out of DOJ At the time, and Devin said, hey, look, I really need someone to help me run this investigation.
Come over here.
I'll let you work on the counterterrorism stuff that you're interested in, and that's your background for the Intel Committee, but you can also lead up this investigation.
And at that time, I said, sure, let's do it.
It'll be a report that no one reads.
Let's get into the beginnings of the investigation.
I think you came in something like four months after the knowledge of the existence of the Steele dossier was...
Yeah, I think I started on House Intel in April of 2017, and it was released in January of 2017, right around the turn of the year.
As soon as I got in, I asked to sort of dive deeper into the dossier because it was so public, and there was rumors that it was used to help further the investigation into Trump.
So we were just at the beginnings of this.
But at the time, we obviously had access to classified information.
That I couldn't share with the public, which led us to review the FISA application.
And that, back then, wasn't even a public fact that there was a FISA application against associates of a presidential campaign, which was a little shocking in and of itself.
But I said, hey, let's take a look at that if we're going to look at all the Russia collusion stuff and who interfered and if there was influence by another country Against a Trump campaign associate, that would be the best place to look.
So we went and reviewed, or I went and looked at, the first FISA application and read it basically cover to cover.
Clearly you found some shocking things.
Yeah.
At my tour at DOJ, doing terrorism prosecutions, you use FISA all the time.
So I had done the FISA applications and search warrants.
I presented them, put them together, worked with the FBI and DOJ and the intel community.
It's a massive, massive lift.
I was very familiar with the process, and I think they also knew that on House Intel, so maybe that's another reason they asked me to come over with them for the investigation.
But I was expecting to see what I normally saw, a well-planned document that's 150, 200 pages long, substantiating each and every allegation with a factual basis and some hard proof, credible witnesses, good sourcing, things like that.
That's basically in every FISA I've ever worked on or seen.
But in this one, the bulk of the subject matter of the FISA was the Steele dossier itself.
And I found that unbelievable, like unbelievably remarkable in the sense that Is that it?
Where's the rest?
And as I read the rest of the application, there was no rest.
So I said, Devin, you know, we've got a problem here.
Either they're not showing us everything, or this is a serious issue and we need to dig further.
And of course, this is the Carter Page FISA, or one of them.
The first one, yeah.
So I said, look, Devin, the way I would recommend running this investigation is you have to acquire as much of the documents that you can.
That they'll permit you to do.
And I was used to the Department of Justice, subpoena power, grand jury.
If we wanted something, you know, we had a very good chance of getting it because we could go to court and we just had so much weight and heft behind the DOJ, as you should.
But in Congress, I would quickly learn, as Trey Gowdy told me in my first encounter with him, he said, Cash, welcome to Congress.
This is where good investigations go to die.
He was just coming off of Benghazi.
He was a former federal prosecutor himself.
And what he was alluding to was the limited power that Congress actually has To produce and acquire the documents necessary to further an investigation.
So I said, alright, let's dig in anyway.
Let's see what we can get.
Let's focus on the documents that we know exist, the FISA, let's get the underlying documents, the source materials, and then let's start lining up witnesses that we're going to want to interview once we complete collecting our documents and we can put them under oath and ask them what they knew.
And then we can get all that information out in a report to the American people.
So this was you creating, initially, was the Nunes Memo.
The Nunes Memo wouldn't come for almost a year after that, and that wasn't even a thought.
The concept of the Nunes Memo came much, much later because we were having a problem getting the classified information out to the American public so that they could read it themselves.
And also, we couldn't go out to the microphones or the sticks that we used to call them and just tell everyone, hey, look what we found!
The Democrats had their own way of doing business under Adam Schiff, but we sort of held true to the application of ethical standards and rules and procedures, and were not able to just drum out information without...
Revealing classified information.
But there's a way to get there, and the Nunes memo was way down the road.
It allowed us, under House rules, a way to present the information to the American public.
So it was a vehicle we used later.
You interviewed something like 60 witnesses specifically around the question of collusion.
This is something that I thought was very interesting, reading Lee's book back in the day.
But you had this very, very specific, legally formulated question that you asked everybody.
As we were building up to the interviews, I said, we have to just make a whole list.
We can't really start bringing in people right away.
Because the crux of any investigation is the documents.
The documents that the agencies themselves created, that's going to be the big picture portion of the investigation.
The interviews are window dressing.
They're nice to have if you can get them.
And under oath, they're even better.
But you can't have a successful interview without the documents.
So once we started putting together the documents, they said, OK, what's the theory or thing that we need to have answered during interviews?
And we just boiled it down to its most simplest form.
We were tasked with finding out whether or not there was any conspiracy, collusion or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.
So I said, hey, why don't we just ask everyone under oath Those three C's.
Ask them, do you have any information that the Trump candidacy and his team colluded with the Russian government?
You know, substitute coordination, substitute conspired.
Because if anyone said yes to that, we want to know.
We want to know what's your basis.
And then we can go and get more documents and more people and say, okay, this is where...
This theory came from.
All 60 some witnesses said no to every question under oath relating to coordination, conspiracy or collusion.
That means I'm talking to attorney generals, former attorney generals, former high level DOJ folks, former FBI guys, former high level FBI guys, deputy director of the FBI, heads of the IC. All of these people who were in place at the time during the Obama administration, not a single one of them could tell me under oath that they had evidence of any kind of collusion, coordination or conspiracy.
I found that kind of shocking since for the last year at that point, you know, the media had been talking about this grand scheme by President Trump and his allies to use Putin to rig the election.
And there were people also publicly saying things that were quite different from what they were saying under oath.
Yeah, lots of people.
And that was one of our hardest parts.
So the reason we did the depositions, the transcripts, the other reason we did them was we wanted to print them out and send them out.
So you guys could read them for yourselves rather than having to rely on us to say, hey, what'd they say in that interview?
What'd they say in that interview?
And so we immediately, that was one of the deals I made with Devin.
I said, whatever we find, documents or interviews or otherwise, we put it out to the American people.
And he agreed to that right away.
The problem we ran into was the interagency, people going out and saying misleading things about an interview that was actually ongoing.
And the best example of that is the Don Jr.
interview and some of the things that came out of his interview while the interview was going on that turned out to be just blatantly false, such as the date of this specific Trump Tower meeting and when Don Jr.
had met with certain individuals, if I remember correctly.
But it was hard for us to counter that because our members, rightly so, weren't going to go to the media and just violate the rules to disclose the entire transcript.
We had to wait.
We did it the right way and we ultimately got all the transcripts out.
And thanks to people like you who care, they're able to read and see for themselves that what many were saying to the media, the mainstream media on the left, was totally wrong.
What was the impact of that in your mind?
I mean, it's just the total failure of many in Congress to do their constitutional oversight responsibility.
They bended to politics.
Their animosity for President Trump overtook any credibility decisions they should have made because all they wanted to do under Adam Schiff's leadership was castigate President Trump.
And if we found something to do that, I told Devin I wanted that out there.
That was the deal.
If we found he did this crazy thing with Putin or paid this guy to do X just so he can help win a few votes, I want the American public to know that.
There has to be accountability across the board.
But we were playing with two totally different systems of accountability for the American public between the two, the Dems and the Republicans on the House Intel Committee.
It's very interesting that you say that.
Certainly in the press, you weren't portrayed as someone who was a truth seeker.
Yeah, the press, that was a part I wasn't expecting.
You go to Congress, the members of Congress are in the press.
That's their thing.
Staffers are never in the press.
And rightly so.
There's just an agreement across Congress.
Like, you don't talk about staffers.
You talk about the senator or the congressman and what the committee and what they're doing.
But you don't talk about staffers.
So when my name got outed by the Democrats, the first article I think called me a genocidal dictator.
It's a little off-putting.
It seems perhaps a little bit of hyperbole, whatever you might have done.
Yeah, perhaps a bit harsh, but I think by then I was starting to realize they knew I was leading the investigation and they didn't like the things we were actually uncovering, which was more and more towards intentional malfeasance, abuse of the FISA court, abuse by the FBI, and abuse by DOJ.
And that's to say some people, a very small number of people at DOJ and the FBI did this stuff.
Not the vast majority of folks that I used to work with who are just awesome people and some of the best work I ever did.
But I guess since I was the guy uncovering it, the media felt it OK to forget all the work I had done to that point.
I'm aware of some reporting that Katherine Herridge did a while back about just some contentious moments that you had with Rod Rosenstein.
Well, there was many, because he has a terrible temper, and it was witnessed by more than just me, so it's not like I'm making stuff up.
But the one that you're probably referring to is, we had a meeting in House Intel spaces with Chairman Nunes and The director of the FBI, Chris Ray, and Rod Rosenstein, who was effectively the attorney general, and a couple of other folks.
And Devin and I were talking about the witnesses we wanted to bring in that were still employed at the FBI and DOJ. And Rod Rosenstein basically lost it and flew off the handles and started screaming at us.
And saying, if you're going to investigate us, I'm going to investigate you, and I'm going to subpoena your records.
And Devin and I were, one, just shocked that the Attorney General is threatening to investigate the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and his staffer for doing their constitutional oversight and being professional about it.
And two, why is he yelling at us?
Like, if he has a disagreement, why is this guy screaming?
On top of that, did he just say he's going to subpoena our records, which he did?
He's going to subpoena the United States Congress for what exactly?
So it was just this rant which made no sense, had no basis in fact, and every time he did that, which he did it more than once, we knew our investigation was going in the right direction.
So we kept going.
So there were quite a few articles that came out about you.
Yeah.
Very few flattering ones.
What was the cost of that to you?
Personally, having been a public defender for eight years, I would tell you I had been called far worse by much better.
You just sort of do the job.
The mission matters more than that nonsense.
But what I did care about was I have a huge family.
And a big family name.
And you know, like everybody else, they're proud of their heritage and their community.
And they were using that name to castigate me and my family.
And I just found that profoundly unfair, especially since none of it was true.
Now, what I would piece together later was they were basically doing to me what Fusion GPS, Steele, and the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign did to Trump.
They just basically made stuff up.
And jammed in information that they made up to fit a narrative that they wanted to be true.
With Trump, they wanted him to have colluded with Russia and Putin and rigged the election.
With me, they wanted me to be this evil, untruthful...
At that time, I started getting tied to President Trump, who I'd never met or spoken to, by the way.
And I had just come out of four years out of the Obama administration, being a terrorism prosecutor.
And served in his civilian DOD. I thought it was shocking for them to say I was a partisan after like a couple of months of being on Capitol Hill.
Fascinating.
So you started hearing from family members, hey, what is this?
Well, my family's awesome.
They were just like, hey, we know you're doing great work.
And my family is Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, whatever.
I mean, I'm an Indian American.
I have a massive family.
It's just all around the world.
So they've just been incredibly supportive.
They didn't care what the articles were saying.
They knew me.
And I just felt bad that they had to, you know, read that and I'm sure get pestered with it by folks around the community saying, oh, that's your kid or that's your nephew or you know this guy, you're friends with him.
To be like, oh, look at him.
They call him Torquemada.
You know, that's the guy that killed 10,000 people during the Spanish Inquisition.
So that's unfortunate.
I can take it, but there's no need for them to be put through that.
When we were talking offline, you told me, you know, you're first generation, just like I'm first generation Canadian, you're first generation American.
I'm working on being first generation American, too.
Where did your family come from?
So what's the background?
Yeah, we're obviously Indian Americans, but the quick story is my parents were born and raised in East Africa, my dad in Uganda, my mom in Tanzania, and a couple generations ago, a large swath of the Indian community went to East Africa to work on the railroads for the British, so that's why there's a big population there.
But then Idi Amin came to power in the 70s in Uganda, who was an actual genocidal dictator, and my dad had to flee Uganda, and he went to Toronto first where they were giving visas, so...
A couple years later, I met my mom, they got married, moved down to New York and started a family.
And so why America?
Probably if you ask my father, which I have, he thinks it's literally the greatest place in the world.
And if you ask him why, he was like, well, They were pretty poor growing up in Uganda, really poor.
He was able to flee a genocidal dictator that wanted to kill him and his family and his friends.
He was able to bring his whole family over to Canada and then New York.
And he was basically able to go from zero to putting a family and a house up, which they had never had of their own, And send their kids and family to school, build a community, bring their values over here, fold them over into America's values, and create this really cool experience for us to grow up in.
And he was basically like, where else am I going to do that?
America's the only place you can do it.
Well, it's amazing, because I think you were the first minority person to hold a number of very high-level posts.
Yeah, so I think this will shock people.
One, I spent more time in the Obama administration than I did with Trump, which is just, I think, funny in retrospect.
But I'm the first person of color to run counterterrorism for any White House.
I'm the first person of color to be the number two In the intelligence community at the Office of Director of National Intelligence.
And I'm the first minority to be the Chief of Staff for the Department of Defense.
And that all happened under President Trump.
Dad must be pretty proud at this point.
I think so.
He's been awesome, the whole family, my mom, my dad, and just the extended family.
They don't really get that involved in politics, and so they're not up to speed on a lot of the stuff we work on, but I think they're just My dad is just like, well, where else could you have done this?
You know, like my son is in the Oval Office with the president and I'm at home and I'm getting phone calls from President Trump and my dad thinks that's hilarious and awesome.
Let's jump back to the process of the investigation now.
And so you were going through this process of interviewing all of these various witnesses, and at the same time, you became aware that Fusion GPS had actually paid for the Steele dossier.
This must have been quite the revelation for you.
It took a little bit of time to get there, but what I told Devin was basically, look, Prosecution 101, follow the money.
You know, once we got down the road of this investigation, I was like, Devin, somebody has to fork up money to pay for this stuff, right?
No one's just doing it out of their goodwill.
And so let's follow the money.
And it's got to be a decent amount of money in order to put all this stuff together.
So we had a source who turned us onto a bank.
And basically said, look, you might want to look here and look at their banking transactions to see if there's a connection between Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele and the DNC somehow.
So we started piecing that together.
And that's about the time when I spent the summer convincing Devin to give me a subpoena, which I thought was...
From my background, I was like, just give me a subpoena.
We issued like a thousand a case.
And he's like, Cash, I don't think you understand.
Before you got the House Intel Committee, the committee had issued one subpoena in its history.
And then during my tenure, I think this is right, we issued 17.
It was a big deal.
And this was the first one.
And I sort of learned that as I went.
And we had to go to the speaker.
And get all the approvals and convince them that we were on the right path.
And I basically told Devin, if I'm wrong, you can just fire me.
No big deal.
He gave it to me and we didn't get the results right away.
What we got was Fusion telling us, we're taking you to federal court because we don't want you to have that subpoena power over us.
That's when I knew we had hit it.
But it would be a couple more months of fighting in federal court to actually see the information.
It became clear to me that Cash viewed obstacles as clues.
The greater the resistance, the more he knew he was digging in the right place.
Over the next few months, they would make a number of startling discoveries, Cash said, including the role of Nellie Orr, the wife of high-ranking DOG official Bruce Orr.
She was hired by Fusion GPS to work on the dossier on Trump.
They also figured out the money trail.
The DNC and Clinton campaign paid over $160,000 to Christopher Steele to try to dig up dirt on Trump's ties to Russia through the law firm Perkins Coy and research firm Fusion GPS. And in December 2017, then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe admitted in a closed-door interview, under oath, that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISA court if the Steele dossier had not existed.
And to me, I knew that, but to get him as the deputy director of the FBI to admit that, and that was a classified interview at the time, I was like, okay, there's all this stuff, Devin.
We have got to figure out a way to get this out.
Not at some report in the back end, but let's figure out a way to get it rolling.
And so that's that time period.
And then we get to the Nunes memo in January.
January of 2018.
If all hell hadn't broken loose yet, then really all hell broke loose.
Yeah, then it was game on because we figured out under the rules of the House Intel Committee that there was a way to release classified information if it met certain requirements.
And this material met those requirements while safeguarding sources and methods which we were able to do.
And so while we were quietly running that process, obviously on our side of the investigation, We wanted to make sure that memo was bulletproof.
So all we put in the memo were excerpts from people's under oath interviews and information that we gleaned from the FBI and DOJ's own documents.
It was the only things we put in the Nunes memo because we didn't want it to be something that we put inflamed rhetoric behind.
That's why it reads kind of bland.
But that's how we set it up.
Well, it wasn't treated as bland, however.
Yeah, I guess not.
Actually, I don't think I've ever told anyone this.
So we had this amazing team who had figured out all the legal gymnastics and ethical gymnastics to get us there.
I was just busy sort of writing it with my colleagues.
What I said was, okay, well, let's also be a little strategic about this, because if we write one, they're going to want to write one.
Which is okay, because I said, let's bait them into it.
Let's not tell them yet.
We'll follow the rules and inform them at a committee hearing, which we did.
Then we gave them the memo and they were shocked that we had been working on this thing.
In that same hearing, or the one afterwards, our members rightly so said, you guys write your own memo and we'll vote it out for you too.
And Adam Schiff took the bait and put in so much more information in his memo than we did in ours, because we knew we would be able to use that information later.
And prove how wrong they were.
It would just take a little bit of time.
So that was the strategy behind it.
Fascinating.
So how did you use it?
So just to give you an example, like our memo was maybe four pages.
I think theirs was like 14 with footnotes and all this stuff.
And they would put all this information in there like, how dare you attack Bruce Ohr, you know, who's this DOJ official who had nothing to do with it.
Well, actually you're wrong.
His wife was paid $50,000.
Bruce Ohr turned out to be the cutout for the FBI when they fired Christopher Steele.
So that's just one example of we use the information that they put in their memo against them to show that what they were writing was actually incorrect and we were able to prove it.
And we were able to do that with also the origins of informing the FISA court what had and hadn't been disclosed to them.
And we were able to use a lot of information from there to say that the FISA court, in fact, had not been told of the relationship between Fusion Steel, DNC. Right, because you would think the FISA court might have different thoughts about the evidence.
Well, of course.
The thing you always do with any court, because what I try to tell people is, a FISA court or whatever court, a search warrant's a search warrant.
Give their probable cause.
That's it.
But when you're going after a search warrant based on a source, you have to disclose to the court its credibility and bias.
And the one thing we found that one of those shocking statements that you're just like, you see it in the documents we were finally pulled out of the FBI was Christopher Steele had admitted to the FBI that he had, I forget the exact quote, but basically hated Donald Trump and wanted him not to be president.
That's fine.
You're entitled to that.
But if that's your source, then you need to disclose that statement to the court to say, we're using this source.
This is what he has to say about one of the bigger targets of our investigation.
And then you explain why you still think he's credible anyway.
They didn't do any of that.
They just withheld it.
And then way later on, we would be proven right by the inspector general in his report.
In that report, we learned about at least one Kevin Clinesmith.
Yeah, in the IG report.
Yes.
At this point, Kevin Clinesmith remains the one person who was seen as culpable, at least to some extent, in all of this.
Well, yeah, he's an FBI lawyer who doctored an email and then presented that information to the Fisk.
And that's about as bad as it gets, just so you can convince a court that we need a search warrant.
That's not supposed to happen here in the U.S. system of justice.
We knew that if he had done it, it's not like this guy was a lone wolf, but we weren't the Department of Justice.
We couldn't bring that sort of investigation and prosecution.
We were just hoping that DOJ would act.
So you're saying you don't think he was a lone wolf?
I don't think you can...
Put together the sequence of events that happened and have a Fusion GPS, an Associate Deputy Attorney General in Bruce Ohr at the Justice Department, his wife, the FBI, Christopher Steele, $160,000, $10 million from Perkins Coie, all of that come together in one place.
For the sole purpose of setting up the Trump campaign so it looks like they colluded with Russia to rig a US presidential election.
I don't think one FBI lawyer is capable of doing that on his own.
No.
What do you make of the fact that there is only one person that has been charged or found guilty?
Personally, for someone who worked at DOJ, part of the reason I left was a lack of internal accountability for when prosecutors breach the public trust that they've been bestowed.
The most common example is Brady's violation of exculpatory evidence.
We found that time and again in the Russiagate investigation that the FISA court was not told of exculpatory evidence as it related to multiple individuals involved in that FISA package.
And so it's infuriating to say, how can they do that and ask the American public to trust them to supervise the accountability over the American public, but we can't hold them accountable when they intentionally breach the trust that they were given.
It's unfortunate, and I hope there's more, but I don't know.
Now, former U.S. Attorney Durham still is playing this role of special counsel, looking into the origins of the investigation.
That has not concluded.
I have no insight into the status of that investigation.
I think, personally, that if I was at the DOJ still, there are numerous individuals I would recommend be charged for their behavior during the whole Russiagate investigation.
And I mean individuals who are both in government and also in the private sector.
That's for Durham to decide.
I hope he does because it's the one thing that really separates us from almost the rest of the world is that our ability to hold even our own officials at the highest levels accountable when they break the law.
And I'm hoping we get there.
Cash's story doesn't end with his investigations at the House Intelligence Committee.
He would later head to the White House under Rick Grinnell, when Grinnell was appointed Acting Director of National Intelligence.
While there, Cash pushed forward the declassifications of numerous documents, transcripts, and text messages, so the American public could finally see it all for themselves.
I'd been at the NSC for maybe a year total, At the time they had gotten rid of Dan Coats and then there was an acting DNI in there and they removed him and President Trump named Rick Grinnell acting until John Ratcliffe could be confirmed.
And my good friend Rick Grinnell called me and said, hey, I got the job and I said, I know, we recommended you and we're ecstatic.
And he said, well, there's one condition.
You're coming with me.
And I said, no, I'm not.
I like it here.
And I lost because it was the president and him versus me.
So we joke about that now, but it was a great four months over there at D&I running the IC. And it's very interesting because this is where you actually got to go back to this investigation that you had worked on, right, in the House Committee.
Yeah, talk about, you know, best laid plans.
Me ending up at DNI, overseeing the IC, we were able to do some amazing substantive intelligence community work, which helped advance President Trump's national security agenda.
That was awesome.
We also trimmed the place down because why spend taxpayer dollars on slots that have not been filled in 4,500 days and things like that.
But since we were there, I was like, well, why don't we just...
Do some declass that I know had been hanging over from my time at House Intel, namely the transcripts.
All of our transcripts still hadn't been released yet.
Actually, maybe two of them were released before that, but the rest weren't.
So Rick was like, yeah, let's do it.
But it wasn't just the transcripts that you chose to declassify.
Yeah, so we went back and we knew, I knew that there was a slew of text messages that had yet to be declassified.
There were FBI and DOJ documents that had yet to be declassified or had heavy redactions that we wanted to remove some more of the redactions.
So we were able to get out a lot of documents during that time.
And this is the one thing that...
We were always attacked with, you do this and sources are gonna die.
You're gonna ruin relationships with foreign governments and you're gonna kill the way we look at this target set and we're never gonna be able to do it again.
And shockingly to them, none of that ever happened after any declassification.
All that was shown was embarrassment and malfeasance by individuals working in the government at certain points in time.
So that's why we were fought so hard and continue this fight to this day because every time we peel it back, we show somebody else didn't perform the duty they undertook to do.
So what would you say was the most important declassification at that time?
We can talk about more than one.
Yeah, well, I thought the transcripts were instrumental because the American public could finally read them for themselves and just say, oh, that's what that person said under oath to this line of questioning.
You know, black and white couldn't be easier.
The text messages, I think we got some more detailed text messages between Strzok and Page and that back and forth.
So that was good.
I think we got some of the McCabe memo out, more of the McCabe memo out.
Some of the stuff on the 25th Amendment meeting with Rod Rosenstein, that came out.
So all of these documents came out that we had known about for some time, but people could just now start reading them on their own.
I think those were some of the more important ones.
What do you think Crossfire Hurricane, based on everything that you've gleaned that you can talk about, what do you think it was all about?
I think it started out as someone trying to look into whether or not there was any foul play.
Which I think at the premise of it is what the FBI is supposed to do and the IC is supposed to do.
So I think it's an original origin.
That's probably where it started.
I think where it metastasized to was based very quickly by a select few people was this is the vehicle by which we are going to target a presidential campaign and we're going to allow I
And I think that just crosses so many lines of wrong and illegal behavior that I'm not sure how we ever let it get that far.
From what you know, how many people were actually surveilled?
At least six that I know of.
And I think it was recently disclosed that like, and when you mean surveil, you know, it's all different types of surveillance.
But if we use that term generally, I'd say probably about six.
And I think it was just disclosed that even Sam Clovis was one of the individuals.
And so, you know, I'd known that for three plus years, but we couldn't talk about it.
And I think it would be beneficial to the American public for the FBI to disclose who they surveilled in this Trump orbit and, more importantly, how.
So the lengths they were willing to go just to try to get A narrative to become true, which is never the purpose of an investigation at the Department of Justice.
You're supposed to follow an investigation and see if there's a crime.
You're not supposed to try to come up with a political narrative and have the ends justify the means.
In all of this, along the way, did you ever feel like you're getting in over your head?
No, I don't think we ever thought that we weren't going to be able to rise to the occasion because we had such a great team.
I think many people individually probably felt like, man, this is a lot of work for a few people.
And it was.
I mean, we were there days, nights, holidays, weekends.
I mean, we worked straight through the Christmas break just to get it done because there was no one else to do it.
Partly what we signed up for.
I think if you ask some of my other teammates, they were sort of drafted into it because they were there on the committee and could add value.
But it got tough at times, but we were able to get through.
Do you feel like we're going to get closure?
I mean, when I say we, I mean the American people.
Yeah.
For me, closure is synonymous with accountability.
So we either have that accountability in the form of The only place that can give it, which is a Department of Justice indictment, or we don't.
And I do think it's that binary.
If you want closure in the complete sense, I think that's the way to do it.
Like, look, we got 14 individuals fired, resigned early, or retired early as a result of our investigation on House Intel because of the malfeasance we showed they committed.
And you're talking at the levels of the director of the FBI, the deputy director of the FBI, on down.
So there's some measure of accountability in that from a congressional standpoint because that's what congressional oversight is supposed to do.
But for the American public, and quite frankly me, there's no accountability unless you can exact the same punishments over those that committed this conduct internally as they do to others externally.
So, is this going to happen?
I'm not in charge.
I never was.
And I'm out of government.
So it'd just be a guess.
But I don't know.
I'd say it's 50-50.
There's another realm of accountability it seems like you're pursuing.
You've got a number of defamation lawsuits out.
I mean, at a certain point, you know, you asked me earlier, Jan, what impact it had on me.
And, you know, I'm starting to see some of that impact about the avalanche of articles that were written about me over the last four years.
And that puts you in a light that's not accurate.
And people read this and people being future employers, people in the business community, people in the legal community, people in government.
And over time, that erodes their confidence in me, and falsely so.
So, you know, at a certain point, you've got to fight back.
I mean, if it's one article here and there, and it's, you know, just a little missive, it's one thing.
But if they're challenging the core values that you carried on your profession with, which is being truthful and having accountability and having government answer to the people, then I think you have to fight back.
So that's what I've chosen to do in court.
So in this whole process related to exploring crossfire hurricane investigation, collusion, what not, what was the high moment in this process for you?
When you are able to show some of your investigative hypotheses to be true, you regain a lot of credibility, at least with a certain portion of the public.
And I think that happened when we showed the public the malfeasance with the Steele dossier and the FISA court.
I think we gained even more when we showed that, hey, we were right when we told you Fusion GPS and the DNC and the Hillary campaign funded this thing.
I think we got it right there.
And I also think things like the Nunes memo helped us put a lot of it together.
And ultimately our report.
I think our report, Hipsy's report for the majority at the time of Republicans, is a really impressive document in the abuses that occurred, not only during the presidential election, but how Russia interfered.
And what we can do to better protect ourselves in the future, which is ultimately the goal of this entire process besides accountability, like, let's not have this happen to us again.
So I think we set it up pretty well, but I don't know if anyone's read it.
Certainly some of our reporters have read it.
I haven't read the whole thing, but what's really interesting, you mentioned that the report actually does chronicle how Russia did interfere, which isn't typically what people think of when they think of that report.
We outlined the very specific things that we were tasked to do.
Find out whether Russia interfered, how did they interfere, who were the players, and how do we fix it?
And I think we did a good job addressing those pillars.
What about the low point?
Getting attacked by the media over and over and over again sort of gets old and can't get you down, but you learn to move beyond that.
I think having administration officials threaten to investigate you because you're doing your job and they're not doing theirs is tough.
A low point in the sense that this is going to be hard, but you keep going.
As Devin said, that's when you know you're over the target.
So if you stop then, then no one's going to know.
And you're not doing the job you signed up to do.
There's still a sizable portion of the American public that isn't aware of what happened.
Yeah, that's right.
What are your thoughts about that?
Well, I mean, it's up to, you know, I don't know how, you can't force the American public to read reports and participate in the democratic process, just take an interest in What we're doing on the Hill or what we're doing at DOJ or wherever.
But I think the one good thing to come from this entire Russiagate hoax is it was a big civics lesson for much of the US populace that had never bothered to even know what the difference between the two legislatures in Congress were for.
So I do think a lot more people paid attention and educated themselves on how our system of government works.
And I think that was a good thing.
Do you think, though, that some people might feel a bit disillusioned with it?
Sure.
Yeah.
It's hard not to.
I mean, there's so many people that all you have to do to speak to the other half of the populace that won't acknowledge this happened is flip the script and say, well...
What if the RNC had paid some former foreign national intelligence officer to dig up information on Hillary Clinton and then taken that information and went to the Department of Justice and said, hey, I think they're conspiring with the foreign government.
Let's get a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant on one of Hillary Clinton's campaign staffers or campaign people.
When you put it in that light, it sounds shockingly impossible to happen in the U.S., but that's what happened.
And so sometimes I try to phrase it as that.
And, you know, if people want to be disillusioned with it, that's fine, but we proved it happened.
So to finish off this episode with Kash Patel, I thought that I would actually do it on a bit of a personal note.
We've gotten a lot of mail, both from our viewers and from our readers, that they're feeling a bit disillusioned at this time in history.
I wanted to share a bit of something personal to me.
My father-in-law, my wife's father, survived the Holocaust.
We actually went to Poland and to Germany a few years back.
We took a film crew with us, and he had been invited to talk to some students, some young people, basically, about his experience.
Kind of an amazing, amazing story ensued.
But something about Manny is that he basically went to the US, went to Canada, made it through, and made something really incredible with his life, aside from a beautiful daughter that I'm very grateful for.
He became an entrepreneur.
He became a publicist.
He basically tried to milk every last bit from his life and just had an incredible, incredible life.
We made a film about him, about his experience, how he made it through the Holocaust, and then his attitude, how he communicated with these young people in Poland and Germany, and just in general his philosophy of life.
And I think that's something that might Really, really resonate with all of you out there.
So that's actually playing at the Garden City Film Festival.
It's online.
You can actually look in my Twitter feed.
I have the information there.
And you can also look on findingmanny.com about where to get tickets for that.
So that's next Sunday, the 28th of March at the Garden City Film Festival online.
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