Rampant FBI misconduct, election fraud, the deep state. Such had been the weekly matters on “Kash’s Corner,” the eponymous on-line present hosted by President-elect Donald Trump’s decide to steer the FBI.
From 2021 to 2023, Kash Patel made content material for The Epoch Times, a information group identified for its far-right conspiracy theories, its affiliation with a Chinese dissident non secular group, and, since June, a sprawling multimillion-dollar money laundering scheme allegedly perpetrated by one in all its prime executives.
NBC News reviewed 79 episodes totaling over 45 hours of content material that includes Patel and his co-host, Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek, neither of whom is accused within the federal case. Together, they spun detailed however unfounded claims of conspiracies involving authorities officers, regulation enforcement businesses, the media and tech corporations, amongst others, all aiming to rig elections, silence conservative voices and undermine Trump’s presidency and re-election.
Billed as a present the place the previous deputy director of nationwide intelligence would “break down the most important problems with our day, from the origins of Covid-19 to the politicization of the intelligence group,” “Kash’s Corner” supplied commentary on the information, usually with a conspiratorial flourish.
The present, out there solely to Epoch Times subscribers, may obtain recent scrutiny as Patel faces Senate affirmation hearings. His lack of expertise, his promotion of politically motivated conspiracy theories in a guide vilifying the FBI, and his public remarks promising to “come after” judges, attorneys and the media concerned in Trump’s many authorized investigations are additionally likely subjects.
It wasn’t simply his namesake present. Patel was a relentless contributor throughout Epoch Times properties, showing on different exhibits, on the sister tv community NTDTV, and within the outlet’s Jan. 6 documentary. The final “Kash’s Corner” dropped in August 2023 with an announcement that Patel can be showing on different exhibits and that the “Corner” can be again after the election.
The particulars of Patel’s contract with The Epoch Times aren’t identified. (Financial disclosure forms filed by discuss radio and Epoch Times host Larry Elder throughout a failed presidential run confirmed the corporate paid between $1 million and $5 million for the same present.) A consultant for Patel declined to remark.
Jekielek and The Epoch Times didn’t reply to requests for remark. In a June statement on the cash laundering allegations, The Epoch Times stated it “intends to and can absolutely cooperate with any investigation coping with the allegations,” and famous that its chief monetary officer, Bill Guan, had been suspended “till this matter is resolved.”
Turning the ‘Corner’
“Kash’s Corner” debuted in the summertime of 2021, when after years of more and more highly effective roles inside Trump’s nationwide safety businesses, the previous federal prosecutor was out of a full-time job following his boss’ election loss.
That January, he started consulting for Trump’s Save America PAC, which devoted most of its spending to the ex-president’s authorized payments. (Patel ultimately earned $325,000 for the job.) In April, he began “fundraising consulting” for the marketing campaign committee Friends of Matt Gaetz, pulling in $145,000 that yr, following news that the far-right congressman was the topic of an underage sex-trafficking investigation (Gaetz has denied the allegations and no costs had been introduced). Patel additionally arrange a web site, Fight for Kash, the place he solicited donations for undefined authorized efforts that promised to “strike a serious blow to the far-Left media and Big Tech!”
It was a consequential second for The Epoch Times, too. After years of struggling, the once-fringe newspaper powered by Falun Gong, a non secular group persecuted in China, had lastly discovered a foothold in conservative media. The firm had spent a small fortune on pro-Trump advertisements within the run-up to 2020 and was amassing a windfall within the wake of Trump’s loss, rising income by a staggering 685% over two years, to $122 million in 2021 — income that will later come underneath federal scrutiny. Executives and editors credited its success to subscriptions pushed by their editorial imaginative and prescient, which they stated supplied a counterbalance to mainstream media, with reviews downplaying the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, denying local weather change and fearmongering about vaccines.
Patel, a major force behind an effort to undercut the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference within the 2016 election, made sense for The Epoch Times, an outlet that had grown its viewers partially by exposing what it dubbed “Spygate,” a disproven conspiracy concept alleging President Barack Obama had spied on Trump’s 2016 marketing campaign as a part of an intricate plot to meddle with the election and tar the incoming president with scandal. In one episode of “Kash’s Corner,” Patel called The Epoch Times’ intricate chart laying out the conspiracy concept, together with purple strings, “one of the best one ever created in historical past.”
In March 2021, Jekielek first interviewed Patel for an “Inside Story of How Spygate Was Uncovered” edition of his show, “American Thought Leaders.” By April, Patel had a present of his personal.
A.J. Bauer, an assistant professor of journalism on the University of Alabama who research conservative media, stated Patel introduced a shared worldview and White House credentials that lent an air of authority to claims which might be often solely discovered on the fringes.
“I feel it was circumstance and dovetailing ideology round conspiracism and the notion of a deep state out to get Trump” that landed Patel at The Epoch Times, Bauer stated. “And I think about that Kash — sorry for the unhealthy pun — introduced cache.”
Fraud allegations
Patel joined The Epoch Times because it seemed to be among the many most profitable media upstarts within the U.S., surging at a time whereas many different retailers had been struggling to construct an viewers or flip a revenue.
The firm stated it was earning profits by means of subscriptions and donations, claims that federal prosecutors now say had been false.
According to an indictment unsealed in June, Guan, The Epoch Times’ chief monetary officer, oversaw a gaggle inside the firm’s Vietnam workplace referred to as the “Make Money Online” workforce. Allegedly, the workforce used cryptocurrency to purchase stolen funds, together with debit playing cards loaded with fraudulent unemployment advantages, at a reduction, after which funneled the laundered cash into Guan’s and The Epoch Times’ financial institution accounts. Guan has pleaded not responsible and is awaiting trial.
Prosecutors declare the alleged cash laundering scheme netted the group some $67 million.
There’s no cause to imagine that Patel, Jekielek or anybody else within the newsroom was conscious of any alleged fraud.
It’s unclear if or how the FBI was concerned within the investigation, whether or not and the way it might be sooner or later, and the way having a former Epoch Times content material creator as director of the company would possibly have an effect on any investigation going ahead.
The initial press release famous the fees in opposition to Guan had been the results of a joint investigation between the Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General and the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, together with “regulation enforcement companions.” The prosecution is a part of an operation by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces centered on “dismantling high-level felony organizations.” The FBI is a member company.
A spokesperson for the FBI referred questions in regards to the investigation to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Public affairs chief Nicholas Biase declined to remark.
‘Just the start’
If Patel supplied legitimacy to The Epoch Times’ short-on-substance claims and connections to Trump that culminated in a 2022 Mar-a-Lago interview with the previous president, he additionally introduced a firebrand persona who was snug courting fringe audiences.
Patel grew to become a frequent visitor on Steve Bannon’s “Real America’s Voice” present, the place he promoted his books and Trump-themed merch, and made his most controversial statements, together with an appearance last year the place he imagined what he would possibly do with federal energy: “We’re going to come back after the folks within the media who lied about American residents, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” he stated. He certified these remarks final yr, telling NBC News that he solely supposed to pursue those that had damaged the regulation.
Things had been slower over at “Kash’s Corner,” much less self-promotional and extra cerebral, the place he had greater than half an hour to put out his model of the world. Most exhibits ran between 30 and 40 minutes.
On the FBI, Patel stated it wanted “an enormous overhaul,” charged its management with “going after political targets” and placing “the regulation second,” and praised three FBI agents who had been stripped of their security clearances and been placed on go away for both being on the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 or sharing conspiracy theories in regards to the assault afterward. (Patel’s basis also provided “grants” of unknown dimension to these ex-agents.)
“We’ve confirmed the illegitimacy of the FBI and its actions,” he stated in December 2022, falsely citing “Russiagate” and Hunter Biden’s laptop computer as proof the FBI has been “fully politicized.”
Later that month, he steered the FBI was a part of a Big Tech conspiracy to censor Americans and promoted a debunked theory that the FBI paid Twitter to censor conservatives as a part of “the most important disinformation marketing campaign to rig a presidential election.”
“This is only the start, and if anybody thinks that it was a one-off, they’re fully mistaken,” he stated. “What, is the FBI going to come back round and say, ‘Now, oh, we had been simply spending authorities {dollars} to assist safeguard a nation’? I imply, that’s going to be the epithet they arrive again with, however we now know the true nature of their corrupt methods.”
Patel usually invoked what he labeled a “two-tiered” justice system. “The FBI and DOJ [are] politicizing targets and manufacturing crimes. They’re principally saying, present me the person and I’ll present you the crime,” he stated on a 2022 show.
In another 2022 episode, Patel voiced his issues about what he termed the FBI’s “confidential human supply corruption cover-up community.” He claimed the company used confidential sources in the course of the Jan. 6 riots for political functions, asking whether or not rioters had been goaded by brokers to commit crimes and questioning the associated convictions. Did “these confidential human sources interact people who find themselves not going to conduct felony exercise and persuade them to take action? That is the definition of entrapment, which is prohibited, and you may’t cost somebody who’s been entrapped.”
The perception that confidential FBI sources contributed to the violence on Jan. 6 or that the company arrange rioters is an unfounded, but persistent one. “Any suggestion that the violence on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was orchestrated by the FBI is categorically false,” the FBI stated in a statement to Politifact this yr.
Patel steered a selected answer: for Congress to make use of the ability of subpoena to uncover crimes and conspiracies by way of “a Church Commission,” much like the 1975 congressional investigation into federal intelligence businesses.
“I don’t see how Americans can have any religion on this FBI anymore,” he said in December 2022. “It’s going to take a serious overhaul from these guys in Congress when the gavels flipped to conduct some rigorous oversight, but additionally to retool the FBI and DOJ, so it really has credibility once more. But that’s going to be a multiyear carry.”
As for who needs to be investigated first, Patel steered in January that it’s Dr. Anthony Fauci, the previous director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a doctor and immunologist who has develop into a serious goal of Covid-era conspiracy theories.
“Fauci, I suppose, is the one-word identify you can say is deserving of a whole investigation,” he stated.
Trump’s authorized woes had been a well-liked topic, too. In a number of episodes final yr, Patel repeatedly framed a number of civil and felony circumstances in opposition to Trump as politically motivated and with out advantage, together with the Stormy Daniels hush money case (“That’s not a criminal offense”); the classified documents case (“When you’re president and you permit, you may take no matter you need”); the E. Jean Carroll case (“Basically, a jury disregards the details and the regulation and bases a call on emotion alone.”); and the federal indictment accusing Trump of conspiring to overturn the election (“The criminalization of thought and free speech.”).
Complicit in almost each scheme, in accordance with Patel, was the media.
“There’s an entire lot of individuals on the market simply considering, ‘What can I imagine?’” Jekielek stated in a 2022 present. “It’s onerous,” Patel replied. “What they need to imagine is Epoch Times, however I’m biased.”
