Since Tim Miller posted it, I haven’t been able to stop looking at Kash Patel’s enemies list.
It’s not that Kash has an enemies list — though that’s an alarming accessory in an FBI nominee.
It’s the nature of the list, both the physical nature of it, but also its composition (the latter of which Philip Bump also discussed).
First, it’s dated — even more dated than it probably had to be for its September 2023 publication date. The most recent villain on the list may be Cassidy Hutchinson, who became a villain in June 2022. Jay Bratt, who became a personal villain to Kash when compelling his testimony in Trump’s stolen documents case no later than November 2022, is not on the list. Nina Jankowicz is on the list. She became a villain around the same time Hutchinson did: when the Biden Administration briefly tried to do something about disinformation until right wingers misrepresented some things she had said about Christopher Steele and the Hunter Biden laptop, which led her to resign and the effort to crash by July 2022. The description of James Baker as the former Deputy General Counsel of Twitter reflects Elon Musk’s firing of him for trying to maintain the privacy of records from Matt Taibbi et al; but Baker may be there as one of Kash’s Durham villains, because other Twitter File villains — most notably Yoel Roth — don’t appear on the list, nor any of the other disinformation experts who’ve been targeted non-stop since the Twitter Files.
Then there are the organizational characteristics. Hutchinson, like Michael Atkinson and Joe Biden, above, as well as Jim Comey, Crossfire Hurricane FBI Agent Curtis Heide, have bullets betraying some formatting problem, as if Kash added a bunch of people to an existing list. “Oh, and that Joe Biden guy! He’s a villain too!” as if he had to delay admitting that Biden was actually President (though Kamala Harris’ bullet is formatted like everyone else’s).
That’s not Kash’s most serious organizational problem. He claims the list is “alphabetical by last name.” But Joe Biden, with his funny bullet, comes after Stephen Boyd. Heide, another funny bullet, comes after Fiona Hill. Charles Kupperman comes after Loretta Lynch. And Alexander Vindman appears between Andrew Weissmann and Christopher Wray.
How are you going to systematically work through your enemies list if you can’t even alphabetize them properly?
Finally, Kash notes that his list is not exhaustive:
It does not include other corrupt actors of the first order such as … members of Fusion GPS or Perkins Coie…
But he’s wrong about that. The list includes Nellie Ohr primarily because she was an “Independent Contract [sic] for Fusion GPS.” And it includes Michael Sussmann as a “former partner at Perkins Coie.” The only other worthy villain for someone like Kash who had been at Perkins Coie — Republican nemesis Marc Elias — left Perkins Coie even before Sussmann did.
This list evinces a mind that struggles with basic structures, not an evil mastermind ready to hit the ground running.
That doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.
The fact that this sloppily organized list is two years old suggests one of the problems with attempting to forestall Trump and Kash’s vengeance by pardoning the people on the existing enemies list. These are yesterday’s enemies, and Trump’s minions have no limit on their ability to find new ones.
Just yesterday, after all, Kash demonstrated the point. Jesse Binnall threatened to sue Olivia Troye for calling Kash a liar.
On December 2, 2024, you appeared as a live guest on MSNBC and made several false and defamatory statements about Mr. Patel. These comments include that Mr. Patel would “lie about intelligence” and would “lie about making things up on operations” to the point where Mr. Patel “put the lives of Navy Seals at risk when it came to Nigeria,” and that Mr. Patel was even misinforming Vice President Mike Pence.
This is a complete fabrication, and you know it is false by virtue of your former position in the White House.
Mark Zaid, who is already representing Troye in a lawsuit filed by Ric Grenell, has a fundraiser to support what is no doubt going to be booming business going ahead.
On the one hand, this demonstrates that Kash will simply add new enemies to an ever evolving mis-alphabetized list, targeting each new person who tells the truth about him. Like the campaigns targeting disinformation that didn’t make Kash’s book, this assault on enemies is an assault on the truth.
Those not on a list focused on Crossfire Hurricane and Trump’s first impeachment are not safe.
Nor can criminal pardons protect targets (and in some ways would be counterproductive) in the face of efforts to harass critics, because these people will sue make-believe cows just to harass a critic.
At the same time, consider how stupid it is to target Troye in this way if you’re an aspiring J Edgar Hoover. In two months, Kash may well have the ability to target Troye with government sanction. Instead of waiting, Troye’s comments will benefit from the Streisand Effect. Since she stands by her claims, Troye may get more opportunities to explain how Kash lied to Mike Pence, to the press, and possibly even to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Plus, there are at least a few Republican Senators who likely know and trust Troye more than they do Kash, so he has added surface area for attack in his own confirmation process.
And if Kash tries to target Troye if and when he does have the power to do so legally, it’ll be an immediate red flag for judges that the FBI — the entire FBI — is not to be trusted.
Don’t get me wrong. If Kash can get confirmed, he’ll supervise 35,000 people, almost all of whom would be able to alphabetize his enemies list and a good chunk of whom would be able — even with FBI’s notoriously archaic computer systems — to automate them. That’s what they do. That’s the danger of putting a guy with an enemies list in charge of the Bureau.
But there’s so much about this list that betrays a guy obsessed with reliving his best moment, a guy who used Congress’ oversight infrastructure to trick the world into supplanting the real Russian investigation with the Steele dossier.
Back in his heyday, Kash’s Nunes memo served simply to project, to obscure the legitimate basis for the Russian investigation. Kash succeeded in telling the origin myth Trump needed from which he has spun all the polarization that followed.
But now, he’s just playing a frantic whack-a-mole, striking at anything or anyone that might speak the truth.
That’s incredibly dangerous. The arbitrary nature is, itself, part of the intended terror.
But it’s also the cry of a guy who doesn’t understand what he’s looking at.
Update: This description of Kash’s book (which I’m hoping to avoid reading) is utterly consistent with this enemies list.
But a truth starts to dawn as Patel unleashes on the FBI: He doesn’t know a lot about it. He hasn’t worked in it, experiencing it only at arms length as an aide of Nunes’s, and viewing it through a prism of deceit of his own choosing.
That is, Kash has to invent a Deep State, but it bears little resemblance to the real thing.
Update: After standing by her comments, Troye offers to testify at Kash’s confirmation hearing.