A new Trump administration will come after the media, says Kash Patel

A confidant of Donald J. Trump, who is likely to take on a top national security role in a new Trump administration, threatened on Tuesday to target journalists for prosecution if the former president regains the White House.

The confidante, Kash Patel, who served as Mr. Trump’s counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council and also as chief of staff to the acting Secretary of Defense, made the comments on a podcast hosted by Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, during a discussion about a possible second Trump presidency starting in 2025.

“We will be going out to find the conspirators, not just within the government but also in the media,” Mr Patel said. “Yes, we are going after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig the presidential election – we are going to come after you. Whether it is criminal or civil, we will find out.” He added: “We are actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes that we said we were always guilty of but never did.”

Earlier in the interview, when Mr. Bannon asked whether a new administration would “deliver the goods” to “trigger prosecutions” early in a second term, Mr. Patel noted that the Trump team had a “bank” had “all American patriots,” but he said he did not want to name names “so the radical left media can terrorize them.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Patel, Erica Knight, pointed out that in the same conversation with Mr. Bannon, Mr. Patel said they would “follow the facts and the law.” She also sent The New York Times a statement from Mr. Patel, which said: “When President Trump takes office in 2025, we will prosecute everyone who broke the law and end the weaponized, two-tiered justice system.”

But Mr Trump, who faces 91 charges in four separate cases, has already pledged to use the Justice Department to “go after” his political opponents – signaling that a second Trump term would build on the ways in which opened the investigation into his enemies. during his first term and completely abandoned the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence.

“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Trump said in June.

Mr. Patel was a relatively unknown Capitol Hill staffer in the early days of the Trump administration in 2017, but he became an aggressive defender of Mr. Trump against the investigation into whether the president’s 2016 campaign conspired with the Russians to influence the outcome. Over the next four years, he became one of Trump’s most trusted aides and one of the most powerful national security officials in the federal government.

By the end of 2020, Mr. Trump trusted Mr. Patel so much that he asked Trump only jettisoned this plan after senior officials, including former CIA Director Gina Haspel and former Attorney General William P. Barr, strongly protested the move. Mr. Barr wrote in his memoir that he told Mark Meadows, then the chief of staff, that Mr. Patel becoming deputy FBI director would only happen “over my dead body.”

Over the past three years since he left government, Mr. Patel has capitalized on his fame as a Trump insider. He has sold “Kash” merchandise in an online store and written a children’s book about the Russia investigation in which a “King Donald” is persecuted by an evil “Hillary Queenton.” The hero of the story is a wizard named “Kash” who uncovers a conspiracy to take down King Donald. Mr. Trump declared that he wanted to “put this great book in every school in America.”

Mr Patel did that himself filed a lawsuit for defamation against The New York Times, CNN and Politico. And since he left the government, he has… fundraising entity to “fight the deep state” and fund lawsuits on behalf of “ordinary Americans” who he says have been “offended” by what he calls “the fake news mafia.”

Mr. Patel’s threats against the news media echo Mr. Trump’s own warnings.

In a Truth Social Post in September, the former president wrote: “I say openly and proudly that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others at the LameStream Media will be scrutinized for their deliberately dishonest and corrupt reporting of people, things and events.” He added: “Why should NBC, or any other corrupt and dishonest media company, have the right to use the US’s highly valuable airwaves for FREE?”

In the same message, Mr. Trump wrote that “Comcast, with its one-sided and brutal reporting by NBC NEWS, and especially MSNBC,” “must be investigated for its ‘country-threatening treason’.”

Earlier this year, Mr. Trump recorded a video for his campaign website in which he promised that in a second term he would return the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadcast licenses, “under presidential authority as the Constitution requires.”

A spokesman for Mr. Trump, Steven Cheung, was asked whether the former president disavowed Mr. Patel’s comments. Mr Cheung did not answer the question directly, but instead referred to a recent audience rack from Mr. Trump’s top two campaign advisers that said: “Any personnel lists, policy agendas or government plans published anywhere are suggestions only. Likewise, any 2024 campaign policy announcements will be made by President Trump or members of his campaign team. Policy recommendations from external allies are just that: recommendations.”

Mr. Patel is among a small number of former senior national security officials from Mr. Trump’s first term who have remained close to him. He was appointed by Mr. Trump in June 2022 as one of his representatives to interact with the National Archives, whose officials had spent months over the past year trying to retrieve stacks of presidential documents that had left the White House when Mr. Trump did. including classified material.

Mr. Patel told Breitbart News during a 2022 interview that he had been present when Mr. Trump released documents before leaving office.

That interview attracted the interest of federal investigators, who in May 2022 subpoenaed any remaining classified documents that he had not turned over. Three months later, the FBI executed a search warrant to locate additional classified material at Trump’s Palm Beach club, Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Trump’s office claimed shortly after the club’s search that he, as president, had set up a standing order under which materials leaving the Oval Office for the White House residence were considered declassified.

Several former senior officials, including former Vice President Mike Pence, said they were unaware of such an order.

Despite Trump’s obsession with reporting and his need to stay in the headlines, which dates back to the 1980s, he has become increasingly threatening to the press throughout his life, especially since the start of his political campaigns in 2015.

He has talked about changing defamation laws to make it easier to sue over coverage. He repeatedly encouraged the crowds at his rallies to antagonize the reporters who had gathered in the back to cover the events. Once in power, he began publicly calling the press “the enemy of the people,” language that despots worldwide often use to justify crackdowns on the press.

He was obsessed with leaks. He wanted aides to intervene in the merger between AT&T and CNN, which he was watching closely. And he told advisers he wanted officials to obtain phone records from a journalist who covered him, a request that apparently was never fulfilled.

But Mr Trump suggests there will be results next time.

“They are a real threat to democracy and are in fact THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” Mr. Trump wrote in September about Truth Social. “The Fake News Media should pay a high price for what they did to our once great country!”