A thirsty Patel juices FBI stats — and DOJ gets Watergate wrong

Two Justice Department nuggets that I want to mention today — two nuggets that may, at first glance, seem both quotidian, even silly, but that together offer an important warning about the coming months:

1. Kash Patel Juices the Stats?

First, here’s the strangest scandal to emerge from newly engaged Kash Patel’s FBI. (Stranger, you might wonder, than the scandals about the customized bottle of bourbon? Okay, maybe not.) But it’s still quite weird: is Patel juicing the arrest stats of the Ten Most Wanted?

On Friday, the Justice Department blasted out a press release about how an alleged Venezuelan Tren de Aragua cybercriminal appeared in court in Nebraska after being apprehended overseas. FBI director Patel, fresh off his latest turn of scandals, bragged that the arrest of Anibal Alexander Canelon Aguirre, the 540th individual added to the bureau’s historic “Top 10 Most Wanted Fugitives” list, itself marked a significant milestone in the FBI’s 110-year war on crime: “Since the start of the Trump administration, we’ve captured TEN of the Top Ten Most Wanted, 2.5 times the number of TMW [the Ten Most Wanted] fugitives captured during the previous four years combined.”

But the arrest also renewed suspicions that Patel is manipulating the Ten Most Wanted list. Traditionally, the “Most Wanted” list has been used to build public awareness, build political pressure on fugitives overseas, or highlight specific threats. Now Patel seems to be featuring fugitives whose arrest is imminent.

Earlier this year, MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian reported that the bureau appeared to be adding fugitives that the FBI had already located or were close to locating. Writing in May, they calculated, “Of the six fugitives caught since Patel was sworn, four were seized within a month of the FBI leadership elevating them to the top of the Ten Most Wanted list. Two of those four were grabbed within 24 hours of being added to the list, according to the FBI.” In one particularly eyebrow-raising case, a fugitive “was apprehended in Culiacán, Mexico, in March, just one hour and 13 minutes after FBI leadership placed him on the Most Wanted list,” meaning that the operation to arrest him had been in the works for days before. Another was added less than a day before she was arrested, again indicating that the plan to arrest her was well underway before the paperwork cleared the Hoover Building.

“They are literally just nominating people they’re about to arrest or that they have solid information on and can affect arrest,” one FBI official told MS NOW. “Gone are the days of nominating the worst of the worst and fugitives that we haven’t been able to find.”

The Ten Most Wanted has long been more what one might call a “statement of priorities” than a ranked list of the ten worst criminal fugitives. Today’s list is a strange and sad mélange of drug dealers, murderers, and fraudsters. Osama bin Laden was added to the list in the summer of 1999, more than two years before the 9/11 plot, and long sat alongside on the list Russian mafia leader Semion Mogilevich, who was living openly in Russia at the time.

If past is prologue, I’d be real careful if I were Satinderjeet Singh, a racketeer added last week to the Ten Most Wanted list — I’d assume that means that the FBI arrest team was already lining up in my hallway outside.

Yet Patel’s need to apparently juice the stats shows just how he thirsty he remains, how desperate he is amid his million scandals and embarrassments to remain in Trump’s favor. His Twitter feed is just an endless scroll of self-congratulatory posts and strange stat-filled graphics championing how tireless his personal efforts have been. My recent favorite, from last week, is about how he calls people overseas more often than his predecessor. No, really:

Like, really, who cares? Posts like this make Kash Patel out to be the worst “Inbox Zero” middle manager of your career — the type of person who writes down items on his daily to-do list just to cross them off and then brags to the team about how many emails he’s answered and Zoom meetings he’s participated in. Imagine being a fully-grown mid-career adult (Patel is 46), someone who on paper even has even achieved meaningful career success and power, and bragging to literally anyone about how many phone calls you’ve made in your job.

The idea that this brag almost surely involved government staff, career FBI personnel, counting up his telephone calls and then tallying Chris Wray’s telephone calls and then building a graphic about said details on taxpayer-paid work hours is even more insane.

It is, though, all sadly consistent with a man so crushingly insecure that he wouldn’t let his aides talk him out of responding on Twitter to a bot that called him a retard.

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2. What the Justice Department Doesn’t Get About Watergate

Second, as if Todd Blanche’s modern Justice Department wasn’t doing enough to undermine law and order in our time, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday that it was now entertaining the idea that somehow Richard Nixon was unfairly targeted and maligned as president amid his umbrella of the Watergate scandal.

I wrote in June about the latest era of rehabbing Richard Nixon’s image and the growing obsession and power inside Trumpworld of the idea that “Nixon was wronged.”

Now it appears that the Justice Department is giving official thought to the idea: Researcher Geoff Shepard, who has written three conspiracy-filled books on Watergate, including one that the whole thing was an effort to make Ted Kennedy president, gave a two-hour presentation, including 78-page slide deck, to the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility about how Nixon and his fellow targets were targeted unfairly and mistreated by prosecutors. Shepherd’s presentation was called “Watergate As Lawfare.”

Shepard, whose research I went over when I was writing my own book and who boasts of his own heartwarming encounter with Nixon at a scholarship luncheon in college, has become one of the leading voices of the movement of “Watergate revisionism,” a foolhardy view that broadly holds a mostly innocent Nixon was betrayed by insiders around him.

Much of the recent revisionism around Watergate equates the “persecution” of Trump, and his many many many crimes, with the idea that somehow Nixon was also targeted by a “Deep State plot.” It’s clearly based on (a) a wildly simplistic and misguided understanding of what Watergate “was”; (b) a desire to hand-wave away both Donald Trump’s egregious corruption, abuse of office, and conspiracies to hold onto power and persecute his enemies; as well as (c) to promote the idea that presidents deserve to be above the law.

The latest DOJ interest seems heading toward some official apology or rebuke of the past prosecution, presumably as a way to excuse Trump’s behavior today and make clear how the Deep State has always wrongly persecuted presidents.

It’s all wrong — both historically and in the modern-day.

The WSJ wrote, “Mainstream scholars have long concluded that Watergate generated a genuine constitutional crisis and that Nixon, not those who investigated him, was guilty of a malfeasance which not only doomed his presidency but also led to overhauls that significantly curtailed executive power.”

Count me in the mainstream.

As the author of what I’d like to believe is the definitive “mainstream” account of the scandal, I think it’s worth remembering the full arc of Watergate and how it was much more than a burglary. I think most Americans still misremember, wrongly, that the whole prosecution was the burglary itself — if you ask the average American they’d probably tell you that the only people prosecuted were the burglars.

In reality, 69 people were indicted or charged with crimes stemming from the Watergate prosecutions — and 48 of those in the end pleaded guilty or were found guilty at trial. As I summarized the full scope in my book:

It was the largest, most egregious and far-reaching scandal in American presidential history — until the current era we’re all living through.

To me, the scandal worth focusing on now isn’t the events of Watergate or the reaction and reforms thereafter. The scandal we need to focus on as a country is that we didn’t engage in a similar post-Watergate era of robust reforms and oversight mechanisms after the first Trump administration. Had we been more aggressive in those post-Trump prosecutions, congressional and democracy reforms, we might have been able to prevent this second, increasingly unrepairable debacle.

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Now it would be easy to think these two scandals — Kash Patel’s thirsty stat obsession and DOJ’s embrace of Nixon era conspiracism — are unrelated stories, just tiny pictures into the day-to-day corruption and misguided antics of the Trump administration two years in.

Yet to me they are very much the SAME story — the story of one of the most important corners of the US government, one that all Americans rely on daily both to protect us from criminal and terrorist threats but also to safeguard our privacy and civil liberties, has been corrupted by being led by the President’s own personal defense attorney and operate not as if it’s the government’s law firm, but as if it has but a single client: Donald Trump himself. Kash Patel knows that to keep his job, he must keep Donald Trump happy. Justice Department staff recognize that embracing Trump’s brain-melting conspiracies and persecution complex is critical to pleasing their boss, the attorney general, and thus the president.

It would be easy to write off Patel’s thirst as a punchline, except that The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick reminded us Friday too of the stakes: A month out from the midterms, Patel seems determined to stir up trouble and please his boss by entertaining conspiracies about the elections. As she asked: “Is There Anything Kash Patel Won’t Do for Trump Before the Midterms?” Her underlying article then makes clear how thirstily Patel is trying to make hay out of Trump’s incorrect and false election conspiracies — and how he’s overpromising on what he can deliver arrests-wise and evidence-wise. After all, this is the guy who bragged for years about wanting to release the Epstein Files — and then has stonewalled releasing them time and again in office, so much so that it basically drove his fellow MAGA podcaster Dan Bongino to quit as his deputy director.

The reporting about Watergate makes clear that it’s a broader question than that too: Is there any hoax, conspiracy, or fabricated evidence that won’t meet the bar of Todd Blanche’s Justice Department? As we enter the final weeks of a very high-stakes, high-tension election — one where Americans are already voting today — it’s deeply worrisome that the primary threat actor we need to protect against is our own Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security.

Similarly, it’s an astounding realization to understand that we’re living in an era where the Justice Department under John Mitchell — Nixon’s campaign manager, architect of Watergate era dirty tricks, and the first former U.S. Attorney General to be convicted of a crime and serve time in federal prison — probably ran a cleaner, less corrupt, less personally subservient Justice Department than Todd Blanche.

GMG

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