Below is an excerpt from Kash Patel’s book Government Gangsters from Post Hill Press
Chapter 3 – When Politics Obstructs Justice
The federal bureaucracy is rotten at the top because senior leadership thinks government exists for the glorification of their own egos and forgets government service exists for the benefit of the American people. The Deep State is really just a collection of unaccountable bad actors at the highest levels of the federal bureaucracy, the media, elected office, corporations, and cultural institutions, who abuse the power they have been given and the institutions they were hired to serve in order to protect themselves and manipulate politics in their favor. And they are aided and abetted by staff in the government who are either in on the game or too afraid to speak up. I regularly used to tell people that the fastest way to move up in the government is to just screw up, and the bigger the screwup, the bigger the promotion. Every person implicated in your mistakes has an interest in covering up what they did, so they will promote you. That means the people at the very top are usually the most immoral, unethical people in the entire agency. As I learned, this corruption has been present within the DoJ for years. But recently, it reached unbelievable levels.
When we understand exactly how the rot has spread and manifested itself, we can craft reforms that address the particular problems within the DoJ. Our goal is not to destroy federal law enforcement. It’s to stop federal law enforcement powers from being abused for corrupt ends. When we do that, we get one step closer to restoring a government that serves the people as the ultimate sovereign in our nation.
Endemic Corruption in the DOJ
One of the main sins of a politicized DoJ is selective prosecutions. For example, in 2021 the Department of Justice charged former Trump advisor Steven Bannon with criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to go along with the Democrat’s sham January 6th committee. Meanwhile, former Obama CIA director John Brennan lied to Congress about the CIA’s efforts to spy on congressional staffers, and former Obama director of national intelligence James Clapper likewise lied to Congress saying there were no National Security Agency (NSA) programs collecting data on Americans. Neither of them has ever been charged for perjury, and they probably never will be. Welcome to the two-tier system of justice in modern-day America. I never thought I’d see it, but as I discovered, now it operates everywhere.
Similarly, the Department of Justice has thus far refused to bring charges against President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, despite his well-documented influence peddling deals with nefarious foreign governments, not to mention his illegal possession of drugs and guns. Yet January 6th protestors are locked up, denied bail, and kept in disgusting conditions, often while being charged with minor criminal offenses. This has now gone on for two years. What we are witnessing is the total corruption of due process. How is it that illegal aliens coming into the country can commit heinous acts of violence and immediately be given bond, but Americans who entered the Capitol on January 6th are denied the same? For our Deep State regime, justice is clearly no longer blind. Prosecutorial decisions are now political decisions.
And frequently enemies of the Deep State are targeted even if they didn’t commit any crimes at all. The media—fed lies by government leakers—reported that I could have been under investigation for improperly disclosing classified information. The source of this attack was shameless Deep State mouthpiece David Ignatius, a columnist for the Washington Post. His original article on the purported “scandal” surrounding me was the definition of disinformation. His sources were two possible anonymous individuals who refused to give their names because they knew they were spouting lies. Meanwhile, Ignatius’s article was written with carefully crafted verbiage—a perceptive reader would see that Ignatius made no actual definitive fact claims but was really just spreading rumors in official sounding language. Only a close reader would see that the “investigation” was really just a theoretical claim. Everyone else would just read the headlines shouting, “Kash Patel under investigation,” and presume the worst.
In a later piece, Ignatius followed up his original smear, reaching out to me for comment about the status of the “investigation.” I told him that he could write the truth—that he made it up out of whole cloth and that the so-called investigation never began. Of course, he didn’t write that. That wouldn’t have helped his narrative. Instead of correcting the record, he allowed the disinformation campaign he started to spread.
The truth is there was no investigation into my handling of classified documents because I did everything by the book while in Washington. Not only that, but if such an investigation really did exist, it would be a clear example of the two-tiered justice system in America, because the Justice Department did absolutely NOTHING to prosecute the near daily leakers of classified information in the Trump administration—leakers that not only damaged the Trump presidency but harmed American national security. Regardless, the Ignatius piece worked exactly as planned. The rest of the fake news media mafia, ultimately fed by Deep State anonymous rubes, smeared my name relentlessly without any consequences.
Why did they target me? Because, as I’ll discuss in the next section, I successfully uncovered the corruption of the FBI and DoJ when I led the Russia Gate investigation on the Hill. I learned that when you go after government corruption, you must be prepared to have your reputation destroyed by the fake news mafia and the corrupt Deep Staters in government. They will do anything to stop you. But I don’t bend the knee. Too bad for them.
I’m not the only law-abiding person the Department of Justice has turned on. In an effort to demonize the over seventy million Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2020, President Biden has repeatedly slandered our own citizens as white supremacists and racists. The Department of Justice took that one step further. Under President Biden, the Justice Department targeted parents who are pushing back against programs to teach their children vile and hateful critical race theory. The DoJ justified its threatening campaign against parents in a memo that labelled these law-abiding citizens as “domestic terrorists.” I literally used to prosecute actual domestic terrorists, and now they put parents in the same category because they disagreed with the education platform the Biden administration was forcing on our youth.
It’s increasingly clear that while leadership at the Department of Justice had no problem letting al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists off the hook, they consider American citizens the real terrorists and enemies.
Reforming the DoJ
When presented with such monumental levels of corruption within the federal government, it’s tempting to want to just tear it all down. However satisfying that might be, it would also do more harm than good. We can see this clearly at the DoJ. America needs a Department of Justice. The government should have a team of lawyers that can prosecute people who violate federal law and bring them to justice, whether that’s drug traffickers, terrorists, or corrupt federal officials who abuse their power. But the DoJ also needs a massive overhaul.
The problem isn’t that we have a Department of Justice. It’s not even necessarily that the laws we have are bad (though some certainly are). The biggest problem is that the law is selectively applied. When it comes to political allies, left-wing radicals at the DoJ play with kid gloves, refusing to prosecute or even proactively trying to absolve their friends of crimes. Yet their political opponents are prosecuted and harassed to the greatest extent of the law and even far beyond the law—even when they’ve done nothing wrong.
The DoJ desperately needs a comprehensive housecleaning, and that starts at the top. First, we need an attorney general who will take on his own staff and put an end to abuses of prosecutorial discretion. Laws should be applied fairly and equally to all. Right now, they are applied selectively based heavily on politics.
Hillary Clinton is proactively absolved from prosecution while President Trump is hounded for years by the illegitimate Mueller Special Counsel based on fabricated claims. Antifa terrorists who lay siege to a federal courthouse in Portland are ignored or let go with a slap on the wrist. Staffers for TV personality Steven Colbert were arrested while trespassing at the Capitol, yet the DoJ gave them a total pass. Meanwhile otherwise law-abiding Americans who walked through the halls of the Capitol on January 6th and did nothing else wrong—violating the same laws that Colbert staffers did—are harassed and prosecuted. These flagrantly unequal applications of justice are not only unfair but completely erode public trust in the DoJ. Those specific prosecutors, and division within the department, that selectively apply the law should be removed and brought to heel. At the same time, a reform-minded attorney general should set clear, objective standards that will help federal prosecutors determine who should and should not be prosecuted. For example, anyone caught trespassing in the Capitol, no matter the political affiliation, should be prosecuted. These clear and specific standards will deprive politicized prosecutors from unequal decision-making.
This is an easy change to make. All it requires is the attorney general modifying the Justice Manual, formerly known as the United States Attorneys’ Manual—the guidebook that all federal prosecutors must follow. Any attorney general can change these absurd rules, but none have because they don’t want to undermine the institution by changing tradition—a farcical excuse in an institution with rapidly diminishing credibility. As a result of these fears, the DoJ hasn’t made any major changes to these rules since Eric Holder was in office under President Obama; this despite the fact that gross abuses and misconduct have been uncovered during and since that time.
Amending the Justice Manual can fix a wide variety of problems even beyond establishing equal prosecutorial standards. For example, the manual can be changed to ban FBI agents and DoJ prosecutors from conducting midnight raids on non-violent offenders, like they did with Roger Stone. It can forbid the jailing of political dissidents without bond. Whenever actors at the DoJ or FBI step out of bounds, there’s a decent chance that a change to the Justice Manual could help fix the problem.
Another problem with selective application of the law is that leadership within the Department of Justice, like many of the most powerful people in Washington, has this disgusting view that if a person has reached a high enough level of government while being a member of the Democrat Party, then that person is absolved from following the law. Whether that person is Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, or even other bad actors (like Lois Lerner, who targeted conservative groups at the IRS, or former Obama national security advisor Susan Rice, who lied about unmasking the identities of Trump officials to spy on them), Democrats in power are not held accountable for their crimes. The DoJ must return to its role of prosecuting those who commit federal crimes. That doesn’t just include those at the highest level of government, it especially means those at the highest level of government. When federal officials are given a position of a public trust, they should be held to an even higher standard than the average American citizen. The only way to restore faith in our justice system is to actually hold the elites who break American laws accountable. If we fail to do so, the frustrations and anger currently tearing American society apart at the seams will only get worse. People will lose their faith in the law, which is the one safeguard we have against violence and societal breakdown. Americans cannot have faith in a system of justice that only looks outwards, investigating the public it serves. There must be internal accountability pursued just as rigorously, if not more so, than the outward application of the law.
Senior Democrat government officials aren’t the only ones currently free from being prosecuted. Leakers against Republican administrations also get a free pass. From the very first day, the Trump administration experienced a deluge of leaks, including the release of classified materials and private calls with foreign leaders. These leaks didn’t just damage American foreign policy. They are also criminal. It is flagrantly illegal to leak classified information, yet for years the Democrats and liberal DoJ lawyers gave it a pass because the leaks were harming a president they didn’t like.
The only way to stop leaks is to prosecute leakers. This isn’t as hard as it may seem. For any classified document, there are only a handful of people who have access to it. That and classified documents are almost always viewed within government office space or on secure government computer systems. Every single government device is monitored, so discovering who sent what document to whom is not terribly difficult. Yet even for those better at covering their tracks, the Department of Justice and the FBI have forensic ways to discover who sent and received information. That is literally a main part of their job. Armed with that information, the Department of Justice needs to bring down the hammer hard. Every single leaker needs to be outed and prosecuted. Every. Single. One. And the leakers of sham classified “investigations” against political targets must be hunted down and prosecuted as well. It is the only way to shore up American national security and restore the professionalism of our government, which should always put the safety and security of our nation above scoring cheap political points against opponents.
An additional way the DoJ has covered for its political allies is by either hiding or leaking the existence of important investigations into public figures. For example, during the 2020 campaign the Department of Justice was investigating Hunter Biden’s corrupt multimillion-dollar deals in places like Ukraine and China—deals that enriched the Biden family and even implicate President Biden himself. Yet the existence of those investigations was hidden until after the election so that it wouldn’t hurt Joe Biden’s electoral chances. Not only that, but the Deep State in the FBI was leveraging their relationships with their allies in Big Tech to squelch the Biden laptop story even before it broke. Years after the election, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the FBI approached Facebook to warn them to be wary of Russian disinformation that would soon drop, a clear effort to sway Facebook’s judgment against the bombshell story. Altogether, this was a monumental rig job, especially considering that at the time the Biden campaign and the media were running a coordinated smear campaign trying to discredit the Hunter Biden accusations. It didn’t matter that the primary source proving Biden family corruption wasn’t some anonymous source of selective government leak but that it was Hunter’s own laptop.
While the DoJ and FBI were doing their best to hide and spin the Biden corruption scandal, other members of the Deep State from the intelligence community were also running political interference. Fifty-one intelligence officials, including four former cabinet secretaries from the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency issued a public letter declaring that the Hunter Biden laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” —an absurd falsehood that the intel officials manufactured after admitting they had not even looked at the laptop themselves. Of course, these officials knew the media would run with headlines designed to convince the people that the laptop was some sort of Russian plant. When later confronted (sadly, after the election) with their lies, not a single one of them apologized. In fact, many have stated that they are proud they helped take down Trump.
If the DoJ had informed the public of its investigation, it would have shattered the Deep State and fake news media narrative that the Hunter laptop was Russian disinformation. The DoJ hid the truth, so the intelligence community’s actual disinformation was able to spread unobstructed. Meanwhile, every time President Trump or one of his family members was ever under an investigation, that information was either announced or leaked, undoubtedly in an attempt to tarnish his reputation and imply that Trump and those around him were obviously guilty of something.
The Department of Justice should end this unequal practice by adopting a single, uniform standard: If anyone of public interest is under investigation, they should announce that investigation immediately and publicly, unless the attorney general and FBI director decide based on operational necessity that they are unable to do so. If they are not able to inform the public, then they must notify the Gang of Eight in Congress—senior members privy to high-level classified information—of the target and their reasoning for keeping it hidden from the American public. This policy should cover broadly all public figures, including political appointees, members of Congress, or one of their family members. Of course, all people are presumed innocent until proven guilty, so the mere existence of an investigation doesn’t mean that the person being investigated is going to prison. But at a bare minimum, this puts both parties on an equal playing field. The Department of Justice can no longer use the announcement of investigations to damage Republicans while waiting to announce investigations into Democrats until the announcement will do the least political harm.
The DoJ has other policies that do grave harm to the American public that must be reformed. One of them is the use of a backdoor way to effectively implement “laws” through guidance and memos rather than through the people’s elected representatives in Congress. The way it works is that lawyers within the Department of Justice—especially within the Civil Rights Division—will send out some sort of public letter saying how they interpret the law. For example, in 2016 the Obama Justice Department along with the Department of Education said that in their opinion, civil rights law demanded that schools allow men to access and use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms. It didn’t matter that civil rights law says no such thing, that Congress never passed a law to allow men to enter women’s restrooms, or that there are many schools opposed to this policy. All that mattered was that unelected DoJ lawyers said they thought the law should be applied to force schools to let men into girls’ bathrooms, and that was that. As a result, schools started changing their bathroom policies because they feared getting prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Effectively, the DoJ changed the law by threatening public schools with lawsuits if they didn’t do what they were told.
This is a completely undemocratic and un-American way to enforce the law. Laws are supposed to be passed by a vote, not by the threat of lawsuits over novel interpretations from left-wing Deep State lawyers. The Department of Justice should completely do away with the use of memoranda and guidance to implement and interpret the laws. It is the job of the judicial branch, not lawyers in the executive branch, to interpret the law. And it is the job of Congress to write laws more specifically and with clear instruction. If anybody thinks that laws passed by Congress are unclear, they can file a lawsuit and take it to court, not just reinterpret the law from some DoJ office in DC.
Speaking of DC, a final reform that would vastly improve the operations of the Department of Justice would be to drastically curb the practice of prosecuting trials within the District of Columbia. In 2020, Washington, DC, voted 92 percent for Joe Biden and less than 6 percent for Donald Trump. Obviously, the jury pool available for DC courts will be woefully biased in politically charged cases. Yet time and again, left-wing leadership at the DoJ chooses to prosecute their cases in perhaps the most liberal jurisdiction in America. Not to mention, DC doesn’t even have the most experienced national security practice at the DoJ, so bringing up such cases uses less qualified lawyers in a biased jurisdiction. The results are infuriating but totally foreseeable—and easily remedied.
For example, at the end of the Trump administration, prosecutor John Durham was tasked with investigating the roots of the Russia collusion hoax. Durham has indicted several people for their illegal actions that led to the Obama FBI proactively spying on its political opponent, Donald Trump. Yet one of those indictments against Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann, who in the 2016 election covered up his connections to the Democrats while claiming to the FBI that the Trump campaign had secret back-channel communications to Russia, was nullified by a biased jury. There is no doubt that Sussmann lied to the FBI. I actually took Sussmann’s deposition during the probe into Russia Gate that would later prove he was willfully misleading federal authorities. But to a slanted jury, that didn’t matter.
I bet if you polled the residents of Washington, DC, large numbers of them would say they actually believe the insane conspiracy that President Trump was a Russian agent. Yet those same people were asked to serve on a jury to judge Sussmann, one of the original authors of that conspiracy. There was little chance they were ever going to decide the case fairly. Don’t believe me. Just listen to the jurors’ own words. After the trial, the jury forewoman told left-wing outlet NPR that the whole trial was a waste of time, saying, “I think we have better time or resources to use or spend to other things that affect the nation as a whole… We could spend that time more wisely.” Really, that means they never even looked at the black-and-white evidence—and the evidence was clear as day. It was as if a bank robber were being prosecuted, and we had a video of the robbery with the perp’s face flawlessly visible. The only way you don’t convict is if you close your eyes. In the Sussmann trial, the jury was closing its eyes.
This practice of choosing exclusively from liberal jury pools needs to end. The Department of Justice should prosecute criminals where there will be a fair trial, not just where the courthouse is closest to the DoJ main headquarters. Washington, DC, may have a lot of lawyers, but it is far from the only place that is qualified to adjudicate violations of federal law. When lawbreakers commit crimes that influence the entire country, the jury shouldn’t just be liberal residents of Washington.
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The Department of Justice is not beyond reform. Perhaps more than any other corrupt federal bureaucracy in the Deep State, the DoJ can be fixed through a strong attorney general and tough lieutenants who are willing to take on the swamp and implement these reforms. Fixing the DoJ is our only hope to reestablish equal justice under the law in America.
