Kashy Patel and the Room of Requirement

Hogwarts Level 7, with the Room of Requirement, by mvm5600/DeviantArt.

Had a weird sighting of FBI director Kash Patel a week or so ago, in The New Republic:

Sources told Fox News Digital Wednesday that FBI Director Kash Patel had discovered multiple burn bags filled with sensitive documents stashed away in a secret room at the agency.

Stashed away in a what? The TNR writer flatly called it nothing but a "far-fetched attempt to distract from the president's ties to the alleged sex trafficker" Jeffrey Epstein, and moved on to making fun of Trump for talking about Epstein anyway, in response to a press question about Patel's discovery, but my impression was that he thought Epstein was really what the question was about:

“Well, I want everything to be shown. You know, as long as it’s fair and reasonable I think it will be shown and it should be shown, and I think [Patel] feels that way, and I think Pam feels that way,” Trump said....“But it’s gotta be stuff that really doesn’t hurt people unfairly, because you have so many people involved. And if they can do that in a fair way, I think it’s great. I think it’s really great. The whole thing is a scam...”

I think Trump doesn't, or didn't, know about Patel's secret room. Or at least didn't know enough to expect a question about it at the presser. I suspect it's a bit of Patellerie of a kind we've wondered about before that he hasn't seen a particular need for Trump to know about (yet), because it's not quite ripe. There are a lot of things Trump doesn't need to know about, like the outcome of the dinner with Bondi and Patel that was supposed to take place at the vice president's office to discuss the Epstein matter (publicity drove the dinner to the White House instead, but there's still no indication the president showed up for it). Patel has tried the story out, though, according to the New York Post version of the story, sometime in late June, on the Joe Rogan show:

“When I first got to the bureau, [I] found a room that [former FBI Director James] Comey and others hid from the world in the Hoover Building, full of documents and computer hard drives that no one had ever seen or heard of,” he said. “They [l]ocked the key and hid access and just said, ‘No one’s ever gonna find this place.'”

That's a fascinating detail about the hard drives. Is that going to be where the Hunter Biden laptop ended up? But the crown jewel of this chamber of secrets according to The Post is something else:

WASHINGTON — FBI Director Kash Patel discovered “burn bags” filled with thousands of documents dating back to the bureau’s Trump-Russia probe during the 2016 campaign, a source familiar with the findings told The Post Wednesday.

One of the documents, discovered in a purported secret room at the FBI’s DC headquarters, is a classified annex to the 2023 report by then-special counsel John Durham that scrutinized the original probe, code-named “Crossfire Hurricane.”

The 29-page appendix to the Durham report, which has never been publicly released, includes details of the intelligence he reviewed, according to Fox News Digital, which first reported on the discovery.

—a document of peculiar interest to Crossfire Hurricane nuts, reputedly offering otherwise unknown evidence that the whole story of Russian election interference and Trump's collusion with it had been fabricated by the FBI:

Fox News Digital reported Tuesday that the annex includes information that foreign sources warned members of the US intelligence community that the FBI would help spread a narrative that the 2016 Trump campaign illegally colluded with the Kremlin to win the election — before the bureau launched “Crossfire Hurricane” in July 2016.

—and a document which has been publicly released now, as you've probably heard, by Chairman Chuckles Grassley of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in a fairly heavily redacted version. Grassley doesn't mention the secret room or the burn bags, though.

I just want to note, first, that we are here chest deep in the world Patel has been swimming in for the past eight years. It's the job Trump made him FBI director to do, and I feel I should have guessed earlier, since he's been one of my pet subjects; it's the same project as he started out in the Trumpery with in 2017 when he began working for Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, looking for evidence that there was something wrong with the way the FBI opened an investigation of Russian active measures during the 2016 presidential race and their possible relations to the Trump campaign, and that's been the object he's been chasing ever since, in 2019 at the National Security Council and office of the DNI (where the director John Ratcliffe, now heading the CIA, declassified John O. Brennan's notes on a meeting of principals with Obama where they discussed the Russian threat), and in 2020 as chief of staff to the secretary of defense, and then at Mar-a-Lago, where he served as a kind of curator of the thousands of documents Trump stole from the White House on his way out of the presidency, and (along with the right-wing hack writer John Solomon) as Trump's personal representative to the National Archives after most of the documents had been returned to them, and as court mythologist in his retelling of the Crossfire Hurricane story in an illustrated children's book about treachery against "King Donald". He was already under Trump's consideration for FBI director in 2020, that or CIA director, it didn't matter which, depending on which director (Christopher Wray or Gina Haspel) Trump was able to get rid of first. If Trump is, as I wrote in January 2023, mad Captain Ahab in his quest to kill the white whale of the FBI, Patel is his faithful personal harpooneer Fedallah.

Things didn't turn out as I was hoping back then, of course. In my opinion Special Counsel Jack Smith made mistakes in the document theft case against Trump, not taking it as seriously as it deserved, issuing only the single indictment, limiting it to the classified materials, and confining it to Florida, allowing a single Trump-favoring judge to smother the whole thing while the public still hadn't understood it well enough to make an outcry. Smith himself hadn't understood it well enough; his team made little attempt to find out what Trump's motivation for hoarding all this stuff might be, beyond the journalistic consensus as represented by Haberman and Feuer that he basically just felt entitled, in his toddler-like absolutist way:

Several former aides and advisers to Mr. Trump have long made the argument that he simply kept the sensitive records because he saw them as “mine,” and because he likes acquiring trophies that he can show off, whatever form those trophies may take

—which is no doubt a part of the truth, but misses the conspiratorial pattern of the document chase and all the people who participated in it over the five or six years from the 2017 inauguration onwards (Nunes and Patel, Cohen-Watnick, Ratcliffe, Grassley, Comer, Solomon and Mollie Hemingway, Mark Meadows, and so on).

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John Solomon is in on this on too, in fact—no hidden rooms or burn bags but twice as many classified annexes of famous reports, not just Durham's but also that of the former FBI inspector general Michael Horowitz, in his report on the predication of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and errors in the search warrant applications on Dr. Carter Page, which Trump is happy to discuss, though he plainly doesn't know anything about it:

“And I will say this, the Durham report was preceded by the Horowitz report, and [then-Attorney General] Bill Barr should’ve used the Horowitz report," Trump said. "You didn’t need the Durham report, because say what you want about Mr. Horowitz, he was appointed by Democrats, but he wrote the most vicious – and true! – report that you’ve ever seen on somebody, and that was on James Comey, and I believe a couple other people in the FBI that were crooked. But this report was so big. ... And for some reason, Bill Barr didn’t use it. I never — it’s such a disappointment, but he didn’t use it.”

Given what Horowitz's official report in fact concluded—

We did not substitute the OIG’s judgment for the judgments made by the Department, but rather sought to determine whether the decision was based on improper considerations, including political bias. We found no evidence that the conclusions by the prosecutors were affected by bias or other improper considerations; rather, we determined that they were based on the prosecutors’ assessment of the facts, the law, and past Department practice

I really don't see now the secret annex could have concluded the opposite, and I'm pleased to note that Michael Horowitz (I just happen to have Michael Horowitz here with me) agrees on that:

Horowitz also noted that “opening the investigation was in compliance with [DOJ] and FBI policies, and we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced” the decision to initiate the Trump-Russia probe.

And you may have heard over the past week that the Durham annex is worse still, the "evidence" of a Clinton plot to create a false narrative of a Russian attempt to influence the election being clearly identified as itself a Russian fake (gift link, I hope)—

This is what Patel's mission has been since that first start in Nunes's office in 2017. From their first pantomime (Nunes pretended to be picking up a document from the White House that he had actually delivered there, and that Patel himself had written in the House committee), it has been marked by fabrication and kayfabe. The story about his discovering these documents in a kind of Harry Potter "Room of Requirement" (in the book series a magically appearing place where everything you need for a particular political purpose is already there) is a transparent ruse. He's there, and always has been, to make it look to Trump followers as if their phony stories are real.