Deep State Mouthpiece Retaliates Against Staffer Who Uncovered Russia Collusion Hoax

In a meandering Washington Post column, first mocking the idea of a "Deep state" before repeatedly and effusively praising it for its work thwarting the will of the elected government, David Ignatius uses anonymous sources to attack Kashyap Patel for exposing misbehavior by intelligence officials, holding them accountable, and mostly for the crime of behaving as if the duly elected President Donald Trump, not unelected bureaucrats, was the real head of the executive branch of government.

Ignatius is a Mouthpiece David Ignatius has been used for decades as a conduit for anonymous intelligence officials to spew their claims, no matter how erroneous, partial, or unsubstantiated those claims are.

As the corporate media and its Big Tech allies aggressively censored legitimate news about Biden family business engagements with foreign adversaries, Ignatius aided the effort, claiming a nameless "Eastern European expert in digital forensics" who examined some Hunter Biden laptop documents "Told me he found anomalies - such as American-style capitalization of the names of ministries - that suggest fakery." Not even the Biden campaign itself made such a claim.

Ignatius promotes unsubstantiated, left-wing rumors that more often than not turn out to be information that is wrong, partially wrong, or unverified bits of raw intelligence that lack context, other former intelligence officials say.

Political Retaliation Against Kash Patel As a senior staff member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Patel was responsible for much of the work debunking the conspiracy theory that arose out of the criminal leak of classified information to Ignatius, a crime that was never really investigated and certainly never prosecuted.

Now, Ignatius' anonymous sources claim that it is Patel who is "Facing" an investigation by Department of Justice officials for "Possible improper disclosure of classified information." It's impossible to know if such a potential investigation is real or just another one of the made-up claims that Ignatius is always eager to peddle.

To take just one example, Ignatius claims that Patel was "a senior adviser to acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell and his successor, John Ratcliffe, helping lead their efforts to remove senior career intelligence officers." In fact, Patel was never an adviser, senior or otherwise, to Ratcliffe.

Beyond the basic goal of advancing Trump's personal agenda, was there a larger mission? Was there a systematic plan, for example, to gain control of the nation's intelligence and military command centers as part of Trump's effort to retain the presidency, despite his loss in the November 2020 election? Ignatius is just asking questions! Questions about whether Kash Patel was QAnon! It's difficult to characterize how insane the question is.

Ignatius relies exclusively on snippets from anonymous sources to bash Patel, an easy accomplishment given their anonymity and the fact that Patel was involved in efforts to reform the massive bureaucracy.

Praising the Deep State Ignatius writes, with grave concern, that Trump's more loyal political appointees were "Motivated partly by a desire to restrict the intelligence agencies' power, and partly to deliver on Trump's promise to end overseas wars." First off, how telling that Ignatius thinks it's bad to restrict intelligence agencies' power to abuse the civil liberties of American citizens and to meddle in presidential elections and administrations.

Ignatius writes of the concerted effort to keep Americans from learning about the origins of the Russia probe and other problems with the intelligence community's Russia collusion hoax, that "Haspel's apparent crime was that for months she had been resisting efforts by Trump and Patel to declassify the information he had gathered for Nunes back in the 2018 report." In fact, resisting orders from the president is a perfectly legitimate reason for a president to want to replace her.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/22/deep-state-mouthpiece-retaliates-against-staffer-who-uncovered-russia-collusion-hoax/