Next up in the parade of dubious Trump administration nominees the Media Research Center is obliged to hype and whitewash as a member in good standing of the Trump Regime Media is Kash Patel, the rabid partisan nominated to be FBI director. Jorge Bonilla huffed in a Dec. 1 post:
The Regime Media are up in arms and in high dudgeon after President Elect Donald Trump sent a Saturday shockwave by choosing former Department of Defense Chief of Staff Kash Patel as the next Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The Patel pick has been met with all manner of hand wringing on the Regime’s Sunday shows.
Over at ABC, Jon Karl opened This Week with the customary overwrought editorial, loaded with appeals to authority, diminishment of Patel’s qualifications, and fearmongering over the scope of Patel’s mission at the Bureau[.] […]
Part of the false underpinning of the media’s arguments against Patel is the idea that his pick is a norms-busting politicization of federal law enforcement, and not an attempt to de-Ba’athify an already-weaponized government. Central to this false premise is the suppression of such stories as the malicious prosecutions of abortion clinic protesters such as Mark Houck, and the classification of both parents questioning their porn-enabling school boards and Latin Mass adherents as “domestic terrorists.” The Regime Media, in full self-preservation mode, would like you to believe that Patel is coming in to ravage a pristine FBI, as opposed to reform it.
Bonilla is alluding to the false right-wing narrative — which it helped to spread — that parents who merely asked questions at school board meetings were labeled as “domestic terrorists”; in fact, only those parents who made violent threats saw actual scrutiny. And Houck wasn’t merely an “abortion clinic protester” — he had assaulted an escort at an abortion clinic.
Still, Bonilla concluded by whining: “Reaction to the Patel pick across the dial was equal parts rage, hysteria, fear, and loathing. There is still time to go before Patel goes before Congress but the Regime Media have made crystal clear that they will fight this pick tooth and nail.”
Bill D’Agostino served up his own grousing about criticism of Patel in a Dec. 3 post:
The leftwing media meltdown over President-elect Trump’s cabinet picks intensified this week with the news that he would appoint Kash Patel, the former Chief of Staff to the Defense Secretary, to replace sitting FBI Director Chris Wray.
Journalists applied all the same lazy, nebulous labels to Patel that they had to other nominees, including “loyalist,” “disruptor,” “unqualified,” and the like. But their panic over him specifically goes far further than that. Rather, they appear genuinely afraid that Patel might actually do what he’s said he would: aggressively root out and prosecute corruption at the hitherto unaccountable agency.
Considering the relationships that these networks have with career intelligence agency bureaucrats, it’s no wonder as to why. Over the last decade and a half, channels like CNN and MSNBC have hired a slew of former Obama-era Justice Department officials, many of whom were integral members of what someone like Patel would call the “deep state.”
For nearly a decade now, CNN has retained disgraced former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper as a paid contributor, as well as former Deputy FBI Director Andy McCabe, among others. Meanwhile, MSNBC has extended cozy contributor contracts to the likes of former CIA Director John Brennan. Various shows on that network also make a habit of inviting on guests like Peter Stork and Andrew Weissman.
These are the sort of people (and in some cases, the actual people) who signed the bogus “51 former intelligence officials say Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation” letter. It’s all very swampy.
The same day, MRC chief Brent Bozell schmoozed with right-wing radio host Larry O’Connor: “When asked about all the controversy over Kash Patel’s nomination to run the FBI, Bozell said Trump means business when he wants to rein in the deep state, and the media are going to resist it.”
After current FBI director Christopher Wray announced his resignation, Alex Christy spent a Dec. 11 post complaining that CNN’s Briana Keilar pointed out how Patel would politicize the FBI, pushing whataboutism in response:
Keilar casually dismissed the “it’s been politicized” claims, but that view doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. The entire argument, which has been backed by a special councel, for Patel is that the FBI, as currently constituted, seems more interested in going after Trump than all those real threats Perez listed. At the same time, incoming Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has recently deplored Wray’s tenure, not just about the Mar-a-Lago raid that Perez mentioned, but non-partisan matters like the FBI’s “ongoing mishandling of sexual harassment claims made by the FBI’s female employees.”
So that makes it OK that Patel plans to use the FBI to target Trump critics?
The same day, Curtis Houck whined that others criticized Patel (and said nice things about Wray):
On Wednesday afternoon, ABC and NBC broke in with network special reports to share that FBI Director Christopher Wray told employees he’d be resigning prior to President-Elect Trump’s inauguration on January 20.
This left journalists like NBC’s Ken Dilanian despondent, blasting Trump’s “controversial,” “hardline,” and “provocative” selection of Kash Patel to replace him after he did “more…than” anyone to force Americans to distrust the bureau.
NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt tossed to the one-time Fusion GPS tool, lamenting Wray is stepping down and might lead the way for the “controversial” Patel.
Dilanian first kvetched that Wray gave into those who “counselled Mr. Wray that it would be better for the FBI workforce if he left on his own accord” and not those “urg[ing]” him “to force Mr. Trump to fire him, to reinforce the idea that this is a norm-shattering event.”
Citing the January 6 investigations and both Jack Smith probes — on classified documents and January 6 — that pulled in FBI resources, Dilanian lamented “Mr. Wray couldn’t avoid crossing Donald Trump” before his thesis that distrust in law enforcement is Trump’s fault:
[…]As for Patel, Dilanian whined he “got his start as a firebrand congressional aide” and has “a history of making inflammatory and controversial statements, even promising to use the FBI and Justice Department to go after Mr. Trump’s enemies, to go after journalists.”
[…]Justice reporter Nicole Sganga called Patel “a hardline critic of the bureau” who “has echoed claims of witch-hunt from President Trump,” but “has a less robust portfolio when it comes to law enforcement and management experience, typical of an FBI director.”
As for Wray, she gushed he “loves the FBI, as he put out in the statements here, you know, feels like he does not want to abandon the men and women on the front lines” and “wanted to, you know, break this news to them, which is why he chose to say this at an FBI town hall, directly to the workforce before, perhaps, it was leaked in some other way.”
P.J. Gladnick lashed out at a commentator in a Dec. 15 post:
Having antipathy towards Donald Trump seems to be almost a job requirement atPolitico. However, even among the TDS crowd their senior staff writer Ankush Khardori seems to be an extreme standout. As has already been revealed at NewsBusters, Khardori absolutely despises Trump to the extent that last July, he urged that the J6 trial be dramatically sped up in order to convict him before election day.
Therefore you have to wonder what is going on in the eyes of Politico management that Khardori was allowed to make the case against choosing Patel as the next FBI director? They have a blind eye that prevents them from seeing that extreme hatred openly for Trump is not a good look for an organization that at least pretends to be even handed.
In any event, Khardori has white hot hatred for Trump so expansive as to include Patel as we can see on Saturday in “You Should Worry About Kash Patel Running the FBI.”
[…]To read Khardori’s screed against Patel you have to be convinced that the FBI is innocent of all the many abuses that have already come to light in large part due to work of Kash Patel as well as multiple whistleblowers. It would be refreshing to have an FBI Director that can provide answers for many of the highly questionable questionable FBI activities of the past few years. No wonder they want to characterize exposing abusive behavior as an abuse of power.
Gladnick didn’t rebut the argument that the FBI under Patel would likely be guilty of even more abuses and “highly questionable questionable” activities in the service of Trump. And none of these MRC writers mentioned Patel’s vow to go after journalists he doesn’t like — something being the FBI director would give him the tools to do.