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The second and last part of the Kash Patel transcript.
45:00 – 58:30: The FISA Fraud: How the Spying Began — CONTINUED
58:30 – 01:10:00: Modernizing the Bureau: AI vs. Terrorist Threats
01:10:00 – 01:25:30: Stopping Foreign Scam Centers & Fentanyl
01:25:30 – 01:49:00: Investigating Arctic Frost & Plasma Echo
First I want to draw attention to this new disclosure. I had not heard of this operation before and Google says it does not exist.
@jsolomonReports predicts that the SPLC case is only the beginning of what’s to come from this DOJ:
“I think we’re about to enter into a period of MAAA. Make America Accountable Again. I think with Pam Bondi moved aside, the speed at which the Justice Department will move on things that have been working in the system for months is picking up.
I think in the summer and fall, we are going to talk a lot more about a case called “Operation Round River. Its goal was to neutralize anyone who would dare suggest there was a corrupt relationship between Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and the Ukrainian Government or the Ukrainian company Burisma.
All the people I’ve talked to in government think that Round River may be the most JAW-DROPPING of the four codename investigations that targeted Donald Trump and his followers.”
The four investigations Kash IDed are, Arctic Frost, Plasmic Echo, Round River and of course Crossfire Hurricane.
….
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
51:30 — Kash Patel: They lost the election. And so what they wanted to do was kneecap the presidency of Donald Trump and set him up to fail. And so they breathlessly put out that false narrative about Russia and collusion over and over and over again. Remember these same people in Trump one, the Rosensteins and Comeys and McCabes of the world were the ones that proposed wearing a wire under the 25th amendment to record Donald Trump. That’s not me saying it. That’s the documents we found. Again, their arrogance. They wrote it down. We put it out. Can you imagine if Obama or Biden’s FBI or DOJ proposed to wear a wire in the Oval Office to record the president of the United States? Would we not still be talking about that?
Sean Hannity: Well, think back again. Donald Trump is running and Hillary is paying for this dirty dossier. Unverified, unverifiable. And James Comey looks at it. Didn’t know anything about the authenticity of it. Then he makes this famous trip to Trump Tower.
First of all, I’ve known Donald Trump for 30 years. It made me laugh when I heard it because I knew it was complete utter BS. Well, there was a report, sir, that you might have been in the Ritz Carlton in Moscow and you might have had hookers in your room urinating on you. Okay, if anyone knows Donald Trump, he is the biggest germaphobe. Him and Howard Stern, the biggest germaphobes in the world. And so it wasn’t true. But Comey knew it wasn’t true.
Kash Patel: There’s something more basic to it than that. The dossier, which now everyone has seen, when I first saw it, I said, “Let’s just do some investigative 101.
” Does that hotel with that room even exist in Moscow? It doesn’t. It literally doesn’t exist.
Sean Hannity: Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is the first I’m hearing it. What? Come on.
Kash Patel: Serious. So, we looked it up. Doesn’t exist. A hotel exists. Not with that room. Not in that location. It’s available on the internet. Anybody at the FBI could have verified that. They didn’t do it on purpose because the narrative, the salacious and fake narrative against Donald Trump was what they wanted out there to kneecap his presidency because they knew we were uncovering their FISA fraud. So once we caught them doing that, what’s the next best thing? Continue the narrative anyway. Continue the narrative to make sure President Trump doesn’t succeed. And thankfully to your reporting and just a select few others, and we were vilified for it then, we got the truth out. And now the American people, when you fast forward across the four years that President Trump was out of office and now that he’s back in office for the first year, it’s right to be focused on this. It’s right to be pissed off about it because what law enforcement should be doing is what we talked about at the top of the show, doing cop work.
Sean Hannity: I want to read Dan Bongino’s famous tweet and I first I want to know what you thought. Did he talk to you before he sent it out?
Kash Patel: The..
Sean Hannity: The infamous Bongino Holy Shit… All right, let me read it to you.
Kash Patel: Yeah, read it to me.
Sean Hannity: It says, “During my tenure here as the deputy director of the FBI, I’ve repeatedly relayed to you that things are happening that may not be immediately visible, but they are happening.” He said, “The director and I are committed to stamping out public corruption and the political weaponization of both law enforcement and intelligence operations. It is a priority for us. But what I have learned in the course of our properly predicated and necessary investigations into these aforementioned matters has shocked me down to my core. I’ll continue in a minute. I’ve known Dan like I’ve known you for years. This is not written lightly.
Kash Patel: No, we talked about it.
Sean Hannity continuing to read: We cannot run a republic like this. I’ll never be the same after learning what I’ve learned. We’re going to conduct these righteous and proper investigations by the book and in accordance with the law. We are going to get the answers we all deserve. And as with any investigation, I cannot predict where it will land. But I can promise you an honest and dignified effort at truth. Not my truth or your truth, but the truth. God bless America
Sean Hannity: I’ve known this guy forever. He did not write that lightly.
Kash Patel: No, we talked about it.
Sean Hannity: Look, he talked to you about it before he sent it out. And you said send.
Kash Patel: We were the best partners. Dan was easily the best hire I’ve made or I’ll ever make. He told me he only wanted to go a year. That was the agreement. I said, “Hey, man. We need you.” When we were first talking about he said, “I can give you a year.” I said, “Give me a year. We’ll take it.”
Here’s the difference. We are doing it by the book. That’s why it takes time. That’s why it takes time to build a prosecution team in different jurisdictions to look at this, to get the grand jury subpoenas out, to put witnesses in the grand jury. We’ve put a ton of witnesses in the grand jury. That’s what they don’t do. They don’t play by the rules. They don’t play by the book, but we do because, as Dan said, we got to do this right. We got one shot at it. We’re not going to do it fast just to get the headline. We’re going to take our time and get it done right and get everybody that was involved under the microscope.
Sean Hannity: When you say, the amount of corruption, this is a priority and that we cannot run a republic like this. I interpret that to mean and I want your impression. Tell me about Comey. as Trump always refers to him as a bad dirty cop. Is he right?
Kash Patel: Yeah. Look at Russia Gate. You can’t do that if you’re stupid. He’s not dumb. You can’t go out and give that Hillary Clinton press conference if you’re stupid or dumb. It’s intentional to seed the narrative and to cover up their dirty work. And so he built a team around him, which we obviously got rid of, that would advance that narrative that crippled the credibility of the FBI. And that’s the one thing we’ve been fixing. It’s not me saying it. The FBI’s credibility before Donald Trump got back into office was cratering. Cratering because of THIS, because they didn’t tackle violent crime and didn’t tackle national security issues. I mean, just look at how fast it changed.
Sean Hannity: Well, how could they be if they’re involved in all this political intrigue and sabotage?
[From the Sundance]
Kash Patel: And that’s what hurt the mission the most. The heroes of this mission under President Trump and this FBI are in the field. That’s why we’re giving them the resources. That’s why we’re bringing in things like AI. AI was never used at the FBI till we got there. Literally, I’m using it everywhere. I’m using it in places like our criminal justice information system database so we can pop fingerprints immediately and get fugitives and arrest warrants out. I’m using it in places like our national threat operations center.
I’ll give you an example. They wanted to do it human by human. Can you imagine how many tips the FBI gets a week? Thousands. If we had just humans look at it, we would never sift through them all. I put AI in there. We stopped a school massacre in North Carolina because we got a tip and we were able to triage it with artificial intelligence. We stopped a school shooting in New York because we got a tip from our private sector partners who are building our AI infrastructure. I mean just think about the old school movies. Remember they get the fingerprint screens up and they’ll say we’ll see you in a couple days when we get a hit. Now those hits are instantaneous because we are welcoming in artificial intelligence.
The former FBI rejected that notion because they knew that wasn’t their focus. Their focus was on weaponization, not modernization. My predecessors didn’t spend one second modernizing the FBI. They kept calling it the premier law enforcement agency in the world, but they failed to give the people in the field the resources that they need. They failed to give our SWAT operators, our tactical operators, our hostage rescue teams the tools they needed.
Sean, our guys, just to give you an example, are doing dynamic hostage rescue operations on a weekly basis with night vision goggles that don’t work. That’s not that’s not hyperbole. That’s a fact. So, I called my partners at DOW and I said, “I need an assist.” They were like, “Roger that. We got you covered.” Why? The question the American people should be asking is, “Why didn’t this so-called premier law enforcement agency of the world, why didn’t they resource it? Why didn’t they build a backbone infrastructure? Why didn’t they go out to the private sector and say, “Hey, we need your help.” Donald Trump kicked that door open. I’ve got every major tech company in the world embedded in the FBI rebuilding our internet capabilities, our classified systems, and the ability for artificial intelligence to be in our counterterrorism program so we can get instantaneous results. What’s the point of collecting terabytes of data if you can’t sift through it?
They never answer that question. And the mainstream media doesn’t ask the question as to why our predecessors kept putting a band-aid on a gunshot to attempt to triage the broken system of the FBI. We spent the last year, this is one of the things I’m most proud of, rebuilding our entire backbone infrastructure because an agent in the field in Omaha should have the exact same toolkit as a guy in New York City. No different. Our SWAT operators should be using machines. They didn’t have Bearcats in the field. We got them Bearcats in the field. You guys want these guys kicking down doors and dropping fast roping off helicopters and things like that and rescuing kids like we just did in Alabama the other week in the middle of a night from a guy who’s holding a young woman at gunpoint. We got to give them the tools that they need. And none of them bothered to do it. They just kept repeating the past hyperbole and resting on the history of the FBI saying we’re great and we’re going to get there.
How come Chris Wray didn’t fight for a budget for this FBI in his five years and saw decline in funds year-over-year for his entire directorship?
Sean Hannity: If Comey is a dirty cop, I know this issue in the indictment 8647. Okay, I think he’s completely full of shit when he says that. Oh, I just thought it was an interesting shell formation. Okay, every American knows what 8647 means. What an interesting shell formation. My wife suggested that I put it on Instagram. I’m like, okay, good luck with that. But to me, that’s the low-hanging fruit for him. Which is why I want to get into what the grand conspiracy will be.
But first, if Comey was a dirty cop, Director Wray used to always warn about some type of apocalyptic meltdown in the country, but then he never did a thing to secure the borders and he kept letting these millions of people come from 200 plus countries and that frustrated me. I felt that that those were all CYA appearances before Congress or the Senate. So my question is, how do you describe Director Wray?
Kash Patel: Look, I don’t spend my days thinking about Director Wray. He paid lip service to the American people to say we have all these investigations but didn’t reduce crime. That’s the result. The results speak for themselves. In one year, in 14 months with President Trump, this FBI has done more than the prior two guys combined. That’s that shows that the mandate of the FBI has been restored by President Trump.
Sean Hannity: That shows you’re not playing politics. You’re not out to screw the next Democrat. You there to stop crime.
Kash Patel: That shows the breadth of cooperation we’re getting from people like the government of Mexico, the government of India, China, Russia even. We’re getting these fugitives from all over the world and we’re sending our people to go get them. I was there on the ground in Mexico when we got the Ryan Weddings of the world. When they said you couldn’t get them, you couldn’t find them. We created operations to go and flush these guys out and we’re getting them all in record speed. We went to the government of India and said, “Hey, there’s a gal over there on our top 10 most wanted list who murdered her handicapped 5-year-old son. They found her in a week for us and we went and brought her back.” They could have done that in the Biden administration. They could have gotten Ryan Wedding. They could have gotten the rapist in North Carolina who was our most wanted fugitive. They could have done all that work. They didn’t because they were focused on keeping the status quo. That’s what the American people hated the most. That’s why I believe they voted Donald Trump back into office again because they wanted to change the status quo in Washington DC on Capitol Hill and the way this FBI represents itself across the country.
Sean Hannity: Walk through the next level. We got all the way through 2016. They set him up like a bowling pin because they took a career senior intelligence officials assessments about there was no Russian interference. They used the dirty dossier to backdoor spy on candidate Trump, transition team Trump, and then later the Trump administration. Carter Page is a nice guy. My understanding is he was a hero. He used to work with three-letter agencies. Is that your assessment of him, too?
Kash Patel: That’s the public information that’s out there. That’s correct.
Sean Hannity: I mean, that’s public and he’s told me directly that he would always help out our government. He was a patriot. Trump has to deal with that for three years. But there’s more to the story. It’s a bigger broader case. The reason that the grand conspiracy, if which you have said you’re looking into is so critical, is because the small the low-hanging fruit on Comey 8647 while important for sure is not the worst of what this guy did. And unfortunately the statute of limitations ran out because you had the intervening Biden years. They were never going to investigate the guy that did all this work for them. However, if there is a grand conspiracy, there are no statutes of limitations.
Kash Patel: Well, and also if they did it again, right? The win here is not just holding these people accountable. The win here is making sure that the FBI, DOJ, and the entire government are never able to do this again to anyone else. That’s what President Trump has said repeatedly. He was the ultimate target, but he wants to make sure that this can never happen to anyone ever again. That is the ultimate win for our republic. And it’s not just this statute of limitations thing. These people, as I said earlier, are so arrogant that they ran back the same playbook. That’s what we uncovered.
Sean Hannity: Isn’t it then important then that those that were involved in it be held accountable?
Kash Patel: All of them. Every single one of them.
Sean Hannity: Okay. So, how do we get from it began here in 2016, July, the press conference, all the way through the setup for 2017, and Trump’s coming in and explain how it continues from there.
Kash Patel: That’s the part that I’ve got to be a little careful about. What I was saying earlier is they ran it back again. I don’t mean in 2016 and 17. I don’t mean in 2021. I mean they ran it back just now.
Sean Hannity: Explain.
Kash Patel: In the last election. In the one that just put Trump back in office. They ran the same playbook of getting regurgitated bogus information funded by political operatives seeded into the intelligence community. And that’s what we figured out and unlocked. And that is where I spend most of my time when it comes to the deweaponization of government. Focused on, collecting those bad actors, getting grand juries, getting prosecutors, and building teams around the country, not just in one location to look at that because these people haven’t stopped. The same actors were involved yet again.
And so that, when you say grand conspiracy, I think the American public thinks one thing. When I hear it, I’m talking about the breath of the entirety of it. And we are putting it all in one place and that’s the crux of what we’re doing right now.
Sean Hannity: Explain how it goes out further. My understanding is you brought Joe diGenova in?
Kash Patel: DOJ did.
Sean Hannity: He’s one tough kick-ass prosecutor.
Kash Patel: He’s been around a long time.
Sean Hannity: I would not want to go up against him. One of the few people I’m like, UH No. But I think he’s also truth oriented and he’ll want to get to the the bottom line. So there really is an effort to just… what do you think it stems from? Is it they hate him? They hate his politics. They hate what he stands for. They hate his style. What is it?
Kash Patel: They hate that he [Trump] did everything they said they were going to do and didn’t get done. Everything from ending the forever wars to securing the border to reducing crime to historic low proportions. He’s accomplished all that and so much more. And if an Obama or Harris or Biden had done it, they would be building monuments for them. But he did it. They talked about it. They ran on it. They weaponized government. He exposed it. Trump then got back into power and said, “We’re going to fix it forever. So do it the right way. Don’t go fast. Get it done and get everybody. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re only 14 months in. I know people think it should have happened yesterday. But look at the public corruption cases we’ve already brought. The work that we’re already doing, the fraud. We haven’t even talked about the fraud in Minnesota or the scam centers overseas that are plaguing the United States of America. We’re doing all of this work. At the same time, we’re doing what you and I are talking about.
Sean Hannity: So, and this is what I guess frustrated me knowing you for a long time. You walk in the door and like people are immediately like slamming you with, “Oh, wait a minute. Where are the JFK files? RFK files with MLK files and are there UFOs?” Which, by the way, I’m going to ask you all of that. I’m fascinated with the UFO part. But you’re slammed with that. But then you’re also slam with getting to the bottom of this, keeping Americans safe and secure, dealing with narco terrorists, dealing with child trafficking operations. All this has taken place in our country. It’s kind of hard to absorb that.
Kash Patel: Well, President Trump not only promised to restore law enforcement and make it better than it’s ever been, he’s also the most transparent president in the history of the United States. All the things you talked about are things other presidents could have put out but didn’t. He did. And let me give you another example of what this FBI is doing. Our constitutional oversight comes from the United States Congress. I’m a big proponent of that. The prior two directors released a total of 14,000 pages of documents to Congress in a total of 10 years. 14,000 pages of documents to oversight committees in Congress.
Sean Hannity: How many [have you released] And if if you listen to your critics, they would think that you’re hiding everything.
Kash Patel: 41,000 pages in 14 months, I don’t do math, but I think it’s like a 350% increase. And that’s just in 14 months because President Trump is driving the transparency initiative. And the documents are the best work. And whether it’s JFK or RFK or UFOs or what have you, it’s also the underlying [stuff] and that’s the balance we got to strike. People are like, “Where are the rest of the Russia gate?” You know, conspiracy documents. My balance is to release what we can while maintaining the integrity of the investigation. If we put everything out, then we jeopardize the integrity of the prosecutions that we will bring. That’s the balance that I have to strike. And I get it. We take a lot of incoming for it. Why don’t you just put it out? Why don’t you just put it out? Well, we want accountability, too, right?
Sean Hannity: But you can’t. But people don’t understand either. You take in voluminous amounts of information. A lot of it is not verified and a lot of it’s not vetted. It’s raw intel that could hurt innocent people. You have redactions that would go along with it. I would urge anyone to go through 500 pages and try to redact what you have to redact and the amount of the intensity of that work alone would be insane and you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of documents. That’s a lot. [Just editing these transcripts is a (euphemism) and I can only handle about 5 to 10 pages a day! –GC]
A random question and then we’ll get back more focused but what keeps Kash Patel awake at night
Kash Patel: Missing something. Did we miss a national security threat? Did we miss the chance at protecting another kid or another community? And I can tell the American public that just look at the month of December alone last year. We stopped four terrorist attacks in four weeks during the holidays. Four.
Sean Hannity: Slow down a second. Most Americans don’t know that.
Kash Patel: Yeah. Everything from the pumpkin tape plot all the way through the attacks that were going to happen in Texas, Florida, and New York. And we stopped them all. We, this FBI.
Sean Hannity: When you say terror attack, do you mean a real attack, a terrorist organization, [and you] stopped it? That’s got to give you a lot of personal job satisfaction and then scare the hell out of you about what else may be out there.
Kash Patel: It’s a two-edged sword, right? Like, thank God that this FBI is on mission doing it. We put it out as much as we can because the work of this FBI should be known to the American public and it should be advertised. Their wins, the sleepless nights that the agents, the intel analysts and professional staff put in. The time away from their families. We are the folks that are responsible for safeguarding America. What keeps me up at night is we’re trying to do everything we can not miss anything.
Sean Hannity: So, you have to be perfect every time.
Kash Patel: Yeah. Well, they only have to get through once.
Sean Hannity: Do you fear a 911 style attack could happen again?
Kash Patel: We’re always on the watch for that given the current circumstances we’re in. And as I said earlier, the thing about terrorists is they’re exceedingly patient. After the disastrous withdrawal in Afghanistan, which led directly to the deaths of 13 of our brave soldiers at Abbey Gate. And by the way, in the first two weeks on the job, Johnny Ratcliffe and I went to the Pakistanis and got the Abbey Gate bomber who just got convicted last week. The question the American public should be asking is what was the Biden administration doing for four years not finding this guy that killed 13 American soldiers. That’s how fast we moved. And that’s how fast you can move.
The problem is, the way that Afghanistan was left by the Biden administration, allows al-Qaeda and ISIS K [ISIS-Khorasan – Terrorist Groups – GC] specifically to rejuvenate. ISIS K, which is the worst of the worst pretty much outside of the Iranian terror regime. And so they are rebuilding slowly. That’s what we’re watching. And we’re watching to see if they are moving people across continents into Africa into South America. And we’re working with our intelligence community partners, CIA, NSA overseas, and of course the DOW running targeted operations overseas, going after the drug traffickers. And the big shift that we had here was we finally equated terrorists to being terrorists. What do I mean by that? Muslim Brotherhood, they’re terrorists. Donald Trump did that. Drug trafficking organizations in Mexico, they’re terrorists. Donald Trump made them FTOs. [Foreign Terrorist Organizations] So that unlocks authorities that we have to traditionally manhunt al-Qaeda and ISIS and ISIS K on these organizations. That is a critical win that is never talked about. Moving the machine to designate these organizations as foreign terrorist organizations so the FBI the CIA the NSA and DOW can do what you’re seeing.
Sean Hannity: Are there sleeper cells… do you believe? And what degree of certainty do you have that there are sleeper cells in this country?
Kash Patel: So we can only work off the intelligence that we have and currently we are looking at that with our partners across the IC. I’m not saying there aren’t. I’m saying the intelligence that’s been produced so far doesn’t show credible information to support that. That’s the assessment of the IC.
Sean Hannity: I don’t know if I’d want to read the presidential daily briefing every day. I think that would be a pretty long when I look at all of this. I want to go back to your interpretation when you had the burn bags ‘cuz that was a big story. When I heard they left burn bags behind. I’m like, either they’re dumb — And then Dan was the one that opened my eyes by saying, I think somebody probably left them there hidden on purpose, hoping we’d find it and maybe even tipped you off that it was there. ‘Cuz you said this is in a room that nobody knew existed. Was it like a safe room?
Kash Patel: Literally, it was in a safe room.
Sean Hannity: And so you told WHO[???] go look in this room.
Kash Patel: First, we had to find it. Remember, it goes back to the arrogance. The people that authored Russia Gate and the ultimate weaponization of government and law enforcement, we caught them because we used their documents. We found their documents. I knew they had done that again. What we found was just a chunk of it. So, I knew it was elsewhere. So, I said, “We’ve got to go comb through the entire building and find a combination of two things. Their arrogance coupled with good people in the FBI who were smart enough to make sure that the material that the arrogant people assumed would be destroyed was not and that was the key for us.
Sean Hannity: We got Dan’s reaction. What was your reaction when you read it?
Kash Patel: It was something I anticipated. I wasn’t surprised by it.
Sean Hannity: Well, you were more deeply involved because you were working with Devon. So, it was just confirmation of what you already knew with more information.
Kash Patel: Yeah. That we hadn’t seen yet. with more information.
Sean Hannity: How do you explain that they put it down on paper? Because that seems pretty dumb to me.
Kash Patel: The arrogance. Why would you put down on paper that you had information that exonerated Carter Page and President Trump’s campaign? ‘Cuz they thought, “No one’s ever going to see this. Hillary’s going to win. We’re never going to see this.”
Sean Hannity: Are you convinced that there’s enough evidence that the DOJ in the future will be able to bring real strong cases against the people that are involved here?
Kash Patel: Yes. I can’t start saying names.
Sean Hannity: … [story about cops in his family] …restoring the FBI to its former greatness and restoring our intelligence community to its former greatness. Are you confident in this 4-year period, assuming we just have four years? I’m hoping longer. That’s possible?
Kash Patel: Yes. That’s what we’re doing. That’s what President Trump’s leading out on. people should really take a hard look at the last 14 months and some of the things we’ve talked about.
They said that none of that was possible. There’s no way you could reduce robberies in this country by 20%. There’s no way you could drop the murder rate in this country by 20%. We did all that. There’s no way you could tackle fraud in Minnesota. What did you see last week? FBI agents along with the inter agency executing 21 search warrants and raiding locations across Minnesota. Not just the fraud here, but the fraud that’s being manufactured and stood up by the CCP overseas in places like Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma. They’re standing up those scam center compounds that are defrauding senior citizens in America by the billions. Just last week, because of President Trump’s ability to have countries in the Middle East, Dubai specifically, the FBI, the Dubai police, and the MPS were on the ground. We shut down nine scam centers, freed 2,000 trafficked enslaved laborers, sent them back home, and shut down a $5 billion scam center fraud that was being perpetrated in the United States of America.
Sean Hannity: It’s crazy this level of crime, especially coming from abroad, is here.
Kash Patel: And [where] they headquartered it. So you have to root out the fraud like we’re doing on the ground in Minnesota. This is our operational plan that we’ve been executing the last year and go to places like Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma where the CCP is standing up villages of scam center compounds and work with our private sectors to annihilate them.
Sean Hannity: Is China the worst of all our geopolitical foes?
Kash Patel: Yeah, by far.
Sean Hannity: Let me ask you about this. So you know I work closely with John Solomon. We know about Arctic Frost. The summary I would give and maybe you can give yours. They actually spied without a warrant, without any basis. You talk about unreasonable search and seizure on congressmen and senators and others.
Kash Patel: Yeah. And others.
Sean Hannity: How’s that investigation going?
Kash Patel: It’s far down the track.
Sean Hannity: You feel you’re getting where you need to be?
Kash Patel: Yeah
Sean Hannity: Here’s the reporting of John Solomon. It’s not just Arctic Frost . What about Round River [Google denies it even exists! – GC], which deals with Ukraine. What about Plasmic Echo, which has to do with classified documents? And then of course, Crossfire Hurricane.
Kash Patel: All of it. All of it collectively is run on the same MO that was stood up by a weaponized law enforcement. And all of it is being uncovered and exposed by the same MO that President Trump came into office again with to root out corruption and weaponization of law enforcement. But how?
Get the documents, then get the witnesses, then get the grand jury subpoenas out, then put people in the grand jury, then build a case with our prosecutors at the same time to collectively hold these people responsible and find jurisdictions where we can prosecute them based on the law. That’s what we’re doing across the board.
Sean Hannity: Relatively speaking, things that have happened to me, like I had Jim Jordan come on my TV show once and say, “Oh, by the way, the government suppressed your social media account for the 2020 election. Or my own my private personal text messages are released publicly with people like Paul Maniffort, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Kayleigh McEnany, I mean, I would think I have a right to privacy. I’ve never committed a crime in my life except speeding and I don’t speed anymore. Nobody ever gets held accountable for that stuff. And nobody in the media ever cared ‘cuz it was me.
Kash Patel: Yeah, I know the feeling. Mine too.
Sean Hannity: And by the way, your FBI contacted me at least a couple of times through my lawyer, and said, “Oh, by the way, we think your client got hacked by Russia, China, and Iran.” My phone. First of all, why do Russia, China, and Iran want to hack my phone?
Kash Patel: Well, you got a pretty big audience, Sean. I don’t know if you noticed that. And our adversaries, look, but in all seriousness, our adversaries aren’t stupid. Why wouldn’t they target you? You’re one of the most powerful messengers of truth that there is.
Sean Hannity: They want him.
Kash Patel: So, they want you and me. I’m a sitting FBI director and I just figured out that the prior FBI illegally surveilled and collected my information.
Sean Hannity: Is there any way to keep your phone safe? ‘cuz I learned through the Nancy Guthrie case that you could think everything is deleted and you have equipment that can actually retrieve it, which I don’t think you guys want it out there . For example, if you delete your cloud, you delete your text, you delete your email, you wipe it clean and it’s still out there like hanging out in the air and it can be retrieved.
Kash Patel: Well, that’s that’s a whole separate conversation when it comes to how do we use technology and how do we use these tech companies, phone companies, social media companies, cloud services. Everybody wants the best of both worlds. They want to be able to use that and rightfully so. But they also want everything protected and that’s why it takes an act of Congress to come in with laws that we can utilize to safeguard these American citizens. I mean, China, Russia, Iran, and DPRK are never going to stop their espionage activities.
Sean Hannity: Ever.
Kash Patel: Ever. We shouldn’t expect them to.
Sean Hannity: We spy on them.
Kash Patel: But what we can do. What this FBI has done is turbocharge how we go after them. I mean, Sean, you cannot have a 43% increase in espionage arrests in 13 months unless you actually turbocharge and do what the president wants you to do, which is safeguard American citizens. So, we’re on that mission set. We’re also working with the private sector to say, “Hey, you guys and us have to work on a couple of things. Ultimately, safeguarding, you know, free speech and everybody’s right to it. But at the same time, our job in law enforcement is to safeguard your privacy.” That’s a tough balance because people want it both ways and it’s really hard to strike that balance.
Sean Hannity: So, a friend of mine who is pretty high ranking in the FBI, he’s now retired. I’ll never forget this conversation I had with him and I brought this up with with Dan. We were talking about the FBI and he volunteered to me, said if the FBI ever comes to your house, don’t talk to them. That goes against every instinct in my being, my natural reaction would be this is the FBI. I want to help the FBI. You know, if they need my assistance, how can I help you? He said, nuh-uh.
Kash Patel: That’s the ultimate goal we’re working towards, to go back to that. But that’s what we want our FBI and our law enforcement to get back to. That’s the degradation of trust that has happened.
Sean Hannity: This is a guy who loves his country. This guy was an agent’s agent. This guy risked his life all the time, was undercover for years in his life. And for him to say, “Whatever you do, don’t talk to them.” It’s probably a perjury trap. That’s what he told me. Well, look at what they did. I mean, he’s saying that because of the examples you and I have talked about. He left because of it.
Kash Patel: And here’s the other thing. I’ve got so many FBI agents. We created a new program for them to come back in. They were so fed up that they left. They’re all coming back in and helping us. And so the ultimate goal of not just holding everyone accountable for the past that we’ve talked about is, the law enforcement community you and I grew up in, me in New York too, that if a cop shows up or an agent shows up, you invite them in and say, “How can we help? We’re getting there. When I go across this country, when I visit the field offices, when I’m in the community, every single agent, analyst, and civilian tells me the same exact thing. We are feeling more safe under President Trump’s leadership than we ever have before. And we’re finally starting to trust the FBI again when they show up because look at what we’re doing. We’re responding in record speed. You see things like political violence. We’re taking that on. You see things like a political system that was used to target individuals. We took on the SPLC. Why do you think they started coming after me so hard just around the time we indicted the SPLC?
Sean Hannity: Weren’t you on their list? I know I’ve been mentioned by them a million times.
Kash Patel: The hate list. Yeah, I’m sure. These are things that Americans have wanted for a long time and we’re doing it with facts, and every time, and this you know this better than anyone, when they’re coming after you, they’ve come after President Trump and the louder the cauldron of baseless reporting is in Washington DC, the more you’re over the target. The only thing left to do is keep pummeling the target. And that’s what we’re doing with everything from the fraud investigations in Minnesota to SPLC to supporting and defending people’s right like those individuals that we just arrested for throwing a girl to the floor for expressing her freedom of speech right and basically attacking her. We got them too. We’re doing that across the country. That’s just one example. And so that’s what the American public wants. And that’s why we stood up our national mission center in the FBI. We literally, made another transformational change. What we did was we have 10 agencies in the FBI headquarters that have stood up just to ingest all of the information on social media and everywhere
else about people being attacked. We are responding to that in record time and go talk to the folks on social media and see, if when they’re being threatened, how fast this FBI responds. We’re running that and quarterbacking that operation out of this FBI.
Sean Hannity: So, we mentioned immigration, unfettered immigration. The president closed the borders. Those 12 million plus un-vetted illegals from over 200 countries, many with terror ties. I’ll tell you my other big fear is we now lived through the third assassination attempt of President Trump. [more like 5 or more with 25 incidents — GC] I know it’s outside of the FBI’s purview, but I’m concerned because I see three common traits in each example. And I’m not being critical. I mean, we saw the best in Secret Service that night at the White House correspondence dinner. You were there.
As a matter of fact, I was in touch with you. You were with the guy, I think, within probably less than 3 minutes, 5 minutes, but here’s what bothers me. I think we have a perimeter problem. In other words, I thought the perimeter in this case was too close to the venue. I think you need multiple perimeters. And if I’m wrong, tell me. I know it’s separate from the FBI. I am concerned that the whole entire hotel was not swept. I was concerned that Trump International, If you know that golf course where the treed areas are known for paparazzi, they would congregate there. They never swept that area. You have to sweep, secure, and then hold it. Make sure nobody goes in after you sweep it. And then Butler, how does somebody get within 130 yards of a president with a rifle and use a ladder to get on a roof? I’m concerned that while the agents themselves, the rank and file are doing a great job, and I’m not being critical of management. I’m just critical of, do we need a an examination or re-examining how we’re protecting our president?
Kash Patel: Well, look, Mark Wayne and I work closely, you know, every day together.
Sean Hannity: He just started, too.
Kash Patel: We’re getting better and better. But just going back to the White House correspondents dinner. You know what the American public should also be proud of is the inter agency showing up. We were all there, the media was all there, and in record time, we had the suspect subdued. I had a mobile command center stood up at the Hilton Hotel. I launched our NC3, our national crisis coordinate center at Hoover and I stood up our command center at the Washington field office. And you’re right, I was on scene. We stayed on scene. We made sure all the civilian population was safely exited from the building after the individual was secured, processed that individual immediately. The FBI agents are the ones that took him to the hospital and interrogated him on the way. And that’s why again with transparency while protecting the integrity of the investigation, we put out more information than any FBI would have on this individual in our investigation.
That night, we stayed up through the night. I stayed up with my leadership team, and got back early the next morning to make sure that we had adjudicated and, safeguarded the integrity of the investigation to make sure there’s accountability, but also to learn what we could. We’re always looking for what we can be doing better, especially when it comes to safeguarding the president of the United States.
Sean Hannity: I just think we need more perimeters further away from venues. And if you can’t sweep an entire hotel, then we can’t have our president there. Especially with the assassination culture. Three attempts against him. Charlie Kirk is dead. Charlie Kirk, you knew him. I knew him. Can’t have it.
All right. Now, let me ask you the fun questions. You know, one thing I want to ask you is about the Nancy Guthrie case. I got frustrated because I knew from my sources they were trying to keep you guys out.
Kash Patel: They did.
Sean Hannity: And look, time matters in an investigation.
Kash Patel: Look, the first 48 hours of anyone’s disappearance are the most critical. And here’s how these cases works. It is a state matter. It’s a state and local law enforcement matter. What we, the FBI, do is say, “Hey, we’re here to help. What do you need? What can we do?” And for four days, we were kept out of the investigation. And when we were finally let in, Sean, look what we did. We went in and got the Ring doorbell and we said, “Hey, is anyone talking to Google?” I called the leadership at Google and I said, “Look, we know that there was not a subscription service to capture all of the data that would have been captured had there been a subscription service. But can we go into the cache? Can we go into the data before it’s deleted and see what we can find?” That’s why you have that image because the FBI worked with Google to put that image out. Another thing we asked to do..
Sean Hannity: You guys got that tape which was the biggest breakthrough during that case.
Kash Patel: We could have gotten it days before. We could have also maybe gotten more data had we..
Sean Hannity: Why wouldn’t they want your help? Why did they send the DNA to a lab in Florida, not Quantico?
Kash Patel: That’s the other thing that you hit on, right? Again, we were saying we’ll process it. I launched hundreds of agents and intel staff to Phoenix and to Tucson just for this case, just to be on stand-by, just to do the canvasing. And we said we’ll take the DNA. And again, it’s a state and local matter, so it’s their call on where to send the DNA. We have Quantico, best lab in the world. I had a fixed wing aircraft on the ground ready to move it immediately through the night.
Sean Hannity: Did they just say no?
Kash Patel: And they said we’re sending it to Florida and and then I don’t know.
Sean Hannity: They have jurisdiction, so it’s their call. Bad call.
Kash Patel: Well, that’s for the American public to decide. And what we can do is continue to offer support. We would have analyzed it within days and maybe gotten better information or more information. Our lab’s just better than any other private lab out there and we didn’t get a chance to do that. So, I understand everybody’s frustrations on that.
Sean Hannity: No, I’m not frustrated with you. If I was the sheriff and you the FBI was willing to help me and time is of the essence, I would want all the help I can get. Okay. Let me ask you about this. And I think this is really important. You’re going to hate me, but I’m obsessed with it. The JFK files, some have been released. But not all of them. If you go back and watch any documentary of the doctors that took care of JFK at Parkland Hospital, They all said the entrance wound was here, the exit wound was here. All of them. That never changed. Then you came up with the Warren Commission. This whole idea of a magic bullet that goes from here to here, hits him, hits him, hits the, you know, okay, never made sense to me. Every time there’s been an attempt to release those files, there’s opposition. There’s got to be a reason.
Kash Patel: Yeah. And that opposition isn’t with the FBI. We don’t control.
Sean Hannity: Have you ever looked at them?
Kash Patel: We’ve examined and fully un-redacted everything that’s within our purview, but there are other agencies that have equities in that, that I can’t speak to. And so the opposition doesn’t come from this FBI or us. As I said, most transparent administration ever under President Trump, put out more documents on JFK, RFK than ever before. I can’t address the reasons why other agencies said we can’t release X for Y.
Sean Hannity: It’s seems crazy to me. I it just doesn’t seem possible. You know, when the Warren Commission comes up with this magic bullet theory and the doctors at the hospital that are.. that was the leading trauma hospital in Dallas and they all said the same thing. They think the entrance wound was here came out the back which exploded. Makes sense based on my knowledge of ballistics. Did the ballistic side of it tell you a story?
Kash Patel: So here’s the thing. It’s a tragic example of what the FBI does and can do. And then when individuals want to be allowed to target someone, they’ll target the FBI. And that’s okay. That’s their right to do that. But we work with the inter agency. We don’t have a unilateral decision point on that. We don’t. We have to respect their equities. we have to respect whatever they have that is ongoing sources or otherwise that have nothing to do with what actually happened but they’re doing something else later. And so that’s the decision making process that goes into it. As you said, and as I’ve said earlier, I’ve been more transparent than any FBI director literally ever and so has President Trump.
Sean Hannity: So the previous 10 years 13,000 documents they released and in less than a year or a little over a year you’ve been in office 41,000 in a year. Do you have a personal interest in like JFK, RFK, MLK that you would just say let me just take a look at it? Not that you have a lot of spare time on your hands.
Kash Patel: I got a lot of personal interests, but I’ll get to those on the other side of this. On another Saturday.
Sean Hannity: Okay. Then I got to get to the question of either it’s true, these people that I’ve interviewed, these documentaries that I’ve watched. I’m more and more convinced. Have you watched Agent Disclosure?
Kash Patel: I haven’t seen it.
Sean Hannity: Okay. You’re busy. You have a full-time job. I’m more and more convinced that probably and my faith tells me you know we have universes within universes. There’s no limit to God’s imagination. So the idea that there would be life on other planets that may have visited here would not at all shock or surprise me. Have you ever looked into it?
Kash Patel: We’re looking at it. Here’s the thing again.
Sean Hannity: Okay. I want all the details.
Kash Patel: Here’s the thing. Every other president before President Trump could have said, “Hey, let’s look at that and get the American people the information.” What did he do? He stood up an inter agency process with Department of War leading that effort to get out the documentation related to everything that you’re talking about, not just from the FBI, from the IC and everywhere else. And so what do we do? We already delivered our first tranche of information to that committee and they’re going to be publicly releasing this information very soon. We are all for it. There’s nothing in this subject that we’re talking about that we don’t want released. Our job at the FBI is to work with the White House and DOW, give them the information, and then they’re going to put that out in a methodical process and you’re going to start seeing those releases literally happening in the very near future. We just met on it.
Sean Hannity: Do you think we’ve ever recovered alien forms?
Kash Patel: I don’t have any information on that specific.
Sean Hannity: So, you know, Donald Trump is kind of verbose. He talks a lot.
Kash Patel: I’m going to let you tell him that.
Sean Hannity: Oh, I tell him anything I want. I have no hesitation. But he clams up on this issue and I don’t know why. I’ve never been interested in it. I’m like, I want you to get interested in it.
Kash Patel: Well, it’s just another example of President Trump listens to what the American public has an interest in. He’s got a a job that’s a billion times more busy than mine. I’m just focused on law enforcement, national security, and crushing violent crime. He’s got to do a million different things at once, and he still has the time to say, “Stand up an organization. The American public wants the documents. We’ve already delivered the documents. They’re coming out. That’s it.”
Sean Hannity: All right. My last thing I want to reiterate for people is in the what 14 months you’ve been the FBI director, what a dramatic shift. And the statistics speak for themselves. And you never get credit. Do you care about not getting credit?
Kash Patel: I don’t want me to get the credit. I don’t care about that. I care about restoring the FBI’s credibility, which is what President Trump is driving for. And I think at some point in the future, people are going to look back and say, “Look at what President Trump and the FBI did. Restored safety to communities across America.” We’re going to start hearing from all these families just generally speaking, not in the media. I mean, saying, “My kid didn’t have access to these illicit drugs in their school, and there was not an overdose. Our communities and playgrounds are safe. They’re back out there doing what they need to be doing. These kids are getting to go to college. There’s not senseless murders and robberies. Gang violence is at an all-time or getting to an all-time low.
These are things that take time to message from the American populace. And I think there’ll be a point in time where that starts meeting the statistics that we’ve laid out here. And that’s the ultimate win. That’s the job. It’s not about me. It’s about these guys and gals doing the work out there. And again, putting the mission first and giving the credit to the heroes in the field and not the monstrosity that was created in Washington DC by my predecessors, which we’ve taken a wrecking ball to. We didn’t come up with some super creative way on how to retool law enforcement. We just took what President Trump said, back the blue, and let good cops be cops. And you’re seeing the results. And we’re doing things like the FBI field manual. I’ll leave you with this. The FBI field manual, our operations guide book used to be like this. [hands one foot apart]
Approvals, requirements, authorities. I slashed that by 40%. I let all the state and local officers that came up to me over the last year and change said, “Hey, I want to be a task force officer with the FBI.” I’m like, “Great. Let’s do it.” I’ve been waiting 14 months. Why is that? Because the FBI had an internal policy that didn’t allow it. Gone. Now you can be a task force officer in 60 days. We cleared a 700 task force officer backlog. Gone. So now if you want the job, which we want you in on, now they’re coming. State and locals, they’re thrilled with that. Little things like the cross deputization, we no longer have to wait for the inter agency to deputize our task force guys. the FBI field offices where the power is in the field and the special agents in charge are now on their own for the first time ever allowed to deputize their own task force officers. Why didn’t the FBI do that before? The institution prevented it because the bureaucracy was so bloated.
Sean Hannity: You know what one of the saddest things Dan said to me in in his interview is that he thinks if they get back in power again, they’re going to want to arrest people like him and you, me probably, and anybody else they disagree with politically. That’s pretty scary. I mean, this is the US.
Kash Patel: It is scary.
Sean Hannity: That shouldn’t happen in our country.
Kash Patel: It shouldn’t. And that’s why we’re making sure we build this place into something that lasts forever. And that’s the job. That’s the behind the-scenes job. All the things we talked about, I probably haven’t ever talked about 80% of it before today. What we’re doing behind the scenes. Because it’s not the sexy changes that people, advertise, but it’s us listening to the guys and gals in the field that said, “I want this. We want intelligence to drive ops in the field. We don’t want intelligence driven Catholic memos from Washington DC.” And so we listen, Dan and I, and their current leadership. So we listen. We want task force officers. We listen. We want cross deputizations. We listen. We want more intel folks in the field. We listen. We want more agents in the field. We listen. We want to be able to get promoted in the field and not have to come back to Washington DC. We listened. We shrunk the dialogue. The operational guide book by 40%. We listened. And that is why we are moving at the speed with which we are moving because that is what President Trump promised the American people.
Sean Hannity: You know what? If we restore the FBI, our intel community, and we embrace law and order and safety and security, how can we not be a greater, safer country? And that prerequisite that I discussed earlier of law and order, safety, security to pursue happiness, then Americans will be better off.
Amazing story untold sadly. It needs to be told more. I know you don’t have a lot of time to do a lot of media. We really appreciate your time coming out and hanging out with us.
Kash Patel: Thanks for letting me hang out, Sean. I appreciate it.
Hopefully the wait will soon be over!