Cash Patel: FBI Director Apparently Paying Off FBI Allies With Personal Slush Fund

from the ivory-back-scratching dept

This is not the only administration to engage in corruption. Most administrations have to some extent. It’s that corruption is the everyday, front-page business of this administration. It’s so brazen, it’s insulting. It demands Americans pretend nothing matters but what Trump wants and, to a lesser extent, whatever his current roster of obliging subservients want.

Even MAGA should be angry. But this political movement is as bereft of intellectual honesty as it is bereft of anything approaching normal human intelligence. It’s millions of people willing to be peasants just because the king has promised to make things even worse for their fellow human beings.

We, the people, end up with daily fuckery, composed and carried out by chinless nepo babies, former Fox commentators and far right podcasters, multiply-disgraced, massively-underqualified members of Trump’s personal legal team, Marco Fucking Rubio, and the homunculus currently doing business as “Stephen Miller.”

Then there’s Kash Patel — a guy who would have been derided as a diversity hire by the MAGA crowd if he hadn’t been given the top spot in the FBI by Donald Trump. Less than 18 months into his tenure, Patel is best known for partying with sports teams, abusing government airplane privileges, spending more time in nightclubs than in his office (ALLEGEDLY), and performing loyalty tests of FBI agents and officials, most often in the form of polygraph tests.

Trump’s slush fund for insurrectionists might be as (nearly!) dead in the water as the Faith No More fish (you know the one…), but Patel has apparently found a way to misuse public funds to reward loyalists willing to ride or die with a man who has managed to (ALLEGEDLY) drink his lack of qualifications under the table.

“We have been receiving troubling reports that you may be using part of the budget of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a personal slush fund to make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in unlawful ‘bonus’ payments to loyalist MAGA henchmen who have engaged in misconduct,” says a letter from Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., to Patel, obtained exclusively by MS NOW.

Committee Democrats have information that Patel has issued more than $1 million in awards, the letter says. The letter says the money went to special agents serving on his Director’s Advisory Team, which Raskin’s letter describes as “a curated group of agents who are willing to carry out your unlawful partisan and personal orders.” It also went to agents on Patel’s security detail, “circumventing the mandatory maximum pay caps established by statute,” the letter says.

I’ve got to hand it to Raskin. While some will (dishonestly) object to the tone of this official letter, it’s written in a form MAGA understands: direct accusations, delivered with contempt. Most official letters/queries sent by legislators are a bit more polite and tend to treat accusations as unconfirmed suspicions, even when the accusers have the facts in hand to deliver unqualified accusations.

This letter forgoes those niceties. That makes it much more difficult for the FBI and/or Kash Patel himself to dispute the accusations. When punches aren’t pulled, the administration has to defend itself in kind. Since it far prefers to bully people who aren’t willing to deliver the first blow, it seems unsure of how to handle this:

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment by MS NOW.

The FBI has maintained its silence even after Sen. Raskin made the letter public by publishing it to the Judiciary Committee’s website. And what’s detailed there definitely looks like the actions of a binge drinker — you know, the magical moment in a bar evening when the contents of your wallet suddenly turn into Monopoly money and you don’t realize just how much damage you’ve done to your bank account until the NSF push notifications start rolling in:

In some cases, nearly $8,000 payments have been made to multiple individuals every two-week pay period despite many of the beneficiaries of your selective generosity already maxing out on a federal employee’s salary. While it is unclear at this time exactly how much each of the agents has received, we can confirm that numerous loyalist employees have received at least five such payments in consecutive pay periods, amounting to nearly $40,000 per agent. We can also confirm you have depleted the FBI reserve accounts for bonus payments at such a frenzied rate that some of the payments have bounced back from exhausted accounts.

That’s insane. On one hand, you have the drunk-on-a-spending-spree indicators: a guy who doesn’t know how much money he’s spent or from what account until someone else notifies him of his overdrafts.

On the other hand, you have the ugly reality of the situation: this is what it takes to keep FBI employees “bought.” The payments are large and happen frequently, strongly suggesting loyalty to his MAGA twist on FBI day-to-day operations lasts — at most — up until the next paycheck hits the bank. If you’re buying loyalty two weeks at a time, you’re not a benefactor. You’re a blackmail victim.

Either Kash Patel thinks he can throw money at any problem that can’t be solved with a lie detector test and a swift dismissal or agents have figured out they can make bank by pretending to be on board with whatever vengeful kick the director happens to be on that particular week. And I’ll be honest: I prefer a yes man who’s in it for personal profit to a yes man that’s in it because toadying is the only life-hack they know.

Whatever the equation, it all comes down to Patel being an absolute chump. Every negative headline increases the chance of him being tossed aside by the man whose boots he’s been licking for most of the last decade. And I can bet that most of these people walking away with inflated paychecks can easily see the buttons they need to push to ensure they get their loyalty bonuses, week in and week out.

Filed Under: corruption, day drinking, fbi, jamie raskin, kash patel, maga, slush fund, trump administration