The Washington Post’s man at the CIA, David Ignatius, has a column in the Aug. 21 issue on Kashyap ("Kash") Patel, who along with John Solomon has been designated by former President Donald Trump as representing the response to the Mar-a-Lago search raid. Ignatius is building a file on Patel; he wrote columns on Patel’s centrality to Trump’s opposition to NATO wars, in April and May 2021. This new column shows what Ignatius cleverly tries to use it to deny; namely, that Patel himself, and his work for President Trump as well as former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), were major targets of that raid. Patel’s rapid-fire series of assignments for Nunes, as chairman and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, and then for President Trump at the Office of National Intelligence, the CIA and the Defense Department, had two foci: discrediting the FBI’s “Crossfire Razor” and “Crossfire Hurricane” reports which tried to call Trump an agent of the Russian adversary; and executing Trump’s orders to withdraw American troops from NATO wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Somalia.
Patel’s brief successes in the second area of assignment were repeatedly overturned, primarily because Trump lacked the courage of his convictions and backed down whenever challenged by the military and intelligence agencies.
The former President often showed the same tendency when it came to “declassifying” secret documents. But in that area there were a series of reports Patel was and is trying to get released, which were written under his direction or by him, and which showed, Ignatius rather admits, that the FBI and agencies working with it were aiming to define Russia as a dangerous adversary and portray Trump as working for Putin in some way—and that the “Crossfire” reports were false.
