As the investigation into the Mar-a-Lago classified documents scandal advances, federal investigators clearly want answers from Kash Patel — a top aide to Donald Trump whom the former president tapped to coordinate with the National Archives on presidential records. In fact, it was Patel who pushed the provocative claim that Trump declassified the stolen materials before leaving office.
With this in mind, the Justice Department brought Patel before a grand jury recently to answer questions. That didn’t go well: He reportedly took the Fifth, invoking his right against self-incrimination.
The problem, of course, is that the Justice Department is still quite eager to learn what Patel knows, and with that in mind, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump associate has received an immunity deal.
A federal judge recently decided the Justice Department couldn’t force Mr. Patel to testify without such protection against his statements being used against him in some future prosecution. That ruling, the people said, opens the door for Mr. Patel, who says Mr. Trump broadly declassified White House documents while still president, to answer questions.
By all appearances, prosecutors didn’t have a whole lot of choices. They asked Patel to cooperate, and he didn’t. They tried to force him to cooperate, and a judge balked. At that point, the choices narrowed to giving up or giving Patel immunity. According to the Wall Street Journal’s report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, the Justice Department appears to have gone with the latter.
It almost certainly did not want to. As The New York Times explained last week, “Prosecutors loathe giving witnesses immunity, particularly in high-profile cases, because it makes it significantly more difficult to prosecute the individual who has received it, according to legal experts.”
Andrew Weissmann, a longtime Justice Department veteran and MSNBC contributor, noted on Twitter overnight that the strategy is not without risk: Much of what happens now will depend on what Patel is prepared to say and whether he tells the truth.
The uncertainty should probably give Trump pause, given that Patel knows a great deal about what actually happened behind the scenes. That said, Patel also made an appearance on a conservative media outlet yesterday and endorsed cutting funding for federal law enforcement — offering a fresh reminder about his perspective.
As for Patel’s background, in case anyone needs a refresher, let’s briefly circle back to our coverage from last week. Patel first came to national attention during Donald Trump’s first impeachment scandal. Fiona Hill, the former top Russia expert at the White House National Security Council, told Congress that she discovered that Trump was ignoring the NSC’s Ukraine expert, choosing instead to listen to Patel — which struck Hill as quite odd.
In fact, Patel had no expertise on Ukraine, though he was an aide to then-Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and the alleged co-author of the hopelessly misguided “Nunes Memo” on the Russia scandal. With this in mind, Hill found it necessary to warn her staff to be “very careful” about communications with the Republican operative, and she removed Patel from internal distribution lists. A year later, as regular readers might recall, Trump gave him a promotion, and Patel landed a plum assignment at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Nine months later, the outgoing Republican president gave Patel another promotion, naming him to a prominent position at the Pentagon. By some accounts, Trump, after his 2020 defeat, even wanted to make Patel the deputy director of the CIA, though other insiders pushed back aggressively and derailed the idea. Former Attorney General William Barr wrote in his memoir that Trump also considered making Patel the deputy director of the FBI, though Barr said he told the White House that would happen “over my dead body.” In the wake of the 2020 results, the operative stuck with Trump, who designated him as of one of his representatives to the National Archives and Records Administration to deal with his presidential records. Now, Patel is one of the most important witnesses in an investigation that might lead to the first indictment of a former American president. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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