When Donald Trump talks about using government power to go after his perceived political foes, he doesn’t just refer to current and former officials. In recent months, for example, the former president has repeatedly raised the specter of using federal powers to crack down on news organizations that report information he doesn’t like.
People close to the Republican keep suggesting that Team Trump is quite serious about this. The New York Times reported:
A confidant of Donald J. Trump who is likely to serve in a senior national security role in any new Trump administration threatened on Tuesday to target journalists for prosecution if the former president regains the White House. The confidant, Kash Patel, who served as Mr. Trump’s counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council and also as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, made the remarks on a podcast hosted by Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former strategist, during a discussion about a potential second Trump presidency beginning in 2025.
“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel said. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
He went on to say, “We’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.”
Patel didn’t appear to be kidding.
Kash Patel says as Trump’s next CIA Director he will lead “patriots” appointed by Trump in an all-out effort to prosecute and jail people in government and the media: “We will find the conspirators in govt and the media. Yes, we are going to come after the people in the media.” pic.twitter.com/NuLyqOIKWO
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 5, 2023
In fairness, it’s worth noting that a spokesperson for Patel told the Times that in the same on-air appearance, the former Trump administration official would “follow the facts and the law.” Patel himself said in a written statement, “When President Trump takes office in 2025, we will prosecute anyone that broke the law and end the weaponized, two tier system of justice.”
In reality, our system of justice has not been weaponized.
Nevertheless, Patel said — out loud, on the record, while being recorded — that a second Trump administration intends to seek out “conspirators” in news organizations. There’s nothing subtle about, “We’re going to come after you,” while referencing the possibility of criminal charges.
In case anyone needs a refresher, Patel is not just some random figure in the former president’s orbit.
As regular readers might recall, he first came to national attention during 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 the then-president 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 a congressional aide. 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, 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. In fact, the former president designated Patel as of one of his representatives to the National Archives and Records Administration to deal with his presidential records — which in turn made Patel a relevant figure in the Mar-a-Lago scandal. (He later asserted his Fifth Amendment rights in front of a grand jury.) I mention this context because while there are plenty of Republican voices who can accurately be described as Trump “associates,” Patel is an actual insider. When he uses words like “we” and “us,” he’s speaking as someone who fully expects to have a leadership role in a prospective second Trump White House. And with this in mind, when Patel said the government would go after news organizations in the wake of the 2024 election, the rhetoric shouldn’t be casually overlooked. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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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