When podcasters become directors

This report [gift link] on Kash Patel is amazing stuff, in the pejorative sense:

Every May, there’s a Five Eyes conference with the head of every intelligence agency. This year it was in the U.K. Kash Patel is going. In the lead-up to that, his detail starts making crazy requests. He’s got special requirements on everything. And the Brits are getting pissed.

Before the conference, his staff says he’s unhappy because he doesn’t like meetings in office settings. What he wants is social events. He wants Premier soccer games. He wants to go jet skiing. He’d like a helicopter tour. Everyone who heard about this was like: Hold on. Is he really going to ask the MI5 director to go jet skiing instead of meeting? The schedule is set, and every Five Eyes partner is doing this. They can’t just say that he’s not participating and instead he wants to go to a Premier soccer game. This is a job, guys.

His staff only cared about three things: what his meals were, when his workouts would be and what his entertainment would be. The biggest plan is how he’s going to get his girlfriend in there so she can go to Windsor Castle. He’s got Nicole Rucker as his assistant, like a true executive concierge. And when she’s not getting the food or the workout she wants, she’ll just start screaming at people, Make it happen!

His staff was briefed multiple times that the Brits were going to want to talk about an F.B.I. position in London that has been pulled. The F.B.I. is arguably their most important partner. MI5 is 5,000 people. The F.B.I. is 38,000. If MI5 ceased to exist, it would be very bad for us. If we cease to exist, it would be an existential threat for them. That person was working on a ton of sensitive stuff, including embassy penetrations and technology, and they want this position back. So Ken McCallum, the MI5 director, goes to Kash Patel at the conference and says: Hey, we really need this position. It’s so important for our mutual benefit. And Kash says: Yep, that person’s going nowhere. She’s absolutely staying. And the Brits rejoice.

Two weeks later, he reverses himself and removes her. The Brits are outraged. Kash will make promises and he will break them, and he doesn’t worry about that.

The guy is basically using a top-level executive position to cosplay as a Vegas whale while also randomly destroying things on behalf of Donald Trump.

The Emil Bove era alone was a shitshow that will have ramifications for a long time:

Maria Ricci, former assistant special agent in charge of the Washington field office: The news hit about the list and the survey, and it was mass chaos. People who worked on real sensitive cases — Jan. 6, the special-counsel investigations, the public-corruption side of the Trump investigation — were packing up their bags and assuming they were about to be fired. People were crying, taking down family pictures from their desks because they were afraid that they wouldn’t be let back in on Monday. This was at the same time that some of the people who worked on those cases were working on the plane crash in the Potomac. They were diving out there finding dead bodies and being told that they were going to be fired.

Northwest special agent: If you really dig deep down, it’s not just the case agents. Those cases involved a whole host of other people, like surveillance, negotiators, SWAT teams. It’s hard not to have touched one of those cases in some way. Maybe even more so than 9/11, because Jan. 6 was the largest investigation in the history of the bureau.

Michael Feinberg, former assistant special agent in charge of the field office in Norfolk, Va.: Emil Bove did not care that individual agents have no say in what matters they work on. You get assigned investigations. There were many agents who ended up on that list who had misgivings about how aggressively Jan. 6 was investigated. So there was a real sense that there was a sort of random persecution going on rather than actually figuring out who was making operational decisions and assigning responsibility to senior executives.

Bove was viewed by the F.B.I. work force not only as somebody whose integrity could not be trusted but as this almost cartoonish figure halfway between a mob enforcer and the grim reaper.

I recommend the whole thing, if you have the stomach for it.