Kash Patel’s Defense for Firing FBI Agents Will Make Your Head Spin

Kash Patel got slammed Tuesday for complaining that a Democratic senator’s question didn’t include the FBI director’s side of the story—while refusing to provide an answer.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Ranking Democrat Dick Durbin asked Patel to explain why he had fired FBI field officers and combat veterans Chris Meyer and Walter Giardina in August, even after Patel was warned that their terminations were unlawful.

“It appears that you terminated these two agents. Why?” asked Durbin.

“I’m not going to get into personnel decisions that we made,” Patel replied.

“So you’re not accountable for your decisions to take people who’ve served our country so admirably, and terminate them without any cause?” Durbin asked.

“That’s a one-sided story,” Patel said.

“So, tell your side of the story,” Durbin interjected, but Patel kept ranting.

“Anyone that has been terminated from the FBI generally speaking failed to meet the needs of the FBI and uphold their constitutional duties, and you providing a one-sided story from your perch is absolutely disgraceful because the men and women of the FBI deserve better,” Patel continued. “And your attack on the current leadership of the men and women of the FBI is equally disgraceful, ’cause now you’re attacking the leaders that are our brave SACs in the field that are doing the job that this county needs, and we will continue to do it.”

“It’s disgraceful when Mr. Meyer and Mr. Giardina, who served our country so well, are terminated apparently because of the rants of a podcaster,” Durbin said.

“That is your opinion, it is not a fact,” Patel retorted.

“Well, it certainly is my opinion I could back up with fact,” Durbin said.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that Meyer had been removed after a pro-Trump influencer had falsely declared him the “main” agent behind the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago that allegedly uncovered a trove of classified documents. But Meyer said he wasn’t assigned to the operation. Senator Chuck Grassley had relayed claims from whistleblowers who accused Giardina of only expressing animosity toward Donald Trump and claimed he had corroborated the infamous Steele dossier. Giardina vehemently denied those accusations and said he never worked on the Steele dossier.

In July, Steven Jensen, the head of the FBI field office in Washington, D.C., urged Patel to shield Giardina, who he felt was being unfairly targeted while his wife was dying from an aggressive form of cancer—but Patel fired him anyway, and then fired Jensen too.

President Trump has thrown his full support behind his administration’s hypocritical, McCarthyite censorship campaign.

“What do you make of Pam Bondi saying she’s gonna go after hate speech? … A lot of your allies say hate speech is free speech,” a reporter asked Trump on Tuesday as he was about to board his flight to the United Kingdom.

“[We’ll] probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly, it’s hate. You have a lotta hate in your heart,” Trump said, threatening the reporter and mostly ignoring the actual question.

“Would that be appropriate?”

“Maybe they’ll come after ABC. Well ABC paid me $16 million recently for a form of hate speech, right? Your company paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech. So maybe they’ll have to go after you.”

The president is referring to the lawsuit he filed against ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, after the host said Trump was “liable for rape” while discussing Trump’s E. Jean Carroll case verdict in which he was actually liable for “sexual abuse.” And while a judge even acknowledged that the difference was semantic, ABC settled to avoid any further damage to its Disney ownership, giving Trump a victory in the process.

As for Bondi, she’s been pushing the same disinformation campaign that every conservative seems to be signing on to right now in an effort to take First Amendment rights from anyone they don’t like.

“There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society,” Bondi told Katie Miller, wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, on her podcast on Monday. “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”

This is a complete about-face that goes against everything the right—and Kirk himself—has been saying for nearly a decade. They’re just praying we don’t notice.

The Trump administration’s censorship campaign has extended to the National Park Service.

The White House has ordered the removal of signs and exhibits documenting American slavery, including a 1863 portrait of an ex-slave, often referred to as either Peter or Gordon, and the thick, variegated whip scars on his “scourged back.” Gordon’s photograph became one of the most widely circulated images of the horrors of U.S. slavery during the abolitionist movement.

The mass information scrub is all in an effort to make the Park Service compliant with Donald Trump’s March executive order that directed the Interior Department to erase any information that could be misconstrued as a “corrosive ideology,” according to four sources that spoke with The Washington Post.

That order has been interpreted by the Parks Service to mean any information relating to racism, sexism, slavery, gay rights, or the persecution of Native Americans, the Post reported Monday night.

Sites affected include Harpers Ferry National Historic Park in West Virginia, where abolitionist John Brown led an unsuccessful raid that eventually led to his capture and the start of the Civil War. Staff at Harpers Ferry flagged more than 30 signs, according to the Post.

Another affected site is the President’s House Site in Philadelphia, where George Washington kept slaves. Exhibits at that location apparently do not comply with the Park Service’s new order, according to sources that spoke with the Post.  

All signage under the department’s purview is subject to review, according to Park Service spokesperson Rachel Pawlitz.

“Interpretive materials that disproportionately emphasize negative aspects of U.S. history or historical figures, without acknowledging broader context or national progress, can unintentionally distort understanding rather than enrich it,” Pawlitz said.

But the White House’s intrusion is historically unprecedented, according to historians.

“This represents an enormous increase in federal power and control over the things we learn,” Jonathan Zimmerman, a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies the history of education, told the Post. “Brought to you by the team that says education should be state and local.”

America’s parks aren’t the only ones undergoing an enormous rescission. Over the course of the summer, the president has wielded a heavy hand in reshaping the Kennedy Center’s programming, and forced the Smithsonian Museum to remove mentions of Trump from its exhibit on impeachments under pressure from the White House. (Those mentions were later reinstated.) 

The administration also issued a memo challenging the application of educational lenses on race, gender, and oppression in U.S. history, and accused the Smithsonian directly of advancing a “divisive, race-centered ideology.” 

Attorney General Pam Bondi is earning scorn—even in the MAGA media ecosystem—for her uninformed claim that the First Amendment has a hate speech exception.

Bondi made the distinction in a Monday appearance on The Katie Miller Podcast, suggesting that hate speech—specifically with regard to the slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk—will “absolutely” be targeted by the Justice Department.

“There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie in our society,” she said. “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything, and that’s across the aisle.

Observers on the right were quick to call out her threat to get the government involved in the reckless doxing campaign MAGA is leading against people accused (often falsely) of glorifying Kirk’s death online.

Many noted that Kirk himself once tweeted, “Hate speech does not exist legally in America.”

“There obviously shouldn’t be any legal repercussions for ‘hate speech,’ which is not even a valid or coherent concept,” wrote podcaster Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire on X—though he said those who celebrate Kirk’s death should face social consequences. “We don’t need Pam Bondi swooping in to throw the entire conversation off the rails by completely missing our point,” he continued. “And having a ‘hate speech’ crackdown in the name of Charlie Kirk—a man who absolutely rejected ‘hate speech’ laws—is especially grotesque.”

Right-wing commentator Savannah Hernandez called Bondi’s sentiment “destructive,” adding, “She needs to be removed as attorney general now.” Talk show host Dave Rubin similarly called for Bondi’s “immediate resignation,” describing her statement as an “unbelievably bad take.” Provocateur Mike Cernovich tweeted that the “hate speech” claim, paired with Bondi’s mishandling of the case of Jeffrey Epstein, shows that the attorney general “really isn’t ready for this moment.”

“Our Attorney General is apparently a moron,” wrote conservative radio host Erick Erickson.

Bondi sought to do damage control Tuesday morning, stating on X, “Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment.”

The GOP has turned so hard on free speech that now even “libertarian” Rand Paul is calling for a “crackdown” on those using their First Amendment rights.

“I was assaulted six, seven years ago, attacked from behind, had six ribs broken and part of my lung removed, and still online, on a daily basis people say they wish that it would happen to me all over again,” Paul said Tuesday on Fox Business. “And by sort of making light of what I suffered, they are encouraging other people to do it. That oughta be taken down, and social media oughta be able to take that down.

“People say, ‘Oh people have a right to say things.’ Well, actually, they don’t necessarily have a right to say things; many people have in their contract what we call a morals clause … or a conduct clause,” Paul continued, as he compared the First Amendment to a military conduct code. “I think it is time for this to be a crackdown on people.”

While it’s ironic to hear a libertarian talk about attacking free speech and civil liberties, that has been all too common in the days following Charlie Kirk’s assassination. People who were haranguing liberals and leftists for policing speech are now going full Big Brother. Vice President JD Vance (who chided all of Europe over free speech in February) said on Monday, “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out, and, hell, call their employer.” Other right-wing ghouls like Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok and Laura Loomer have also been on an intense, often inaccurate doxing campaign of anyone they think is saying bad stuff about a man who made a career off of his own hateful speech. And The Washington Post fired opinion columnist Karen Attiah for expressing very measured opinions about Kirk’s politics.

Republicans are banking on the electorate being too obtuse to notice their obvious hypocrisy. But people like Zeteo’s Medhi Hasan are already noticing, and using Charlie Kirk’s own words to call them out.

“Hate speech does not legally exist in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech,” Kirk said last year on X, as Hasan pointed out. “And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”

A New York state court on Tuesday dismissed all terrorism charges against Luigi Mangione, the 27-year-old accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, with Judge Gregory Carro ruling they were “legally insufficient.”

To meet the definition of terrorism, Carro noted, an action must have the intent to “intimidate and coerce a civilian population.”

But while the prosecution put “great emphasis on [Mangione’s] ‘ideological’ motive,” Carro wrote, ideological belief does not necessarily meet that criteria, despite the prosecution falsely conflating the two.

“There is no indication in the statute that a murder committed for ideological reasons (in this case, the defendant’s apparent desire to draw attention to what he perceived as inequities or greed within the American health care system), fits within the definition of terrorism, without establishing the necessary element of an intent to intimidate or coerce,” Carro ruled.

“While the defendant was clearly expressing an animus toward UHC, and the health care industry generally, it does not follow that his goal was to ‘intimidate and coerce a civilian population,’” and there was “no evidence presented” that he had such a goal, the judge said.

Mangione still faces second-degree murder charges in New York, as well as federal charges and Pennsylvania state charges.

This story has been updated.

Attorney General Pam Bondi accidentally revealed that she doesn’t have a clue how First Amendment law works in the United States—that, or she just doesn’t care.

Speaking on The Katie Miller Podcast Monday, Bondi, who regularly pushes the legal limits to support President Donald Trump, said she planned to crack down on “hate speech” following the death of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

“There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie in our society,” she said, adding: “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything, and that’s across the aisle.”

But Bondi may have a hard time “targeting” anyone, as there is no legal definition for hate speech in the United States, and it is generally protected by the First Amendment—no matter how heinous.

It also seems clear that, despite her words, Bondi has her own narrow definition of hate speech—specifically, that it was only rhetoric about right-wing figures. For example, she seems entirely unbothered by her boss calling his political enemies “vermin,” promising to imprison his opponents, and joking about Nancy Pelosi and her husband being attacked or putting Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad.

Later, speaking on Fox News, Bondi claimed that employers had an “obligation” to fire workers who spoke ill of conservatives.

“You need to look at people who are saying horrible things. And they shouldn’t be working with you,” she said. “Businesses cannot discriminate. If you wanna go in and print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute you for that.”

Crucially, there is no legal obligation to get rid of employees for their speech. Businesses are barred from discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex, or national origin—not political affiliation. They can discriminate based on speech, but only if it targets one of those protected characteristics.

Bondi’s remarks quickly summoned a torrent of criticism from figures across the political spectrum with any knowledge of how the First Amendment works. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh wrote on X that there “obviously shouldn’t be any legal repercussions for ‘hate speech,’” and conservative talk show host Erick Erickson noted, “Our attorney general is apparently a moron.”

The attorney general tried desperately to defend herself Tuesday.

“Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment,” she wrote on X. “It’s a crime. For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over.”

Bondi cited a federal law stating it was illegal to transmit “any communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another” across state borders. She also cited a federal law that bars using the U.S. Postal Service to send threats, and another law against threatening to assault the family members of public officials.

“You cannot call for someone’s murder. You cannot swat a Member of Congress. You cannot dox a conservative family and think it will be brushed off as ‘free speech.’ These acts are punishable crimes, and every single threat will be met with the full force of the law,” she wrote. “Free speech protects ideas, debate, even dissent but it does NOT and will NEVER protect violence.”

In fact, it’s the far right that has undertaken a massive doxing campaign in the wake of Kirk’s death.

Bondi even noted that she didn’t think hate speech cut both ways. “It is clear this violent rhetoric is designed to silence others from voicing conservative ideals,” she added.

Donald Trump has once again turned to the court system to do his dirty work.

The commander in chief announced a $15 billion defamation lawsuit against The New York Times Monday night, claiming that the paper had deliberately lied about MAGA conservatives and the “nation as a whole.”

“Today, I have the Great Honor of bringing a $15 Billion Dollar [sic] Defamation and Libel Lawsuit against The New York Times, one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country, becoming a virtual ‘mouthpiece’ for the Radical Left Democrat Party,” Trump posted to Truth Social. “I view it as the single largest illegal Campaign contribution, EVER.”

He also took particular issue with the Times’ 2024 endorsement of former Vice President Kamala Harris—a tradition that practically every newspaper editorial board partakes in.

“Their Endorsement of Kamala Harris was actually put dead center on the front page of The New York Times, something heretofore UNHEARD OF!” he wrote.

Trump made it very clear where he pulled his inspiration and precedent for the behemoth lawsuit: his prior “successful litigation against George Slopadopoulos/ABC/Disney, and 60 Minutes/CBS/Paramount,” which he claimed had smeared him via routine editing decisions made regarding a sit-down interview with Harris last year.

Trump insisted that the network had selectively edited Harris’s answers to a question regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a detail made all the more confusing since CBS’s 60 Minutes and Face the Nation cut and aired different portions of her 21-second response on different days. An independent review by the Federal Communications Commission showed that the two answers were in fact cut from the same longer response, and media law experts believed that Trump’s legal offensive would be an easy win for CBS.

But in July, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, settled the apparently cut-and-dry lawsuit with Trump—much to the dismay of network staff—so that Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, could close a multibillion-dollar merger that required the Trump administration’s sign-off.

The fallout of the interview—and Trump’s response to it—have been cataclysmic. The longtime head of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, quit after Paramount executives attempted to interfere with the show’s content, reportedly pressuring him to change how the show reports on the president. The former president of CBS, Wendy McMahon, resigned under similar circumstances shortly afterward.

Trump had promised to rope the Times into the lawsuit for months, arguing that the paper’s decision to report on the lawsuit was tantamount to tortious interference.

A spokesperson for the Times roundly rejected Trump’s suit.

“This lawsuit has no merit,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “It lacks any legitimate legal claims and instead is an attempt to stifle and discourage independent reporting. The New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics. We will continue to pursue the facts without fear or favor and stand up for journalists’ First Amendment right to ask questions on behalf of the American people.”

This story has been updated.

A New York Times exposé published Monday tells the tale of two back-to-back deals that enriched three powerful families: the Trumps, the Witkoffs (as in Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff), and the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates.

In one deal, announced in May, a firm of Emirati royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan invested $2 billion in World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company owned by the Trump and Witkoff families—which consequently became among the most prominent crypto firms overnight.

In the other, negotiated “at the same time and by some of the same people,” the White House two weeks later agreed to sell the UAE hundreds of thousands of the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence chips, despite national security concerns.

The Times revealed that some officials in the Trump administration were wary about the chip deal due to UAE-China ties. But a key dissenter at the National Security Council, David Feith, was taken out of the equation when MAGA provocateur Laura Loomer questioned his (and five other NSC members’) loyalty, leading to their removal by the president. Silicon Valley investor David Sacks, Trump’s AI and crypto czar, then took a leading role in the negotiations—and received a White House ethics waiver in order to do so.

While the Times reports that there is no evidence that the two deals constituted an explicit quid pro quo—and the White House, and those involved, maintains they were not linked—they do “violate longstanding norms in the United States for political, diplomatic and private deal-making among senior officials and their children,” according to ethics lawyers cited in the report.

On Bluesky, economist Ryan Cummings, who served on President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote that the deals, if linked, would represent, by far, “the largest public corruption scandal in the history of the United States”—amounting to a $2 billion bribe, whereas the most comparable incident, the Harding administration’s Teapot Dome scandal, involved bribes amounting to about $10 million in today’s dollars, he said.

Dan Nexon, a political scientist at Georgetown University, observed that the report reveals how “U.S. foreign policy is much easier to understand once you accept that the main ‘grand strategy’ of the Trump administration is straight-up kleptocracy.”

“The Trump Administration is cashing in on foreign crypto deals—and weakening guardrails that protect our advanced technology,” wrote Senator Elizabeth Warren on X. “We should not pass any crypto legislation without shutting this down.”

President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi want to “Make Memphis Great Again.”

On Monday, the president signed a presidential memorandum to establish the “Memphis Safe Task Force,” delivering on weeks of threats to send federally controlled law enforcement into the Blackest city in America. The National Guard, FBI, ATF, DEA, ICE, Homeland Security Investigations, and the U.S. Marshals will all be present.

Trump used a perceived crime wave as justification for the memorandum, a move similar to his federal takeover of D.C. last month.

“A person is four times more likely to be murdered in Memphis, Tennessee, today than in Mexico City. And you know Mexico City is not a cakewalk,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “It’s been overrun with carjackings, robberies, shootings, and killings … so we’re not gonna allow this kind of savagery to destroy our society anymore. We’re stopping it.”

Trump also reaffirmed that he was still planning the same operation in Chicago, although he noted that the administration would wait a bit, perhaps to prepare legal defenses to the lawsuit that would surely come from Illinois Governor JB Pritzker.

Trump’s attack on Memphis—along with his threats to Chicago and Baltimore—reaffirms his aggressiveness toward Democratic, majority-Black cities with Black leaders.

Memphis Mayor Paul Young has already made his disapproval of the president’s decision clear.

“It’s not something that I believe is going to reduce crime in our city. I think that the way to reduce crime is to invest in the things that are going to intervene and prevent crime in the first place,” Young told the Reverend Al Sharpton Sunday on MSNBC.

This story has been updated.