Everyone on Team Trump Is Pissed at Kash Patel

Kash Patel’s tenure as FBI director is not winning him friends in the Trump administration.

His firing of at least 30 bureau agents for being hostile to conservatism or President Trump has drawn the ire of the FBI’s rank-and-file personnel, for one. And he irked the Justice Department with his announcement that the “FBI thwarted a potential terrorist attack” on Halloween, despite the fact that no charges had been filed and local police didn’t have details. 

Officials at the DOJ told the White House that Patel’s early announcement had hurt the investigation, The Wall Street Journal reports, and led two friends of the suspects to move up plans to leave the country. His firings have also drawn the ire of the FBI Agents Association, which said in a statement that Patel had “launched a campaign of erratic and arbitrary retribution.”

“FBI Agents deal in facts, and we urge Director Patel to do the same,” the statement said.

Plus, Patel used a private FBI jet to see his girlfriend, singer Alexis Wilkins, perform at a wrestling event in Pennsylvania, and later travel to her Nashville home in the midst of a government shutdown. Patel continued to use the jet after that to travel to the Boondoggle Ranch, a hunting resort in Texas owned by the family of a Republican donor, C.R. “Bubba” Saulsbury Jr., according to the Journal, and also visited Scotland in August. 

Ironically, before becoming FBI director, Patel derided the use of a private jet by previous FBI directors. “Chris Wray, hey, you don’t need a government-funded G5 jet so you can fly off to the Adirondacks for vacation,” Patel said on a podcast in 2023.  

The newspaper reports that Trump has expressed his displeasure with Patel in private, although he continues to lend his support to the director. Trump was reportedly upset that Patel hadn’t fired disloyal FBI agents fast enough, and didn’t like how Patel handled the review of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. If the negative press continues, Patel might find his job in jeopardy. 

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have leaked three email exchanges from disgraced sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that allege that President Donald Trump was fully aware of his pedophilia and abuse, stating that his former close friend “knew about the girls.” 

“i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump [sic]. [Redacted] spent hours at my house with him ,, [sic] he has never once been mentioned. police chief etc,” Epstein wrote in 2011 to his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, allegedly referring to one of his sex-trafficking victims. 

“I have been thinking about that…” Maxwell responded. 

In another email to author Michael Wolff, Epstein implies that Trump knew Maxwell was trafficking young women who worked at Mar-a-Lago.

“trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever.  .  of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop,” he wrote.

Yet another email from December 15, 2015, shows Wolff informing Epstein that CNN was going to ask Trump about their relationship at the next presidential debate.

“if we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?” Epstein asked.

“If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency,” Wolff replied, insinuating that Epstein’s word could sink candidate Trump’s reputation. “You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.” Trump was not asked about Epstein at the debate. 

This issue just won’t go away no matter how hard the president tries. From Attorney General Pam Bondi’s botched “client list” reveal to the rushed cover-up and closing of the case, each step the Trump administration has taken to absolve the president—who was close friends with the sex predator—has only led to more startling evidence and more scrutiny. From the birthday book to these emails, it seems highly likely that Trump has not been completely truthful about his relationship with Epstein and knowledge of his heinous activity. And while Trump has shrugged the case off as “stupid” and a “Democrat hoax” in the past, recent developments only indicate that this saga is nowhere near a conclusion.   

The president has yet to respond to the email leaks.

Read the full emails here.

In spite of the Trump administration’s aggressive anti-immigration agenda, the president actually believes that the United States doesn’t have the homegrown talent to excel on its own.

Donald Trump made that much clear during an interview with Fox News Tuesday, ardently defending the H-1B visa, a costly program that allows skilled foreign workers a chance to temporarily work within the U.S., while boasting about America’s AI prowess in comparison to China.

“And does that mean the H-1B visa thing will not be a big priority for your administration? Because if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can’t flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers,” said host Laura Ingraham.

But that’s where the president disagreed, arguing that the country needs foreigners to fill American jobs in order to Make America Great Again.

“You also do have to bring in talent,” Trump said.

“We have plenty of talented people here,” pressed Ingraham.

“No you don’t, no you don’t,” Trump said. “No, you don’t have certain talents. And you have to—people have to learn.”

“You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory and we’re going to make missiles’—”, Trump continued before Ingraham interjected.

“How did we ever do it before?” she said, likely referring to the mass mobilization of American factory workers during World War II.

MAGA blasted the interview, furious at the president’s waffling nationalism and his apparent doubt in American excellence.

“I’m sorry but what the fuck is this?” wrote The Blaze’s Logan Hall. “American talent split the atom and went to the moon. American talent built everything the modern world takes for granted now. Give me a break. This is insanity.”

Republican politician and Lake County, Florida, commissioner Anthony Sabatini warned that Trump’s rhetoric could make the GOP lose the midterms.

“We’ve never seen an administration crash & burn in its first year so badly—for no reason other than to appease donors & special interests,” Sabatini posted on X. “Trump has surrounded himself with the worst people.”

Other conservative commentators felt that Trump’s message was remarkably simple.

“Trump hates America and Americans,” tweeted the New York Post’s Kevin Bass. “This is the only explanation I can come up with for this pattern of behavior.… He wants to import the third world to take Americans’ jobs.”

It’s a philosophy that Trump could have picked up from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who vehemently fought to keep the program when it came under fire from MAGA acolytes earlier this year. At the time, Musk argued that there is a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” in the U.S.

Early-term opposition to the work visa temporarily married some figures on the left and the right, combining the likes of Laura Loomer with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the latter of whom called out Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires for over-leveraging the work visa program to dump good-paying American jobs in favor of absurdly underpaid foreign labor. (Loomer went a more xenophobic route.)

Sanders’s office noted that in 2022 and 2023, “the top 30 corporations using this program laid off at least 85,000 American workers while they hired over 34,000 new H-1B guest workers.”

President Donald Trump’s extrajudicial military strikes have cost the United States yet another intelligence ally.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that Bogota would also stop sharing intelligence with the U.S., following a report that the United Kingdom had stopped sharing some intelligence tracking vessels in the Caribbean.

“Issue the order to all levels of the public security forces’ intelligence to suspend the sending of communications and other dealings with U.S. security agencies. Such a measure will be maintained as long as the missile attack on boats in the Caribbean persists,” Petro wrote on X Tuesday. “The fight against drugs must be subordinated to the human rights of the Caribbean people.”

Historically, the U.S. would use intelligence from its foreign allies to identify vessels that could be involved in drug trafficking. Those boats would be stopped by U.S. officials, boarded, and searched. But recently, Trump has opted to just blow them up, killing dozens of crew members and violating international law.

This isn’t the first time Petro has weighed in on this issue. Last month, Petro took to social media to accuse Trump of murder after a military strike on a Colombian vessel, claiming that the September attack had killed a lifelong fisherman. “U.S. government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters,” Petro wrote.

Petro has emerged as an outspoken critic of Trump and his administration, as the U.S. president has called him “an illegal drug leader” and cut off foreign aid to Colombia. At the United Nations earlier this year, Petro compared Trump to Hitler. Last week, during the COP30 climate talks in Belém, Brazil, Petro joined other world leaders in rebuking the absent Trump, saying: “Mr. Trump is against humankind.”

Democrats had previously warned that Trump’s boat strikes and escalating rhetoric against Petro could cost the U.S. one of its main allies in the Western hemisphere.

About a dozen Fannie Mae watchdogs were fired right as they were investigating whether Trump official Bill Pulte illegally obtained the mortgage records of indicted New York Attorney General and Trump administration target Letitia James.

At the time, Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, or FHFA, attributed the firings to the team focusing too much on diversity, equity, and inclusion. But new information revealed by The Wall Street Journal Tuesday suggests the removals were both cover for Pulte and punishment for the watchdogs simply doing their jobs.

The ethics and investigations group had gotten internal complaints asserting that senior Fannie Mae officials had improperly ordered staff to access the mortgage records of James and other prominent Democrats. The group sent their findings to the FHFA’s Office of the Inspector General, which then gave it to the U.S. attorney’s office in eastern Virginia. That office is under the leadership of former Trump defense attorney Lindsey Halligan, who received a bar complaint on Tuesday.

Once Halligan got her hands on it, the watchdog staffers were fired, including Chief Ethics Officer Suzanne Libby. General Counsel Danielle McCoy resigned after being forced out by leadership.

The weak fraud indictment against James accuses her of committing mortgage fraud in order to get a better loan rate when she bought a home in Virginia in 2023. Prosecutors claimed that James violated that loan agreement by renting the property out. James had called the indictment baseless, and the evidence is backing her up.

This would be a massive scandal in any other administration if true. But this is President Trump, so it’s just a normal Tuesday.