How Kash Patel Cobbled Together a Conspiracy to Help Trump

FBI Director Kash Patel’s incessant desire to uncover a “deep state” conspiracy against Donald Trump ruined multiple federal employees’ careers and turned judges against the Justice Department, The New York Times reported Monday.

Patel first announced last summer on Joe Rogan’s podcast—where else?—that he had stumbled across a secret room in FBI headquarters containing evidence that a cabal had been out to get Trump since 2016. The “evidence” was a collection of documents Patel found in government “burn bags,” which are meant to be destroyed.

Patel claimed that a “grand conspiracy” would tie together the 2016 Russia investigations, Trump’s 2020 election loss, and the president’s criminal prosecutions in 2023 and 2024. It was certainly a good plot for a movie.

“You know how I caught these guys?” Patel gloated. “Because these guys were so arrogant, they would write everything down, and I found the documents.”

Unsurprisingly, the documents failed to show the conspiracy that Patel promised. But that didn’t stop him, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and other members of the Trump administration from weaponizing the Justice Department to pursue the conspiracy claims and attack Trump’s enemies.

Over the course of 2025, the White House demanded that low-level prosecutors indict the likes of former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Senator Adam Schiff, even when the evidence was flimsy.

Todd Gilbert, a Virginia district attorney, was told to investigate the burn bags in relation to Comey, whose name showed up on some of the documents. Gilbert concluded that his office only had jurisdiction to investigate whether the documents in the bags were intentionally hidden.

That still would have been a big deal had Gilbert found that to be the case. But even under intense pressure from the White House, the attorney found that nothing was out of the ordinary with the documents, and he refused to impanel a grand jury. Despite his team writing a lengthy analysis to the Justice Department explaining the decision, Gilbert was then fired.

Patel and company continued trying to indict Trump’s enemies with brazen disregard for the justice system. James and Schiff became targets, but as with Comey, the Justice Department’s cases against them fell apart. The Trump team did get a win in April after North Carolina prosecutors indicted Comey for posting an Instagram photo showing the numbers “86 47” written in seashells, but that case is almost certainly too stupid to actually get Comey in trouble.

The Trump administration’s biased use of the Justice Department is a blatant and awful example of their corruption that doesn’t get as much media coverage as it should. District prosecutors and judges continue to uphold the law, but the pressure on them from above is certainly tremendous, and the next few years will test their limits.

ProPublica reports that the federal government was looking into violations of the Clean Water Act from Southern Coal and other affiliated mining operations controlled by West Virginia Governor Jim Justice and his family. In the past, the companies have been sued numerous times by state and federal authorities for failing to follow environmental laws, and racked up numerous pollution violations. The Trump administration doesn’t see the value.

The investigation was an effort spanning multiple federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice’s Environmental Crimes Section, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Western District of Virginia. Initially, prosecutors thought they had the backing of Robert Tracci, President Trump’s top official in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Such a criminal probe was a rare occurrence, as there are only a dozen Clean Water Act criminal cases prosecuted each year by the DOJ. Rarer still is the fact that such an investigation was killed so early. As prosecutors fought the companies for records through subpoenas in court, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, headed by now–Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, shut down the investigation.

“They were told ‘pencils down,’” an unnamed source told ProPublica. A former federal prosecutor, Rick Mountcastle, told the publication that he had “never heard of that happening before.”

“There shouldn’t be some sort of untouchables list of people who are immune from enforcement,” said Mountcastle, who spent 24 years as a federal prosecutor in the Western District of Virginia. Justice is a Republican elected to the Senate in 2024, winning the seat with the help of Trump’s endorsement.

It’s no secret that Trump doesn’t care about environmental laws, and he has long praised coal as an energy source, ignoring its widespread negative impact on clear air, water, and public health. Protecting a political ally like Justice from any consequences from the unsafe effects of a sprawling coal operation is entirely expected of this president.

The African continent’s top referee has been banned from entering the United States ahead of the FIFA World Cup.

Omar Artan was set to make history as the first Somalian to officiate the World Cup before he was allegedly denied entry at Miami International Airport despite having a travel visa. The reason for his denial was not made immediately clear, although Somalia is one of the countries on President Trump’s travel ban, and has been a frequent target of his racist attacks since he returned to office.

“Omar Artan is among Africa’s most respected referees and deserves the support of the entire football community,” Somalia’s Ministry of Youth and Sports adviser and former national team captain, Ciise Aden Abshir said in a statement to Agence France-Presse. “Denying him entry to the United States and preventing him from officiating scheduled matches harms not only him personally but also undermines football’s commitment to fairness, merit, and the spirit of fair play.”

Artan is one of many players, officials, coaches, and fans who will run into issues simply getting into the World Cup with America’s aggressive anti-immigration policies—which risk overshadowing the event entirely. Iranian team staff allege they had visas denied, Cameroonian-born Swiss midfielder Breel Embolo was denied entry, and Iraqi striker Aymen Hussein was detained and question in Chicago O’Hare airport for seven hours.

Both FIFA and the Trump administration have had a year and a half to prepare for the tournament. It was predictable the entire time that visas for players, staff, and referees would be an issue. And yet, with the tournament three days away, it is engulfed in avoidable chaos.

President Trump’s immigration czar, Tom Homan, is pledging a rapid surge of immigration agents in New York City.

Homan told Fox News Monday that he is reviewing plans to rapidly increase ICE activity in the city, deploying “more ICE agents than you’ve ever seen,” claiming that he promised New York Governor Kathy Hochul to boost ICE’s presence in New York if the state passed any bills preventing local and state law enforcement from cooperating with federal agencies in New York’s jails. Hochul signed such a bill last month.

“I made her a promise: You’re going to see more ICE agents than you’ve ever seen in New York City, and it’s coming,” Homan said. “I just reviewed an operational plan.”

Homan and other Trump administration officials have threatened ICE surges in major cities across the country, especially when cities and states pass laws restricting or barring cooperation with ICE. In late 2025 to early 2026, a major ICE escalation was attempted with Operation Metro Surge in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, which caused a massive backlash among local residents and resulted in the deaths of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Victor Manuel Diaz.

There are about 20,000 ICE agents, though this figure includes many who work in administrative capacities. The population of New York City is over eight million, and letting ICE agents loose won’t go over well with residents. Hochul told reporters Monday that Trump promised her, in a meeting with other state governors, that one of the lessons of Operation Metro Surge was that “we’re not going where we’re not welcome.”

“And he looked over at me, as the governor of the state of New York at this meeting, and he says, ‘For example, I will not go to New York unless Kathy asks.’ And I said, ‘I’m not asking, so we’re good,’” Hochul said, pointing out the failures of Minneapolis and suggesting Republicans would pay a heavy political price in the state for an ICE surge.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is on reasonably good terms with Trump, referenced the impending soccer World Cup in his rebuke to Homan.

“We will not allow ICE or anyone else to sow fear in our communities—especially at this moment. As the world comes to our city, we will stand proudly with our immigrant neighbors and reject these attacks for what they are: an attempt to divide us,” Mamdani posted on X. That doesn’t bode well for ICE agents in New York City, who would meet even more resistance than they did in Minneapolis.

President Donald Trump has once again turned his ire onto the Senate parliamentarian, amid his ongoing feud with members of his own party.

“Senate Majority Leader John Thune should immediately fire the Parliamentarian, who treats Republicans, and everything that they stand for, horribly!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Monday.

This is the second time Trump has lashed out against Elizabeth MacDonough, who recently struck $1 billion in funding for the Secret Service from the $72 billion budget reconciliation bill.

MacDonough had determined that the funds, including an estimated $220 million for the construction of Trump’s White House ballroom, fell outside of the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee’s plans to fund immigration enforcement.

Trump has not been able to get over it. The president claimed again Monday that MacDonough should be removed because she was appointed by a Democrat, and thus “caters to Democrats.” In reality, her job requires her to advise lawmakers, and to strike certain provisions from reconciliation bills in accordance with the “Byrd rule.”

“Just the other night, as an example, she ruled against us on a proposal that would have easily been approved, and should have been, by anyone else,” Trump wrote. “We have every right to change her, and should do so, IMMEDIATELY. As long as she’s there, we will never get our desperately needed, SAVE AMERICA ACT, approved, and put into full force and effect!”

It doesn’t seem that Thune is on board with the president’s outrageous demand.

After MacDonough’s decision, a spokesperson for the South Dakota Republican relayed the appropriate deference: “Redraft. Refine. Resubmit. None of this is abnormal during a Byrd process.”