Good morning. Long week. I’m out today with a look at the turmoil within the FBI over at Public Notice. A few items on that below and then some stuff on the killing of Charlie Kirk. The last two weeks have felt a little more troubling than normal, which is obviously very bad because our acceptance of the normal level of troubling-ness is already bad. Anyway, if you want to support my work, please subscribe to American Doom.
FBI Director Kash Patel took a lot of credit both for himself and his agency at a press conference this morning in Utah. But first, he thanked President Donald J. Trump for his role in law enforcement bringing Charlie Kirk’s killer to justice in “historic” time.
“I want to express my deep gratitude to President Trump, the vice president and the entire White House who have been so incredibly supportive with both resources and just personally to the FBI as a team,” Patel said. “They had our backs the entire way.”
“In 33 hours,” Patel said, “we have made historic progress for Charlie.”
Patel then laid out the timeline. The first FBI agents were on scene within 16 minutes of Kirk being shot. The agency then “launched fixed-wing assets” to “transport personnel.” (This means they flew FBI agents on planes out to Utah, including Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino on Thursday night.)
“At my direction,” Patel went on, “the FBI released the first set of FBI photos of the suspect at 10 a.m., local time on 9/11.”
For all the Americans across the nation hanging on Patel’s every word — and especially the one at the White House — Patel then got to the most important part: “Myself and Deputy Director Bongino arrived on the scene at approximately 5:30 p.m. on 9/11.”
Neither Patel or Bongino are investigators. Their presence at an active crime scene is both unprecedented and unnecessary. It was all for show, for the benefit of one man.
By 10 p.m. Thursday night, Kirk’s killer was in custody. But it would be another 10 hours before the nation learned that the manhunt was over — because Trump himself wanted to make the announcement on Fox & Friends on Friday morning.
What followed has become the routine American practice of trying to determine what political team the killer is on. I’ll get to more about that in a moment. But first let me tell you about Patel’s FBI, which is, not surprisingly, considering his strange and amateurish performance at the Friday morning press conference for the benefit of making Trump happy so he won’t fire Patel, in turmoil because of Patel’s basic unfitness for the job and the political purge he has carried out within the agency.
Also, he and Bongino’s brains are consumed by their online presence, meaning that their primary focus is to gain the approval of their social media followings — not necessarily do the job of running the FBI.
These facts have come to light thanks to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday by three FBI veterans with nearly 60 years experience in the agency combined. In any other presidential administration, Wednesday’s lawsuit would be a monumental scandal. In Trump’s second term, it’s simply a news item on a Wednesday.
The lawsuit lays out how Patel, Bongino, Trump lawyer-turned federal judge Emil Bove, and a 29-year-old Trump loyalist with no law enforcement experience have purged the FBI of veteran agents simply because they’ve refused to submit to total fealty to the president. In other words: the Trump administration has completely weaponized the FBI so that it can be used to punish the president’s enemies — including perceived enemies within the agency itself, regardless of their level of experience and expertise.
The lawsuit also shows the level of online brain rot that Patel and Bongino are working with. Both men, according to the lawsuit, are so consumed by seeking the approval of their online followings that they can’t be bothered to consult the incredible wealth of materials at their disposal.
In one instance, Bongino asked Steven Jensen — one of the agents who was fired and is named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit — whether he worked on January 6 prosecutions. Bongino was concerned about this because “people were saying online” that the agent had prosecuted January 6 attackers, the lawsuit states. The agent told Bongino that, yes, he had worked on those prosecutions as part of his role as Section Chief of the Domestic Terrorism Operations Section, which Bongino would have known about if he had read the agent’s “publicly available FBI biography and official personnel file.”
Patel’s obsession with online clout-chasing, meanwhile, was apparent on Wednesday night, when he told the world on X that Kirk’s killer had been arrested. Two hours later, he recanted. I reached out to Sen. Mark Warner’s office about all this. Warner has been raising the alarm about the political purge within the FBI and its implications on the agency’s ability to solve and prevent major crimes. This is what he said:
“The allegations in this lawsuit only confirm what’s obvious to anyone paying attention: Kash Patel is more focused on curating his social media image than doing the hard work of keeping Americans safe,” Warner told me. “Most Americans expect the FBI Director to be focused on threats to our national security, not how many followers he has on X.”
So, the FBI is in turmoil, losing experienced agents because they did their jobs and investigated Trump for his many obvious crimes, or because they might have voted for a Democrat. Plus, it’s being led by two social media addicts who are being directed by the online mobs that they need to appease in order to maintain their influence.
It makes perfect sense, then, that Patel and Bongino saw the need to fly out to Utah to… just be there while actual members of law enforcement chased Kirk’s killer. And when it came to actually catching Tyler Robinson, the break in the case came when his family turned him in.
Patel kicked off his remarks on Friday morning by saying, “This is what happens when you let good cops be cops.” It turns out the best cop involved was Robinson’s own farther, a veteran of the local sheriff’s office, who turned in his own son.
But Patel and Bongino are Internet-warped ideologues. They see everything through the lens of the good vs. evil, right vs. left, LAW AND ORDER vs. DEFUND THE POLICE that they both subscribe to and has greatly aided their rise to positions of power they never should have had. Meanwhile, good cops are getting the boot because they don’t support Trump enough.
Now, on to Robinson.
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The one potential upside of Patel and Bongino being so terminally online is that they might actually be able to help the FBI move into a modern age of extremism based on incoherent political ideology. In the case of Robinson, it appears that, like Trump’s would-be assassin in Butler, Pa. last year, he either had no traditional conservative or liberal ideology — or he was even more far to the right than Kirk was, which is why he took him out.
Much has been made of the “Hey fascist! Catch! ⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️⬇️” engraving Robinson carved into one of the shell casings in his gun. Right-wing media and Republicans have glommed onto this as evidence that Robinson was a left-wing extremist. But as younger reporters and non-legacy media outlets are pointing out, the engravings on Robinson’s bullets are more complex than the smoothed-out, HE WAS ANTIFA storyline being pushed by the American right.
At a minimum, the engravings are “a confusing mix of internet memes and pop culture,” reports the Verge. Taken further, it’s entirely possible that Robinson was a far-right supporter of Nick Fuentes — a Groyper — who disagreed with Kirk for not being further to the right.
Regardless, Kirk is dead partly because of the ironic, nihilistic gamer culture of the Internet that pervades so many young American lives.
“Many young extremists now believe in a much simpler binary: Order and chaos,” Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day writes. “And if you are spending any time at all trying to derive meaning from violent acts like this then you are, by definition, their enemy.”
I spend a lot of time reading and reporting on right-wing extremism, constantly consuming content posted by election deniers and deciphering their conspiracies, and this is damn far out there even for me. I can’t imagine what the FBI, let alone local cops in Utah, are making of all this.
But it seems like now would be a good time to have someone like Steven Jensen at the FBI, running investigations into domestic terrorism. Too bad he’s gone, and the Trump administration has scaled back investigations of domestic terrorism in favor of immigration enforcement.
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