There are some stunningly versatile folks still strutting their stuff in the fading days of the Trump administration. Honestly. Persons not unlike the wunderkind Jared Kushner, a guy capable of negotiating peace in the mid-East, orchestrating prison reform, and negotiating trade deals with Mexico, all without a shred of experience or relevant education. Who would have thunk it. Born to greatness these folks were, but wasted and lost in menial low level jobs until their hidden talents were recognized by Trump himself. Sad that it has taken so darn long for that cream to rise to the top. Oh what might have been.
Take John McEntee for example, the 30-year-old former U Conn college quarterback and one time Trump sandwich fetcher, then Trump White House body man who was sadly dismissed from that post by John Kelly after his online gambling habit came to light, only to be rehired in the post-impeachment post Kelly White House where he was promoted to head the Presidential Personnel Office earlier this year. McEntee has busied himself rooting out those he deems less than perfectly loyal to Mr. Trump and hiring a bunch of young guns to replace them. Never in all of history has The Peter Principle been so prominently on display en.wikipedia.org/....
and then, there is the marvelous Kashyap Patel.
The new Pentagon chief of staff, Kashyap (Kash) Patel now holds one of the most powerful positions at the Pentagon. He controls access to the new secretary of defense and for the next 66 days will have a hand and a voice in determining all Pentagon decisions.
Kash Patel has been on the fast track during the Trump administration moving from a staff role on the House Intelligence Committee, to a post as a counterterrorism expert in the NSA (or was he a Ukraine specialist?!), to a job as a special assistant to the President and now to the chief of staff for Chris Miller the new acting Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. A dramatic rise indeed.
Oh, least I forget, there was also that secret diplomatic mission to Syria earlier this year in an effort to negotiate with Assad for the release of Americans held hostage, including Austin Tice, a journalist not seen for 8 years. Who knew Trump cared so much about journalists.
Kash Patel entered the limelight while he served as the top aide to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and sometime dairy farmer. In that role as Nunes top staffer on the Intel Committee, Patel engineered efforts to distract from and discredit the origins of the Mueller investigations involving the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which as we know was aimed at undermining the candidacy of Hillary Clinton and helping Donald Trump get elected.
Patel was the lead author of a biased majority committee report built on ‘cherry picked’ information that questioned the conduct and motivation of FBI and DOJ officials investigating Russia’s election interference, suggesting that they acted to undermine the president as part of some nefarious an anti-Trump ‘deep state’ conspiracy. It was Patel’s narrative that claimed FISA warrants for several of Trump campaign staffers, including Carter Page (petroleum industry consultant and a former foreign-policy adviser to Trump) had been obtained inappropriately, based as he falsely claimed, entirely on the opposition research from the Steele Dossier — which was deemed to be unreliable since it was funded by Democrats (after it was funded by Trumps Republican rivals).
Telling members of the Trump administration exactly what they want to hear, regardless of the extent to which you need to distort reality, is apparently the express ticket to rapid promotion and power in Trump’s orbit. Funny that it took such talented people so long to discover that secret. Patel’s hatchet work on the intel committed helped destroy the careers of James Comey, Sally Yates and Bruce Ohr — but it sure did help Kash to cash in and move up.
On February 19, 2020 Trump removed acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Joseph Maguire after learning that members of the Intelligence Community has briefed Congress on Russian efforts to assist in the re-election of Donald Trump in 2020. McGuire was replaced by a Trump political ally, Richard ‘Ric’ Grenell — the Ambassador to Germany, who had no substantive foreign policy or National Intelligence experience.
Grenell then brought Kash Patel over from the National Security Council. This is what Slate had to say about that at the time.
Trump’s Lackeys Now Pose a Grave National Security Threat — Richard Grenell and Kashyap Patel are likely to twist intelligence just to keep the president from getting angry. slate.com/...
As Grenell’s deputy Patel’s new job was to “clean house” —that is, to remove anyone and everyone in the intelligence community not sufficiently loyal to the president and to puppetize the remaining intelligence analysts into pliant Trump policy advocates. Grenell hired Patel after firing Maguire’s deputy, Andrew Hallman, a career intelligence officer with 30 years of experience www.nytimes.com/.... As in most of Trump’s government, skill, knowledge, and ability have little value before loyalty.
In the summer of 2020 Kash Patel was sent to Syria to help negotiate with the Assad regime for the release of Americans held hostage there, including Austin Tice.
A former U.S. Marine, Tice had ventured into Syria in May 2012, before his last year at Georgetown Law School. His freelance photos and stories were published by McClatchy newspapers, The Washington Post and other news outlets.
Tice disappeared in August 2012, a few days before his 31st birthday, after being detained at a checkpoint as he was heading out of Syria to file his latest stories.
Some analysists have speculated the shake up at the Pentagon in the last 10 weeks of the trump administration was undertaken to facilitate Trump’s promised withdrawal form Afghanistan. Others expect it was done to allow for selective declassification and public release of military intelligence aimed at hurting Joe Biden and Democrats and bolstering an alternate narrative that Putin didn’t intervene to help Trump win election in 2016.
Some of us also worry that the shake up at the Pentagon was done to make it possible to unleash the military onto the streets of America to quell protests that are sure to erupt should Trump attempt to discredit the election results, continue to claim victory and remain in office. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper had refused to allow that. His replacement might not be as willing to resist Trump’s urges to break the law and discard long standing precedent regarding the Posse Comitias Act. Whatever the intent, the new appointments at the heart of the Pentagon put people with fierce loyalty to Trump and limited experience in positions of enormous trust and responsibility. What could go wrong with that in in the next 66 days.
Some diarists here see all these personnel moves as score settling and death throe bluster. I sincerely hope they are right, but fear otherwise. Watch with me — when Chris Wray at F.B.I. or Gina Haspel at C.I.A. are fired, then let’s think again.