Kash Patel and Dan Bongino Are Now Officially Part of the Deep State
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Are FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino now part of a massive cover-up? Some of President Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters are inclined to think so.
During a Sunday Fox News appearance with Maria Bartiromo, they poured cold water on the conspiracy theory that the reported suicide of child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was a cover-up. Both officials said the evidence supports the conclusion that Epstein died by suicide.
Bartiromo said to Patel, “You said Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. People don’t believe it.”
Patel replied, “Well, I mean, listen, they have a right to their opinion, but as someone who has worked as a public defender, as a prosecutor, who’s been in that prison system, who has been in the Metropolitan Detention Center, who’s been in segregated housing. You know a suicide when you see one, and that’s what that was.” Bongino agreed, saying, “He killed himself. Again, you want me to get, I’ve… I’ve seen the whole file. He killed himself.”
This was not the development expected by hardcore conspiracy theorists who have convinced themselves that Epstein was part of some bizarre child blood-consuming cabal that became the primary narrative of QAnon set over much of the past decade.
Both Patel and Bongino spent a great deal of time undermining the Biden administration with baseless accusations and pointed”questions” that strongly suggested some nefarious deep state control of the Justice Department and the FBI. Scores of podcast listeners believed these theories to be true, even though zero proof was ever presented.
This is how conspiracies work — one never needs to prove that they are right, it’s just raising the doubt or asking the questions about something is enough to raise skepticism. Its a deeply cynical political ploy built on the burden of proof. It is literally impossible to prove a negative. Why does the Bigfoot conspiracy last? Because he’s never been found. A darker example in international politics? No one could ever prove Saddam Hussein never had WMDs, because how can one prove you DON’T have something? You can’t. And so we went to war.
So while Patel and Bongino rose to fame and political stature playing this deeply skeptical game, they are now exposed to the same logical fallacy. They insist that Epstein’s death is a suicide, but they only say that now that they have “seen the reports” that were made available to them in their current roles? How convenient.
The thing is, I sense that these and other “deep state” conspiracies aren’t going to disappear with new leadership at the FBI suddenly. During Monday’s White House Press Briefing, the “new media” reporter Liam Cosgrove of pro-Trump online outlet Zero Hedge opened the questions by insisting that Epstein’s death was part of a grander conspiracy tied to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Cosgrove asked:
So anyways, that’s just a lead in to my question about the most famous Clinton-related suicide, which is that of Jeffrey Epstein. There’s still a lot of questions around that case. You’ve released phase one of the Epstein files. What was missing from that is any connection to his ties to intelligence agencies, and that’s really the whole story — not just trafficking young girls, but doing it on behalf of intelligence agencies, and even potentially as part of a blackmail ring with potential ties to the Israeli government. So, for phase two, when can we expect it? Will it have information pertaining to those aspects of the Epstein case?
This was the first question in the first briefing following Patel and Bongino’s appearance with Bartiromo, which suggests the hard-nose “believers” of this and other baseless and bizarre “deep state” conspiracies aren’t going to give up and suddenly take the FBI’s current leadership’s word for it.
In other words, Patel and Bongino may very well get a strong dose of their own medicine — even if it’s every bit as bizarre today as it was when it came out of their mouths over the past four years.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
