John Bolton’s Cheap Shots At Kash Patel Are A Sign Of Panic In Washington

John Bolton’s jeremiad against Kash Patel in The Wall Street Journal this week is a case study in how the Washington swamp is panicking over the incoming Trump administration, especially President-elect Trump’s plans to drastically reform the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department.

Like the recent barrage of attacks against Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Defense, the panicked opposition to the nomination of Patel for FBI director has nothing to do with Patel himself and everything to do with undermining Trump’s second-term agenda.

A quick glance at Bolton’s argument bears this out. Bolton — the perfect specimen of a Washington swamp creature if ever there was one — relies on false statements and outlandish innuendo to argue that Patel is somehow unfit to take the place of outgoing FBI director Christopher Wray, who announced his resignation on Wednesday.

The most glaring false statement made by Bolton is that Patel wasn’t a senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council. In fact, Patel served as the Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the NSC, as his bio on the Department of Defense website clearly states. What’s more, the WSJ itself last week ran a piece in support of Patel for FBI director by former Trump White House national security advisor Robert O’Brien, who correctly notes that Patel “served as the National Security Council’s senior director for counterterrorism.”

Bolton moves on from that obvious lie to cite none other than Fiona Hill, the NSC intelligence analyst who was a star witness in the first impeachment of President Trump and a central player in the Russia collusion hoax. During the impeachment hearings, Hill claimed that Patel was engaged in various Ukraine-related activities in 2019, which Bolton decries as “unrestrained freelancing” — a charge Patel has repeatedly denied. In March 2023, Patel even filed a $23 million defamation suit against Politico for knowingly spreading false claims that Patel was a “Ukraine whisperer” who fed lies to Trump about Ukraine.