FBI Director Kash Patel announced that a “wave of transparency” is on its way to his organization, accusing the FBI of covering up for Hillary Clinton for over a decade — but that it is all coming to an end.
Sitting alongside FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino for a Fox News interview on “Sunday Morning Futures,” Patel explained how the Bureau is now on a long road to rebuilding public trust after years of scrutiny for its activities involving powerful Democratic politicians, theories about J6 involvement, and infamous investigations into President Donald Trump.
But it was Patel’s revelation of how the FBI helped create Crossfire Hurricane, the probe into Trump’s alleged collaboration with Russia, that convinced him that the government was always “weaponized” against Clinton’s opponents.
“You asked in the beginning how the FBI was weaponized,” he said to host Maria Bartiromo. “Well, the FBI hijacked the constitutional responsibility of the Department of Justice and the Attorney General, and James Comey and others specifically decided what cases to prosecute and not prosecute. Don’t believe me? Go to the videotape in the Hillary Clinton investigation.”
“We don’t decide prosecutions, and neither do any agent or intel analyst. We have great partners under Attorney General [Pam] Bondi. We work with them and discuss the matter with them, but the prosecutorial decision is with them,” he said.
According to Patel, the FBI will soon publicly explain the lengths that former agents went to promote the false claim that President Trump conspired with Russian operatives to influence the 2016 election.
“That’s how vindictive and vicious the former leadership structure here was. Not only did they bastardize the FISA process and lie to the American public, they withheld and hid documentation and put it in rooms where people weren’t supposed to look,” Patel said.
“It’s a good thing we’re here now to clean it up, and you’re about to see a wave of transparency… Just give us about a week or two,” Patel added with his remarks.
At another point in the interview, Patel and Bongino gave fresh details about convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s August 2019 suicide while in custody awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Reports at the time said Epstein was found unresponsive in his jail cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City, hanging off the side of his cell’s bed with a bedsheet around his neck. After guards initiated CPR, Epstein was transported to New York Downtown Hospital, where he was pronounced dead later that evening.
The New York City medical examiner and the Justice Department Inspector General ruled that Epstein’s death was a suicide by hanging. After initially being suspicious, then-Attorney General William Barr said what happened was “a perfect storm of screw-ups” after both the FBI and Justice Department conducted their probes into Epstein’s death.
Epstein was a known associate of former President Bill Clinton, former MIT professor Noam Chomsky, and Prince Andrew, so immediately following his death, suspicions about the timing and circumstances surrounding it surfaced.
WATCH:
During the wide-ranging interview with Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo, both Patel and Bongino reaffirmed what the DOJ and FBI have previously said in various interviews — that Epstein died by his own hand while in his jail cell.
“As someone who has worked as a public defender, as a prosecutor who’s been in that prison system, who’s 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,” Patel told Bartiromo, adding that people who disagree “have a right to their own opinion.”
Bongino jumped in and added, “He killed himself. I’ve seen the whole file. He killed himself.”