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Dear Joe Rogan, Kash Patel Played You - David Corn
Dear Joe Rogan,
I don’t know you. We’ve never met, and I am not a regular listener of your podcast. But I have the impression you are a man who does not like to be played. I regret to inform you that Kash Patel played you.
When the FBI director was on your show last month, he made multiple statements that were false or misleading. Given that you’re a proponent of truth-telling, I expect you will be troubled to learn this.
Let me start with Patel’s remarks about what he derisively calls “Russiagate.” A good chunk of your two-hour-long conversation was devoted to this topic, a personal obsession of Patel. As he has done for years, Patel presented to you and your audience a highly skewed and false narrative. “All roads lead to Russiagate,” he declared. “That’s where it all started.” He meant that his entire critique of the so-called Deep State and the supposedly corrupt Joe Biden gang stems from the Trump-Russia scandal. So it can be rather instructive to look at his claims about this foundational matter.
During the podcast, Patel gave you the “90-seconds” version of this controversy:
Can you imagine a time in the United Staes of America in the 21st century, where a political party would go overseas and acquire fake foreign intelligence from a foreign intelligence officer funded by donations to that political party in the United States of America, then take that material, package it, walk it to the FBI, literally, and say, ‘Hey, we need you to surveil the opponent of our political party who happens to be running for the president of the United States”? Then convince the FBI to go to a secret federal FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court that I used to use to manhunt terrorists and say, ‘Hey I need you to wiretap essentially all the comms in and around Trump camp because of the material we gave you.’ And then have that FBI lie to the federal court and the judge in that warrant application, which is a felony, and intentionally remove information of innocence from that application just to get it above the threshold so the judge would sign it. That’s Russiagate.
Much in this description was inaccurate. The political party Patel was referring to—the Democrats—did not hand that opposition research to the FBI and request surveillance of Donald Trump, and the FBI did not seek to wiretap “essentially all the comms” of the Trump camp. It requested a wiretap on one former Trump campaign adviser.
But more to the point, Joe, what Patel was referring to was merely one slice of the much larger Trump-Russia affair. And this is Patel’s magic trick. It’s a diversion. He wants you and others to fixate on the issue of a search warrant and not pay attention to the bigger story: Russia attacked the 2016 election to help Trump, and Trump aided and abetted Moscow by denying this assault, thus providing cover to Vladimir Putin.
I don’t know you. We’ve never met, and I am not a regular listener of your podcast. But I have the impression you are a man who does not like to be played. I regret to inform you that Kash Patel played you.
When the FBI director was on your show last month, he made multiple statements that were false or misleading. Given that you’re a proponent of truth-telling, I expect you will be troubled to learn this.
Let me start with Patel’s remarks about what he derisively calls “Russiagate.” A good chunk of your two-hour-long conversation was devoted to this topic, a personal obsession of Patel. As he has done for years, Patel presented to you and your audience a highly skewed and false narrative. “All roads lead to Russiagate,” he declared. “That’s where it all started.” He meant that his entire critique of the so-called Deep State and the supposedly corrupt Joe Biden gang stems from the Trump-Russia scandal. So it can be rather instructive to look at his claims about this foundational matter.
During the podcast, Patel gave you the “90-seconds” version of this controversy:
Can you imagine a time in the United Staes of America in the 21st century, where a political party would go overseas and acquire fake foreign intelligence from a foreign intelligence officer funded by donations to that political party in the United States of America, then take that material, package it, walk it to the FBI, literally, and say, ‘Hey, we need you to surveil the opponent of our political party who happens to be running for the president of the United States”? Then convince the FBI to go to a secret federal FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court that I used to use to manhunt terrorists and say, ‘Hey I need you to wiretap essentially all the comms in and around Trump camp because of the material we gave you.’ And then have that FBI lie to the federal court and the judge in that warrant application, which is a felony, and intentionally remove information of innocence from that application just to get it above the threshold so the judge would sign it. That’s Russiagate.
Much in this description was inaccurate. The political party Patel was referring to—the Democrats—did not hand that opposition research to the FBI and request surveillance of Donald Trump, and the FBI did not seek to wiretap “essentially all the comms” of the Trump camp. It requested a wiretap on one former Trump campaign adviser.
But more to the point, Joe, what Patel was referring to was merely one slice of the much larger Trump-Russia affair. And this is Patel’s magic trick. It’s a diversion. He wants you and others to fixate on the issue of a search warrant and not pay attention to the bigger story: Russia attacked the 2016 election to help Trump, and Trump aided and abetted Moscow by denying this assault, thus providing cover to Vladimir Putin.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/06/joe-rogan-kash-patel-played-you-russia-investigation-trump/
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