Election fraud, widespread FBI wrongdoing, and the deep state. President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to head the FBI hosted the online program Kash’s Corner, which included these kinds of weekly subjects.
Kash Patel worked for The Epoch Times from 2021 to 2023. The news outlet is well-known for its far-right conspiracy theories, affiliation with a Chinese dissident religious group, and, since June, a massive multimillion-dollar money laundering scheme that one of its top executives is accused of committing.
Patel and his co-host, Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek, who are not charged in the federal case, were featured in 79 episodes comprising more than 45 hours of footage that NBC News reviewed. In order to rig elections, muzzle conservative voices, and jeopardize Trump’s presidency and reelection, they collectively concocted intricate but baseless allegations of conspiracies involving government officials, law enforcement, the media, and internet corporations, among others.
Offering analysis on the news, frequently with a conspiratorial flare, Kash’s Corner was billed as a program where the former deputy director of national intelligence will dissect the most pressing topics of our time, from the causes of COVID-19 to the politicization of the intelligence community.
With Patel facing Senate confirmation hearings, the program—which is exclusively accessible to Epoch Times subscribers—may come under increased scrutiny. His inexperience, his book that demonized the FBI and promoted politically motivated conspiracy theories, and his public statements that he would target the judges, attorneys, and journalists who were involved in Trump’s numerous legal probes are other likely topics.
His namesake show wasn’t the only one. In addition to participating on other shows, the sister television network NTDTV, and the outlet’s documentary from January 6, Patel was a consistent contributor to all Epoch Times properties. With the declaration that Patel will be appearing on other shows and that Kash’s Corner would return after the election, the show’s final episode aired in August 2023.
There is no information available regarding Patel’s contract with The Epoch Times. (The corporation spent between $1 million and $5 million for a similar show, according to financial disclosure forms submitted by talk radio and Epoch Times anchor Larry Elder during a failed presidential campaign.) Patel’s spokesperson chose not to comment.
Requests for response from Jekielek and The Epoch Times were not answered. The Epoch Times stated in a June statement regarding the money laundering charges that it plans to cooperate completely with any inquiry into the allegations and that its chief financial officer, Bill Guan, has been suspended until the matter is handled.
Turning the ‘Corner’
Kash’s Corner made its debut in the summer of 2021, when the former federal prosecutor was unemployed full-time after his boss’s election defeat, following years of assuming progressively influential positions inside Trump’s national security agencies.
He started working as a consultant for Trump’s Save America PAC that January, which focused the majority of its funds on the former president’s legal expenditures. (In actuality, Patelul earned $325,000 for the position.) Following reports that the far-right lawmaker was the focus of an investigation into juvenile sex trafficking, he began fundraising consulting for Friends of Matt Gaetz in April, earning $145,000 that year (Gaetz has disputed the claims and no charges were made). Additionally, Patel created the website Fight for Kash, where he raised money for vague legal actions that aimed to deal a serious blow to Big Tech and the far-left media!
Additionally, it was a pivotal occasion for The Epoch Times. The once-fringe journal, which was run by the Chinese religious sect Falun Gong, has finally established itself in conservative media after years of hardship. In the lead-up to 2020, the company had spent a small fortune on pro-Trump advertisements. After Trump’s loss, it received a windfall that increased revenue by a startling 685% over two years, reaching $122 million in 2021. This money would eventually be subject to federal examination. As a counterweight to mainstream media, which downplayed the Capitol riots on January 6, denied climate change, and spread anxiety about vaccines, executives and editors attributed its success to subscriptions motivated by their editorial vision.
Patel, a key player in an attempt to sabotage the Justice Department’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, was a logical choice for The Epoch Times, a publication that had expanded its readership by revealing what it called Spygate, a discredited conspiracy theory that claimed President Barack Obama had spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign as part of a complex scheme to sabotage the election and discredit the incoming president. Patel dubbed the Epoch Times’ elaborate graphic, which included red strings and laid out the conspiracy hypothesis, the best one ever made in history in one of Kash’s Corner’s episodes.
Patel was initially interviewed by Jekielek for his show, American Thought Leaders, in March 2021 for an Inside Story of How Spygate Was Uncovered. Patel has his own show by April.
Patel offered a common perspective and White House credentials that gave assertions that are typically only seen on the periphery a sense of legitimacy, according to A.J. Bauer, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Alabama who specializes in conservative media.
According to Bauer, Patel was hired by The Epoch Times due to a combination of circumstances and a worldview centered on conspiracism and the idea of a deep state working against Trump. Additionally, I assume that Kash, who apologizes for the poor pun, brought cache.
Fraud allegations
At a time when many other media businesses were having difficulty gaining readers or making a profit, Patel joined The Epoch Times, which seemed to be one of the most prosperous media startups in the United States.
Federal prosecutors now dispute the company’s allegations that it was profiting from donations and subscriptions.
Guan, The Epoch Times’ chief finance officer, was in charge of a team known as the Make Money Online team in the company’s Vietnam headquarters, according to an indictment that was made public in June. The group allegedly laundered money into Guan’s and The Epoch Times’ bank accounts by using cryptocurrencies to purchase stolen funds, including debit cards loaded with false unemployment benefits, at a discount. Guan is awaiting trial after entering a not guilty plea.
The organization allegedly made almost $67 million from the suspected money laundering scam, according to the prosecution.
No one in the newsroom, including Patel and Jekielek, has any reason to suspect that they knew about any purported fraud.
The FBI’s involvement in the investigation, its future involvement, and the potential impact of having a former Epoch Times content creator as the agency’s director on future investigations are all unknown.
According to the first news release, the accusations against Guan were the outcome of a combined investigation by law enforcement partners, the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, and the Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General. Dismantling high-level criminal groups is the goal of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, which includes the prosecution. One of the participating agencies is the FBI.
Questions on the inquiry were sent to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York by an FBI spokesperson. Nicholas Biase, the head of public affairs, chose not to comment.
‘Just the beginning’
In addition to providing credibility to The Epoch Times’ unsubstantiated allegations and ties to Trump, which resulted in an interview with the former president in Mar-a-Lago in 2022, Patel also presented a fiery presence that was at ease interacting with fringe audiences.
Patel started appearing frequently on Steve Bannon’s Real America’s Voice show, where he advertised his books and merchandise with Trump themes. It was during this show that he made some of his most contentious remarks, such as when he speculated about what he might do if he had federal power last year: “We will pursue those in the media who misrepresented Americans and assisted Joe Biden in manipulating the presidential election,” he declared. Last year, he clarified his statements by telling NBC News that he only planned to go after lawbreakers.
He had more than 30 minutes to present his vision of the world in Kash’s Corner, where things moved more slowly, were less self-promotional, and were more intellectual. The majority of shows lasted 30 to 40 minutes.
Patel said the FBI needed a major overhaul and accused its leadership of prioritizing political targets over the law. He also praised three FBI agents who were placed on leave and denied security clearances for either attending the January 6 attack on the Capitol or later spreading conspiracy theories about it. (Those former agents also received funds of unknown size from the Patel Foundation.)
In December 2022, he claimed, erroneously using Russiagate and Hunter Biden’s laptop as proof that the FBI has been fully politicized, “We’ve proven the illegitimacy of the FBI and its actions.”
Later that month, he advocated a baseless theory that the FBI paid Twitter to suppress conservatives as part of the greatest disinformation campaign to rig a presidential election, and he implied that the FBI was involved in a Big Tech conspiracy to control Americans.
“This is just the beginning,” he added, adding that anyone who believes it was an isolated incident is totally mistaken. What if the FBI turns around and claims, “Oh, we were just using public funds to help protect a country?” That’s going to be their catchphrase when they return, but we now see how rotten they really are.
Patel frequently referred to what he called a two-tiered legal system. The DOJ and FBI [are] fabricating crimes and politicizing targets. On a 2022 show, he stated, “They’re essentially saying, show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”
Inanother 2022episode, Patel voiced his concerns about what he termed the FBI s confidential human source corruption cover-up network. He claimed the agency used confidential sources during the Jan. 6 riots for political purposes, asking whether rioters had been goaded by agents to commit crimes and questioning the related convictions. Did those confidential human sources engage people who are not going to conduct criminal activity and convince them to do so? That is the definition of entrapment, which is illegal, and you can t charge someone who s been entrapped.
The belief that confidential FBI sources contributed to the violence on Jan. 6 or that the agency set up rioters is an unfounded, yet persistent one. Any suggestion that the violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was orchestrated by the FBI is categorically false, the FBI said ina statement to Politifactthis year.
Patel suggested a specific solution: for Congress to use the power of subpoena to uncover crimes and conspiracies via a Church Commission, similar to the 1975 congressional investigation into federal intelligence agencies.
I don t see how Americans can have any faith in this FBI anymore,he saidin December 2022. It s going to take a major overhaul from these guys in Congress when the gavels flipped to conduct some rigorous oversight, but also to retool the FBI and DOJ, so it actually has credibility again. But that s going to be a multiyear lift.
As for who should be investigated first, Patel suggestedin Januarythat it be Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a physician and immunologist who has become a major target of Covid-era conspiracy theories.
Fauci, I guess, is the one-word name that you can say is deserving of an entire investigation, he said.
Trump s legal woes were a popular subject, too. In multiple episodes last year, Patel repeatedly framed multiple civil and criminal cases against Trump as politically motivated and without merit, including the Stormy Danielshush money case( That s not a crime ); theclassified documents case( When you re president and you leave, you can take whatever you want ); theE. Jean Carroll case( Basically, a jury disregards the facts and the law and bases a decision on emotion alone. ); andthe federal indictmentaccusing Trump of conspiring to overturn the election ( The criminalization of thought and free speech. ).
Complicit in nearly every scheme, according to Patel, was the media.
There s a whole lot of people out there just thinking, What can I believe? Jekielek saidin a 2022show. It s hard, Patel replied. What they should believe is Epoch Times, but I m biased.
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