Kash Patel has written a children’s book about the investigation he led into the FBI’s targeting of Donald Trump on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. If children seem to be a peculiar target audience for a book about a Beltway political scandal, the fact is that the future of the country hangs on whether rising generations know the truth about the seminal events that took place during and after the 2016 election cycle.
“The Plot Against the King” is a cheerful and colorful recasting of familiar events, setting them in the imaginary past. The lead character is a wizard known as “Kash the Distinguished Discoverer,” “who could discover anything about anything.” In this instance, he finds that Hillary Queenton had arranged to falsely accuse King Donald of having cheated his way to the throne.
It’s not hard to see the real-life characters Patel is drawing on to tell the story. A chorus consisting of heralds (the media), a “shifty” knight (Rep. Adam “Shifty” Schiff), and spies such as “Keeper Komey” (former FBI director James Comey) echo Queenton’s charges to turn the public against the leader that they’ve chosen. But Duke Devin (former Congressman Devin Nunes) enlists Kash the Wizard to join him on “The Quest for the Truth about the Plot against the King.”
Patel’s book ends on a happy note: He and the Duke find the truth and show the people that the king hadn’t misled them and is in fact their rightly chosen leader. In real life, Americans are waiting for special counsel John Durham to complete the work begun by Nunes and Patel and bring criminal charges against the leading conspirators in the plot against the president.
And thus Patel’s book tacitly underscores the far-reaching importance of Durham’s work. Without indictments and convictions of those who used government resources to frame Trump as a Russian spy, future history books are likely to teach a version of events that was designed from the beginning to deceive Americans.
It’s a truism that history is written by the victors. But the history of Russiagate is different. There aren’t two competing interpretations of the same set of facts, one recounted by the dominant culture and the other by the opposition. Rather, one narrative is a lie from beginning to end. The other shows how that lie was generated; what political, investigative, and administrative purposes it served; who pushed it through federal bureaucracies and the media; and what laws were broken to sustain the lie and thereby lay waste to U.S. institutions.
Now it’s hardly unusual for a U.S. politician to defame her opponent as Hillary Clinton did when her campaign injected Russiagate into the public square. Nor is it surprising that the media would assist the candidate from the political party it has been aligned with for decades. The crucial issue, and the point of Nunes and Patel’s investigation, is that Clinton’s lie was the predicate for a federal investigation of her opponent. That’s not simply political dirty tricks; it could be evidence of a far-reaching criminal conspiracy.
The coverup began after the election, when outgoing President Barack Obama instructed his spy chiefs to legitimize Clinton’s lie with a government document (the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment) finding that Russia had supported Trump’s candidacy. As a result, Obama and top U.S. officials in partnership with the press embedded the collusion lie in the official record.
Only indictments and convictions will compel establishment publicists, such as the media and academia, to revise the official record by forcing them to explain why their sources and colleagues, Team Collusion, were charged with crimes. Otherwise, America is in steep trouble. Democracies can survive fake news, but not fake history.
“The Plot Against the King” is meant to be read to children by their parents so that both may be educated by analogy and led to the truth. Paging through it, I was reminded of an issue that has troubled me since the beginning of the collusion narrative. What do the men and women of the media, the intelligence services, and the Democratic Party who pushed the Russiagate story tell their children and grandchildren about the story they carried for years? Do they lie to their children as they lied to American news audiences? Yes, everything your mommy and daddy said is true—Trump was a Russian spy.
Or do they tell them the truth? Trump wasn’t a Russian spy, but your mother and father said so anyway. We said it on television, and we said it in Congress. We didn’t say it when Kash Patel asked us under oath because we might have gone to jail for it.
We lied because we wanted a woman in the White House. We lied because Trump seemed scary. We lied because everyone else was doing it. If we didn’t play along, we might have lost our jobs.
Instead, we have our beautiful house where you and your siblings have your own rooms, and we wouldn’t be able to send you all to excellent private schools where you’re surrounded by other children whose parents also lied about Russiagate. You can tell your teachers if you want, it doesn’t matter. Everyone knows Donald Trump was a Russian spy.
