Kash Patel, a former national security prosecutor who served under President Donald Trump, said Tuesday that a new Trump administration elected in 2024 would prosecute members of the U.S. media who acted as “conspirators” and “lied about American citizens.”
“We will go out and find the conspirators—not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Mr. Patel told Steve Bannon on an episode of Mr. Bannon’s “War Room” podcast on Tuesday.
Mr. Patel’s remarks were made during a broader conversation on the Democrats’ 2024 strategy and his new book, titled “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy.”
The Deep State, which Mr. Bannon described as an unconstitutional “fourth branch of government,” is going to be dismantled “brick by brick,” he said, noting that this process will include criminal and civil prosecutions.
In framing his questions about the timeline for potential prosecutions against members of the media, Mr. Bannon said he wanted news producers who might be listening to his podcast to know: “This is just not rhetoric. We’re absolutely dead serious.”
Mr. Patel said that prosecutions could come swiftly under a new Trump administration, with an important caveat—prosecutors will “follow the facts and the law.”
“The one thing we will do, that they [Democrats] never will do, is we will follow the facts and the law and go to courts of law and correct these justices and lawyers who have been prosecuting these cases based on politics and actually issuing them as lawfare,” Mr. Patel said.
“We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice, and Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we’re ’tyrannical.‘ This is why we’re ’dictators,'” he added, referring to recent news headlines.
“Because we’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have,” he added.
President Trump was branded a “dictator” in recent articles, one of which was published by The Washington Post on Monday, titled “The Fear of a Looming Trump Dictatorship,” and another by Salon on Tuesday, titled “Americans Are Sleepwalking into a Trump Dictatorship.”
Bringing Justice to ‘Government Gangsters’
Mr. Bannon sought Mr. Patel’s thoughts on his contention that the Democrats’ strategy for the 2024 presidential race involved conspiring with left-wing legacy media outlets to launch a coordinated campaign to paint President Trump as a “dictator.”Democrats can’t run a winning presidential campaign touting the U.S. economy, geopolitics, national security, or even race-related issues, according to Mr. Bannon, who said black and Hispanic men “are leaving them.”
Therefore, “the only thing they can run on,” he continued, is to claim that President Trump is a “dictator,” his Christian and Catholic supporters “are a bunch of jackboots, more dangerous than al Qaeda.”
“That is their campaign,” Mr. Bannon declared. “That’s what we’re highlighting.”
Mr. Patel, who has previously served as Department of Defense chief of staff and is also a former terrorism prosecutor, agreed with this assessment.
“Steve, it goes down to one thing,” Mr. Patel said. “They know that they can’t bring up a better policy than President Trump on anything. Not the border, not taking on the CCP [Chinese Communist Party], not defeating Iran, not taking on Russia, not taking on the DPRK [North Korean regime], not ending forever wars, not ending human trafficking, not ending the drug cartels. Anything!
“They have no better policy,” he continued. “And so what they turn to is their radical left-wing conspirators in the fake news media.”
Mr. Patel expressed the view that recent headlines calling President Trump a “dictator” are the “last thing” Democrat operatives have left in their arsenal.
Democrats and members of the legacy media, according to Mr. Bannon, are afraid that a new Trump administration will mean those who’ve acted unlawfully may be held accountable by a Trump Department of Justice (DOJ).
“I think one of the fears I’m hearing ... is that they understand that hey, we have the receipts,” Mr. Bannon said. “We know exactly what they did. We know exactly who did it. We’ve sent them the letters to say ‘hold your papers, don’t destroy your emails, don’t destroy your servers.’”
“They don’t like it. They’ve never had accountability, and this is why they’re in panic mode,” he added.
Mr. Patel said that “the Left and the radical left-wing media are running away from” evidence.
“Now they’re actually saying, the left is saying, Donald Trump is going to dare to use the DOJ and FBI to act out acts of political vengeance,” Mr. Patel said, noting the irony that the two-tiered system of justice he says the Biden administration has used to target President Trump might backfire.
“The only difference is the left knows they’re the ones that broke the law,” he added, pointing to the Russia Gate hoax and the 2020 presidential elections, of which President Trump has maintained his stance that fraud occurred.
