There were two competing letters published yesterday designed to frame Kash Patel’s efforts to frame Democrats with being mean to Donald Trump, for which (the NYT reports) Trump wants to be paid $230 million. They are:
- A letter Lanny Breuer sent to Chuck Grassley, scolding him for the irresponsible way Grassley fearmongered Jack Smith’s analysis of toll records affecting nine or ten members of Congress. (Zoe Tillman wrote about the letter here.)
- A letter Jim Jordan sent to Pam Bondi, effectively recycling debunked Kash Patel claims to support a claim that John Brennan lied about the Intelligence Community Assessment.
I’m a well-established critic of Lanny Breuer, but the letter is substantive and direct. After mocking Josh Hawley’s claim that he was “tapped,” the letter shows how toll records have been used in various other investigations:
- The Robert Hur investigation of Joe Biden.
- Charging documents in five different investigations charged since Kash has become FBI Director.
- In leak investigations, targeting Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and staffers (including Kash Patel).
- The Robert Menendez investigation.
But all that’s just set up for this passage, mocking Kash for his claim, made on Sean Hannity’s show while he was wearing a ridiculous jacket, that Jack Smith was trying to hide his use of toll records in a “lockbox in a vault, and then put that vault in a cyber place where no one can see or search these files.”
[T]here is simply no support for FBI Director Patel’s recent assertion that Mr. Smith hid the toll records information so that “no one would find it,” or that Mr. Smith put the toll records in a “lockbox in a vault, and then put that vault in a cyber place where no one can see or search these files.”9 It is not clear what cyber place in a vault in a lockbox Director Patel is describing, but Mr. Smith’s use of these records is inconsistent with someone who was trying to conceal them. Paragraph 119 of the August 1, 2023 indictment describes some of the calls that were made to U.S. Senators on January 6, 2021, and footnote 132 of Volume 1 of the Special Counsel Report refers to the use of toll records in the investigation. Moreover, the precise records at issue were produced in discovery to President Trump’s personal lawyers, some of whom now serve in senior positions within the Department of Justice.
9 HANNITY: Patel: “We’re Just Warming Up” in Investigation of Alleged Tracking of GOP Senators, Fox News (Oct. 7, 2025), https://www.foxnews.com/video/6382234662112.
Even without this letter, sentient beings were able to point to the place in the indictment and the Jack Smith report where these toll records were described. And, as the letter notes, Trump’s attorneys — including Todd Blanche — got discovery on those toll records years ago, but did not challenge their use in a criminal case.
All this was quite clear to sentient beings. But not the staffers exploiting Chuck Grassley’s diminished capacities to make a stink about something very ordinary.
By comparison, the Jordan letter is shoddy even by his standards.
The ostensible purpose is to refer John Brennan to DOJ (but, significantly, not FBI) for testimony Brennan gave — in a hearing about the letter truthfully saying a bunch of spooks thought the Hunter Biden laptop had the hallmarks of a Russian information op — that mentioned the Steele dossier in passing. This may be an effort to predicate a case in DC after the case in Philly has stalled, but anyone aware of the law would question how comments about the Steele dossier were material to a hearing about the Hunter Biden letter, a point that Brennan even made at the time: “I don’t see any relevance to the Hunter Biden laptop issue now,” as quoted in Jordan’s letter.
More importantly, the letter appears to be an effort to launder debunked propaganda Kash Patel did years ago through Congress back into an investigation led by Kash Patel, something I’ve addressed in the past.
The key paragraph makes a number of claims, some of which are fabrications (and therefore commit the crime that Jim Jordan is referring), others of which are misrepresentations of prior reports that were themselves propaganda.
On January 6, 2017, the CIA, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and National Security Agency published a declassified version of an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) titled Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections. 3 The ICA stated, among other things, that Russia “developed a clear preference” for President Trump and “aspired to help” him win the election.4 This conclusion—now known to be false—was based in part on the Steele dossier, which “was referenced in the ICA main body text, and further detailed in a two-page ICA annex.”5 The Steele dossier was a series of reports containing baseless accusations concerning President Trump’s ties to Russia compiled and delivered to the FBI in 2016 by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele.6 Subsequent investigations confirmed that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid Steele via the law firm Perkins Coie and opposition research firm Fusion GPS to provide derogatory information about Trump’s purported ties to Russia, which resulted in the discredited dossier.7 In July 2025, the Trump Administration declassified numerous documents showing that the ICA’s main findings were false and that the Obama Administration knowingly fabricated the findings for the purpose of undermining the Trump Administration.8
3 OFF. OF THE DIR. OF NAT’L INTEL., ASSESSING RUSSIAN ACTIVITIES AND INTENTIONS IN RECENT US ELECTIONS (Jan. 6, 2017) [hereinafter “Russian Interference ICA”].
4 Id. at 1.
5 MAJORITY STAFF REPORT, H. PERM. SELECT COMM. ON INTEL., 116TH CONG., OVERSIGHT INVESTIGATION & REFERRAL: THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY ASSESSMENT (ICA) “RUSSIA’S INFLUENCE CAMPAIGN TARGETING THE 2016 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION,” at 23 (2020) [hereinafter “HPSCI Report”].
6 See JOHN H. DURHAM, U.S. DEP’T OF JUST., OFF. OF SPECIAL COUNS., REPORT ON MATTERS RELATED TO INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS ARISING OUT OF THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS, at 11-12, 109-117 (2023) [hereinafter “Durham Report”].
7 See id. at 109-117; HPSCI Report, supra note 5, at 22-32; U.S. DEP’T OF JUST., OFF. OF THE INSPECTOR GEN., REVIEW OF FOUR FISA APPLICATIONS AND OTHER ASPECTS OF THE FBI’S CROSSFIRE HURRICANE INVESTIGATION, at v-xii (2019); Memorandum from HPSCI Majority Staff to HPSCI Majority Members, Re: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Jan. 18, 2018).
8 Sarah Bedford & Kaelan Deese, Russiagate definitive timeline: How new intelligence documents fit in, WASH. EXAM’R (July 26, 2025). [my emphasis]
The key claim in here — that what Jordan falsely says is the key claim of 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which he describes as, “that Russia ‘developed a clear preference’ for President Trump and ‘aspired to help’ him win the election,” is based on the Steele dossier — is based off two reports Kash substantially wrote (marked in blue). Never mind that it is only the key claim of the Intelligence Community Assessment if you have the thin skin of a Narcissist, never mind that any dispute is about how much evidence there was before discovering the June 9 meetings or Paul Manafort’s sharing of campaign information with Russian spies. That key claim had nothing to do with the subsequent investigation of Trump, which investigation had already been set into motion by Mike Flynn’s shitty OpSec.
But as I wrote extensively, the one dated 2020, showing that Congressional Republicans packaged up older claims and Russian spycraft after the Mueller Report definitively showed the Russia did prefer Trump and Trump did welcome that help, is an attempt to create a time machine to go back to the halcyon time before we knew all that.
Jordan, perhaps wisely, doesn’t try to lay out how all this fits together. He outsources it to a right wing propaganda outlet, outsourcing to them their credulity about the time machine effect going on.
Jim Jordan lied, shamelessly, when he alleged that that claim was shown to be false. And he lied, shamelessly, when he said that a report that affirmatively did not incorporate intelligence from the Steele dossier, choosing instead to only link it and specifically say it was not incorporated into analytical work (which backs Brennan, not Jordan), instead relied on the dossier.
This conclusion—now known to be false—was based in part on the Steele dossier, which “was referenced in the ICA main body text, and further detailed in a two-page ICA annex.”
If the intimation that Kash Patel’s hand-picked investigators breached Jim Comey’s attorney-client privilege in service of this conspiracy bears out, it only adds to the list of corrupt and possibly illegal things Kash has done in pursuit of this witch hunt. And that’s before you consider all the cops and prosecutors that get fired along the way.
Kash Patel may well be in a race against time. He needs to package up things before Comey gets them all thrown out before Andrew Bailey becomes eligible to act as FBI Director bypassing confirmation, in mid-December.
Links
A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up
Think of the HPSCI Report as a Time Machine to Launder Donald Trump’s Russia Russia Russia Claims
Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win
Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton
The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us
Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State