The most devastating mistake made by Team Biden in Afghanistan was the "unconditional surrender" of the Bagram Air Base, former Trump administration intelligence advisor Kash Patel told WorldTribune.com.
Afghan military officials said the U.S., after 20 years, completely vacated Bagram last month by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left.
"It's an unconditional surrender, it’s not even a withdrawal," Patel said of Team Biden's decision to give up the strategically key air base.
"We just up and left. Bagram as you know is the brain center of our operation in Afghanistan. It’s what the U.S. Government owns wholly and without the Afghan government. Multiple runways. It’s our allied base operation. NATO operation, staging area for aircraft, helicopters, weapons, machinery. It’s just enormous and you can’t run Afghanistan if you cut the head off. And that’s what Biden did."
Patel added: "In terms of the national command authority, in terms of the chain of command the president, the secretary of defense, you basically have political figures, buffoons in (Lloyd) Austin and (Gen. Mark) Milley basically instead of doing their job and resigning in protest to the president’s actions to surrender Bagram, kowtowing to him so they can keep their jobs and continue to be the political hacks that they are instead of the apolitical officers they should be."
President Donald Trump's withdrawal plan included retaining control of Bagram until all Americans were out of Afghanistan. Bagram has two runways and other facilities that safely can handle significant amounts of traffic and also host a large population. Kabul airport has just one runway.
Patel addressed the following topics in a wide-ranging interview with WorldTribune Editor, Robert Morton: What the Trump intel team got right, Patel's key role in exposing the Trump-Russia hoax, and his new legal offense trust.
WorldTribune: On the Bagram surrender, it’s almost as if there was a foreign power running our government to make a decision like that. Who can understand it?
Patel: Nobody does. That’s the problem. We can’t get an answer out of Joe Biden so everyone is left to, what’s the word, come up with some reasoning, but there is no reasoning for the absolute surrender of Bagram Air Force Base. It’s just failed leadership and there’s just nothing more to it than that. It’s so sad.
WorldTribune: Let’s discuss your key role and unique perspective in the discovery of the illegal U.S. spying on Donald Trump’s campaign and the false basis for the Mueller investigation which dominated media coverage for much of the first term of the Trump administration. From our vantage point as journalists (although different from much of the Washington press corps) this was the biggest story ever. Watergate paled in comparison. The question we heard most often from our readers was: Where are the indictments, where is the Justice Department? Where are the Swat Teams? Where are the answers? Do you have one?
Patel: I wish I knew. The million dollar question is what is John Durham doing? I know what I would do. I would prosecute the Lisa Pages, Andy McCabe, the Peter Strzoks of the world at least for intentionally misleading the American public, filing a fraudulent warrant application in the FISA court, withholding exculpatory evidence, committing contempt of court, and other offenses. That is where I would at least start.
WorldTribune: There were certainly offenses that could be prosecuted, right?
Patel: Yeah, I think so. In terms of obstruction of justice, lying to federal officials, lying to a federal court. I think there is conspiracy, and there is enough proof to charge these individuals with conspiracy to perpetuate a fraud on the federal intelligence court. There are all sorts of things that you could prosecute, but you would have to put people in grand juries, get sworn testimony, get the documentation from the FBI and DOJ. And maybe Durham is doing that. I don’t know that’s he’s not. I just don’t know that he is.
WorldTribune: If Durham ever goes public with what he has been doing, he will establish his legacy one way or the other.
Patel: That’s a hundred percent true.
WorldTribune: Our article of June 4 quoted you as saying that “Every single time President Trump had the intelligence correct and based policy decisions in sound reasoning. The only people rejecting the proper course of conduct was the mainstream media, aided by the clown show that is Adam Schiff.” Given the number of bad actors surrounding the president, how was he able to get "the intelligence correct"?
Patel: I won’t speak to who the bad actors are or might have been but I know who was around the president giving him appropriate advice. The Johnny Ratcliffes and Ric Grenells of the world, Robert O’Brien, me, Chris Miller. But we were briefing him. We were his national security team and we were briefing him based on the intelligence we were getting at our operational level missions. And we were getting the actual intelligence to him so that he could make the appropriate decisions on something like an Afghanistan. And so we were confident that we had the team in place to brief the president at the level that it needed to occur. And he made the right conditions-based withdrawal plan that was working based on that, just looking at Afghanistan. Now there are other teams and failures based on FBI, DOJ for sure, all day long.
WorldTribune: When were you there briefing the president? Could you fill in the blanks in your resume from your time on the staff of Rep. Devin Nunes and afterwards?
Patel: So I got the offer to go to the White House to join the National Security Council in January 2019. Then I stayed there until the end, but basically I had two roles. During my time in the White House I ran counterterrorism as senior director for counterterrorism, deputy assistant to the president. But when he fired the DNI, Ric Grenell went over as the acting director, and I went over as the deputy. For four months, I was the acting deputy DNI. It was a longer title but essentially that is what I was. And we did that. And so Ric and I were the ones literally briefing the president at the time on the Covid operation. And so we were doing that and a bunch of other things related to Iran, China, Russia and Afghanistan. And then Johnny Ratcliffe gets sworn in and I go back to the White House as senior director for counterterrorism, and I stay there advising the president about all that. Myself as well as obviously Robert O’Brien. And then the president fires (Secretary of Defense) Mark Esper in November 2020 and sends me over to run DOD as chief of staff. So I finished out the last three months over there. And so the mission, the top priority there besides protect America was to get us the hell out of Afghanistan smartly.
WorldTribune: The arbitrary mandating of virtual reality by the government-media-corporate power structure from Jan. 20, 2021 forward and the resulting crackdown has impacted many from President Trump to independent media including WorldTribune.com.
Patel: Selective crackdown. Twitter has still allowed the Taliban terrorists to operate on its Big Tech platform and push terrorism propaganda. But not President Trump.
WorldTribune: I tell media friends that the only real media on the scale needed to counter the corporate and social media monolith was President Trump himself. He was single-handedly fighting the entire media establishment. By silencing him, they silenced half the news. Related to the consolidation of the media, a trend we have observed since the Vietnam War, it seems to be also happening in the legal arena from the DOJ down to the state and local jurisdictions where we see so many politicized district attorneys and judges. What is your perspective on that as a lawyer and how does that affect what you are doing with the Kash Patel Legal Offense Trust?
Patel: That dovetails into what I am trying to do. It’s like you said. The Mainstream Media lost it when Donald Trump was elected. Or a little before that actually. And they continued to print political narratives that they wanted to be true but most of the time they were false, i.e. Russiagate, i.e. the Russia bounty scandal. Not even scandal. The Russia bounty misinformation campaign by the media where they alleged you know that we knew Putin was paying bounties to kill Americans. Ridiculous. It was false. It took them a year to admit that. But those were just a couple of examples where the media hurt American interests. They just wanted to attack President Trump and his policies. They didn’t care what the truth was.
Along that course of action that they took, there were people that they started attacking. Me and many others. Actually going after people who were serving and had nothing to do with the media. It was crazy and then they went after family members too. And so at a certain point you just have to say you can’t attack the family and get away with it. You can’t use Big Tech and Twitter and push your lies and say well we are hiding behind Section 230 and no one is going to do anything to us. And so that was the thing with my lawsuits. I just got tired of it and I said, I’m going to fight back. So I filed lawsuits for defamation against Politico, The New York Times and CNN.
[Then, when] I traveled around the country after leaving government service with Devin Nunes on his Freedom Tour, all these people would come up to me and say, 'How are your lawsuits going?' We know so many people that are similarly situated but they didn’t have the means to raise money, get lawyers, to take their act to the court.
And I said, you know what, I’m not in government anymore, what can I do to help? And FightWithKash.com is what I came up with. I’m going to raise money. I’m going to go around the country and find people who are defamed by the platforms who have a righteous action and raise money so they can have their day in court so they can exact a correctness out of the Mainstream Media and Big Tech to the extent that it would actually hurt them. You know, 7-figure wins. Actual judgements in court that show these outlets unlawfully attacked American citizens. My cases are still ongoing. Right now my focus is on raising money for others.
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