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Erin Ryan:  Welcome to another edition of This F*cking Guy, the show that picks one f*cking guy making America worse and explains why they suck. I’m Erin Ryan, host of Crooked Media’s Hysteria Podcast.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  And I’m Alyssa Mastromonaco the other host of Crooked Media’s Hysteria Podcast. Today we’re talking about Kash Patel, the pop eyed podcaster and wee little children’s book author that Trump put in charge of the FBI.

Erin Ryan:  Patel is a shining example of how, in this great country of ours, if you are aggressively servile to the right people, you too can be given a job for which you are so unqualified that you may personally set back trust in your profession generations. And lucky for Kash, he’s the perfect size for kissing ass, as his lips tend to line up perfectly with the butthole of a man of average height.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Patel has been described by people who know him as duplicitous, manipulative, and conspiratorial, a juvenile person who wants to play with toys and dress in camouflage.

Erin Ryan:  Exactly the kind of qualities you want in the leader of our nation’s premier law enforcement agency. Kashyap Pramod Patel  was born on February 25th, 1980, in Garden City, New York, an affluent little hamlet on Long Island that is also the home of Joe Namath, Madeleine Albright, and Susan Lucci.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Garden City is also famously the departure point for Charles Lindbergh’s historic solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927.

Erin Ryan:  Patel’s parents, who are of Indian descent, settled in the States after they were racially targeted and kicked out of Uganda by the dictator Idi Amin in the 1970s. Kashyap was raised Hindu, which put him and his family in the minority in the mostly Christian town. Patel played ice hockey as a kid and still considers himself a hockey fanatic. As a senior at Garden City High School, his yearbook quote was, Racism is man’s gravest threat, the maximum hatred for minimum reason.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Sounds pretty woke to me.

Erin Ryan:  Yeah, it does.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Patel would go on to claim in a memoir that he had been interested in going to medical school, but instead he became fascinated by the defense attorneys who golfed at the Garden City Country Club where he caddied.

Erin Ryan:  Kash Patel saying he was considering medical school is kind of like me saying, I’m considering starring as the new Bond. Pretty sure I’m not a ruggedly handsome male actor in the same way that I’m pretty sure that Kash Patel was too dumb and lazy to pass the MCAT.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  How do we know that Kash Patel is too dumb and lazy to be a doctor? Well he ended up attending Pace University School of Law, which is currently ranked 141 of 196 accredited law schools in the country.

Erin Ryan:  One of his law professors told the New Yorkers Marc Fisher that Kash’s Academic performance in school was, quote, “At best average.”

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Another curious tidbit from Fisher’s profile, the professor said that Patel was a DEI-praising left-winger in law school. He signed an amicus brief supporting race as a factor for consideration in law school admissions, which is a far cry from what he’d do once he became director of the FBI, which is immediately eliminate diversity from the list of the FBI’s values.

Erin Ryan:  After a mediocre performance at a subpar law school, Kash moved to Miami and worked as a public defender. A peer glowingly reviewed his performance as adequate. And a friend of mine, who is a former prosecutor who tried a double-digit number of cases against Patel and won all of them, described Patel as not smart.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Well, that’s a little concerning.

Erin Ryan:  Yeah. During the second Obama term, Patel became a staffer at the Justice Department. It’s a period of time in his life that he now fibs about a lot. Kash brags about being the lead prosecutor on the investigation into a pair of coordinated terror attacks against American targets in Benghazi, Libya. Here he is on the Sean Ryan podcast, no eelation, sucking his own dick.

[clip of Kash Patel]: My first big instance of that was Benghazi. I was the I was the main justice lead prosecutor for Benghazi for—

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  [overlapping]  No kidding. Yeah, no kidding. And in his 2023 book, Government Gangsters, Patel says basically the same thing, writing, quote “By the time the DOJ was moving in full force to compile evidence and bring prosecutions against the Benghazi terrorists, I was leading the prosecution’s efforts at Maine Justice in Washington DC.”

Erin Ryan:  Okay, but when the New York Times asked people who were actually important at the Department of Justice at the time to fact check these claims, they had no idea what Kash was talking about. Kash Patel was never the lead prosecutor on the Benghazi investigation. The truth is that Patel didn’t start serving in a junior position in the counter-terrorism section of the Department of Justice until well after the investigation into the Benghazi attacks began. And he left six months before the first case in that investigation even went to trial. And he was only working on the Benghazi investigation for a short amount of time.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  And according to sources who spoke to the New York Times, when Patel was working on Benghazi, his job was to find and identify materials that needed to be sent to the defense team and make sure everybody important was getting the paperwork they needed.

Erin Ryan:  It’s like handing out flyers outside a performance of Hamilton and then telling everybody afterward that you played Hamilton. [laughter] Another fib that Patel told about his time working for the Department of Justice is that Main Justice, that’s the headquarters branch of the DOJ, asked him to help prosecute Benghazi ringleader Ahmed Abu Khattala during the trial, but that he turned them down.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Fact check says that was a lie. DOJ employees told the Times that not only was Patel never asked to be part of Khattala’s trial, the investigation was not even being run by Main Justice. The New Yorker quoted one retired FBI agent as saying, of the group prosecuting Benghazi perpetrators, “It was such a small group, and Patel wasn’t in it. I would know. I never heard his name. He just was not there.”

Erin Ryan:  Ooh, ouch. Patel has also done some fibbing around former Attorney General Eric Holder. Here he is again on the Sean Ryan, no relation, podcast.

[clip of Kash Patel]: I remember this meeting with then A.G. Holder, and we had a deck of like 19 guys we wanted to prosecute. You know, JSOC had ’em rolled up and we wanted to get ’em all. They killed four Americans, you know. It’s a terr—legit terrorist attack. And the basic general response from the FBI and DOJ leadership was, Well, it’s only politically convenient to get one guy. And they went and got basically the wrong guy.

Erin Ryan:  I didn’t know that they made those don’t tread on me shirts in children’s sizes. [laughter]

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Also, not true. The Department of Justice had filed complaints about a dozen militants, but they were kept under seal because charges are kept under seal when the alleged perpetrator hasn’t been captured. Because the suspects were hiding in other countries, the process of capturing them would have required sophisticated military operations and tons of resources. One former FBI agent who was working on the case described going after all the people charged with terrorism related to the Benghazi attacks as not feasible.

Erin Ryan:  Yeah, so contrary to what Patel claims, the defendant who was brought to trial is the one that was captured, and he was definitely not the wrong guy. He was the ringleader. When the Times reached out to Patel for a comment, a spokesperson said that what Patel had said about his role in the Benghazi investigation was correct, and that he was so good at fighting terrorism in the Justice Department that he received an award for it. But that also was not totally the truth. Here’s a direct quote from the Times smackdown of Patel’s Benghazi claims. Quote, “In 2018, a team of current and former prosecutors and FBI officials who had worked on the investigation and prosecution of Mr. Khattala received the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service, which is the department’s second highest award for employee performance. Mr. Patel was not among the recipients.” End quote.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Erin this really screams fidelity, bravery, and integrity.

Erin Ryan:  In 2016, Patel made the news, but not for being a good lawyer. He showed up to a trial in Texas fresh from an airplane from Tajikstan via London and was promptly reamed by the judge so robustly that it made the Washington Post. So this exchange is a little bit legendary in legal circles because after this was over, Justice Department officials claimed that they were having difficulty obtaining a transcript of the hearing where Patel got yelled at. But then a newspaper got the transcript without an issue, and Judge Hughes issued an order of ineptitude aimed at the government’s lawyers.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Wow! Ineptitude. Oh, this was a villain origin story moment for Kash Patel. He was still big mad about it in his 2023 memoir.

Erin Ryan:  Soon Kash would accept the job that would lead to his first significant achievement. Aid to California congressman and senior Trump butt sucker Devin Nunes. Nunes is also known for losing a lawsuit against a man who ran a parody Twitter account called Devin Nunes’ Cow.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Nunes offered Patel a role on his staff with the promise that if Patel could help sow doubt in the snowballing theory of the Trump campaign colluding with Russian intelligence in 2016, Nunes would help Patel get a White House job.

Erin Ryan:  As a congressional staffer, Patel was a notoriously leaker and tattletale who couldn’t be trusted with secret information because minutes after Patel was told something sensitive, it would magically end up on Fox News. He also once tried to personally serve CIA director Mike Pompeo with a subpoena. [laughter] I’m sorry, that’s so funny. After using his congressional credentials to get into CIA headquarters, Patel claimed that he was ruffling feathers so spectacularly that Rod Rosenstein, who was the deputy attorney general at the time, threatened to subpoena him. But Rod Rosenstein is like, that didn’t happen. Eventually, Patel says he uncovered evidence that the FBI had abused the FISA process in order to keep tabs on a Trump campaign aide named Carter Page. Patel ended up being the author of a buzzy four-page document known as the Nunez Memo. The document claimed that the Carter Page FISA warrant was inappropriately reliant on information gleaned from the Steele dossier. God, so many blasts from the past. The Steele dossier was opposition research funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign. According to the memo, the FBI had not disclosed the partisan origins of the dossier and ergo by the logic of the memo, the whole Russian collusion thing was a giant hoax.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  The FBI issued a rare statement prior to the memo’s release, claiming that the document’s slippery relationship with the truth was concerning.

Erin Ryan:  But pressure mounted from the other side. A Twitter campaign called hashtag release the memo got a lot of social media traction in January 2018. Fox News was, of course, all over it. Eventually, House Republicans, who were in the majority at the time, stopped acting like they were being blocked from releasing the memo and released the memo. Ironically, a lot of the accounts boosting the hashtag release the memo turned out to be Russian bots. Democrat Adam Schiff released a Democratic counter memo that claimed that the Nunes memo was misleading because the Carter Page FISA warrant hadn’t relied solely on the Steele Dossier, and its funding hadn’t actually been concealed. But by then, MAGA had done what MAGA does and declared victory by ratfuck. Kash Patel has claimed that the memo saved Trump’s presidency.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Dubious.

Erin Ryan:  An inspector general’s report later found that the Nunes Memo didn’t actually prove that the basis for the Russia collusion investigation was partisan APO research that turned out to be faulty. The Steele dossier wasn’t reliable, but everything else the investigation found was legit.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  So the opposite of what Kash Patel claims publicly now.

Erin Ryan:  Yep. Now that Kash Patel had done what Representative Nunes had asked, Patel started pestering his boss about getting him a job at the White House. But that was slow going, despite a pressure campaign. Nunes asked Trump to hire his thirsty flunky. Trump pressed for John Bolton to find him a place on the National Security Council. Bolton, who has since been indicted by his former boss for mishandling classified documents, did not want Patel to work for him. But apparently Nunes was as pesky as a stage mom trying to get his beautiful son the role of a lifetime.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Bolton and a Bolton deputy named Charles Kupperman met Patel and were like, this guy is a total opportunist who just wants to latch on to whoever can get him the most power and attention. And they also noticed that Patel had exaggerated his own importance on his resume. Bolton eventually relented and gave Patel a job on the NSC, but Patel’s job was a green badge job. Now, Erin, if you have a green badge, you don’t actually have access to the White House. Just the Eisenhower office building. So while Kash technically worked for the White House, he didn’t work in the White House. And to be clear, I was a blue badge holder.

Erin Ryan:   Okay. I mean, I would say humble brag, but that is like a legit. That’s the thing you should be bragging about.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Thank you.

Erin Ryan:  Eventually, though, Patel snagged an invitation to the Oval Office thanks to some interventions from Fox News’ Sean Hannity. So I guess that’s who Kash was leaking to when he was a congressional staffer. Still, Patel wasn’t quite on Trump’s radar beyond being a name that people he liked batted around. Here’s a funny story that has made the rounds told to me by a reporter friend. So Patel, even back in 2018 when he thought he was king shit of Fuck Mountain, had a reputation for fibbing about how important he actually was. Actually, my friend described it as a penchant for lying and self-flattery.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Having spent many years in Washington, a city full of people who have a penchant for lying and self-flattery, I gotta say being a standout in that category requires you to be utterly insufferable. Totally full of it.

Erin Ryan:  Right? So it’s 2018. Our boy Kash was hanging out with a bunch of Trump hangers on, Katrina Pierson, some some media people who were in that circle, and they were in the lobby of the since rebranded Trump Hotel. During the hang, Kash was bragging to the other people there how he was secretly extremely close to the big man, aka President Trump.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  It’s so cringe how servile all these guys are to him.

Erin Ryan:  So crazy. Well, Alyssa, MAGA men are natural followers. They just want a big daddy to boss them around. They want to be told what to do. So Kash is bragging about how important he is, and the people who are sitting with him are actually on a first name basis with Trump, and they know that Kash is a bullshitter. They’re kind of just politely letting him talk without pushing back. You know how Joe Rogan is when he’s being told incorrect information about something he doesn’t understand.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  So the worst guy at every cocktail party.

Erin Ryan:  Absolutely. But then who walks into the Trump Hotel lobby but Trump Hotel lobby frequent flyer, President Trump himself? [laughter] He kind of Mickey Mouses around the lobby, walks over to the table where Kash was just moments prior, bragging about how close he was with him, and proceeds to say hi to just about everybody else at that table because he actually knew them. But he doesn’t know Kash from Adam. He doesn’t even make eye contact with him.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  How mortifying.

Erin Ryan:  Yeah, even Kash Patel, who seems shame immune these days, was pretty embarrassed, and everybody else at the table just sat there swallowing their laughter.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Patel’s exaggerated closeness with the president during this time would also make an appearance in his 2023 memoir, where he bragged that everybody was so jealous of his closeness with President Trump that Defense Secretary Mark Esper requested that Patel be fired. Esper said this never happened.

Erin Ryan:  Everywhere that Kash Patel goes, that meme of Mariah Carey going, I don’t know her, follows. Patel would attempt to make hay out of his role in the Nunes Memo for literally years to come. In twenty twenty two, he wrote a children’s book about the Nunes Memo and Steele dossier called The Plot Against the King, which is still available on Amazon for 19.99, but that I couldn’t bring myself to actually purchase because it looks like it is about the same quality as a coloring book you’d win at a shitty carnival.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  I am dying to hear what this book is about.

Erin Ryan:  Well, Alyssa, it features several characters that bear some resemblance to real people, such as Hillary Queenton, King Donald, and a Shifty Knight that is obviously based on Adam Schiff, and of course, a wizard named Kash.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Why would children want to read a fictional story of the Steele dossier? Isn’t that the source of the rumor that there’s a video that exists involving Donald Trump prostitutes, a Moscow hotel room, and gallons of piss?

Erin Ryan:  Well, obviously Kash leaves out the pee pee tape parts. I’m not sure if the plot against the king was a hit or if Kash just can’t take a hint, but there were two sequels, including one about the mass MAGA delusion that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. It’s called The Plot Against the King: 2,000 Mules.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Seriously, 2000 Mules? Named after that debunked Dinesh D’Souza film that he ended up getting sued over? The one that former Attorney General Bill Barr said had a laughable premise?

Erin Ryan:  That’s right. And at the launch event for the second installment of Patel’s Children’s Trilogy, child attendees could use a catapult to launch watermelons with Adam Schiff’s face taped on them. And Kash Patel posed with a sword.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  That’s a big sword.

Erin Ryan:  That’s actually a regular size sword. Kash Patel is just a tiny little guy. While the internet says he’s anywhere from 5’7 to 5’9, eyewitnesses have told me that he is 5’6, tops.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  I knew that eventually we get to the part where we made fun of his height.

Erin Ryan:  Look, let’s preface by saying we love a short king. The late musical artist Prince was approximately 11 inches tall, and he was one of the sexiest men to ever live. But when a short guy can’t own it and makes it everybody else’s problem and overcompensates by acting like the biggest douche on the planet in an attempt to impress people, we’ll never ever consider him one of them. Well, then we’re well within our rights to point out that he’s pocket-sized. Come on, look at this little interview he did with Fox News’ Bret Baier. Look at his little legs.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Oh, I’m sad. That happens to me.

Erin Ryan:  If we had to rank all of Kash Patel’s bad qualities, being boy-sized with a whiny little voice wouldn’t even be on the list. But it does seem to be one of the things that he feels bad about. Kash Patel is a small person who’s always wanted to feel big. And that’s kind of funny.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  So go ahead and point out that when he tries to sound tough, he sounds like Joe Pesci. Home Alone Joe Pesci, not Casino Joe Pesci.

Erin Ryan:  According to a New York magazine profile, when Patel was working his green badge job at the White House Kids Club, there was some speculation that Kash was serving as a back channel from the NSC to people like Rudy Giuliani, who was fishing for damaging information on Joe Biden and Ukraine. NSC Deputy Director Charles Kupperman says he was once called to the Oval Office and found that the low-level staffer Kash was already there, having tattled to the president that there were a lot of disloyal people working for the NSC. Kash had his cocktail wiener sized fingers all over Ukraine policy, to the point that, according to one former official, Trump believed that Patel was in charge of Ukraine policy.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Not sure who looks worse here. Trump’s rapidly calcifying brain or Patel’s Gríma Wormtongue act.

Erin Ryan:  Lord of the Rings reference. Nice. In 2020, Trump tried to get Patel installed as the deputy director of the FBI, a proposition to which Attorney General William Barr responded over my dead body before threatening to resign. Undeterred, Trump tried to hire Patel to be the deputy director of the CIA, but then director Gina Haspel said that if that happened, she’d quit. Vice President Mike Pence had to intervene.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  So why did nobody serious want to work closely with Kash Patel? Probably because he had a reputation for being a transparent climber whose ability to do the jobs he’d been given did not match the skills that his jobs required. Whatever the opposite of imposter syndrome is, Kash Patel has it.

Erin Ryan:  You know who was a fan of Kash though before anybody outside of DC really knew who he was?

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Hm.

Erin Ryan:  Q, as in the anonymous poster that was the mysterious ringleader of the QAnon conspiracy theory. In 2018, Q mentioned Patel by name in one of his drops. More on that in a bit. After Trump lost the 2020 election, Patel’s wild conspiracy theories were all over the place. He said that he believed that the FBI had seeded informants into the crowd on January 6th in order to drum up violence, and at the same time, that all of the January 6th defendants were political prisoners.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Once Trump was out of the White House, Kash did what all good grifters do and set up a consulting firm, a pack, and a brand called Fight with Kash, and started selling merch festooned with his dumb little logo. You could buy Kash Patel branded wine.

Erin Ryan:  alyssa, I looked up the wine. Guess how much it retails for?

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  If it’s more than two buck chuck.

Erin Ryan:  It’s two hundred thirty-three dollars and ninety-nine cents for six bottles for Kash Patel branded wine.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Well, if that’s outside of your budget, there’s also Kash Patel branded socks, flags, and hoodies. You know, stuff you’d only trust if it was approved by an unremarkable man with a law degree from one of the bottom tier law schools in America.

Erin Ryan:  Absolutely. That’s where I get all my wine. Patel also produced Justice for All, which was a recording of a group known as the J6 Choir singing an off-key rendition of the Star Spangled Banner from a jail in DC, interspersed with Donald Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Patel has bragged that it was at the top of the charts, but that’s not exactly true. It briefly topped the Billboard Digital Song sales chart, but it never even cracked the Billboard Top 100. Alyssa, am I being overly paranoid when I point out that the digital song sales chart seems like it would be about as easy to manipulate as the New York Times bestseller chart?

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Yes, I think it’s completely fair to mentally assign the dagger of death asterisk to the January sixth choir.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  They suck. They suck. [laughter]

Erin Ryan:  They’re really bad.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Kash Patel has said he’d use the proceeds from the sale of his branded trash to fund the Kash Foundation, which exists to fund lawsuits against news media.

Erin Ryan:  According to the New Yorker, a recent tax return from the foundation reported that its net income of six hundred sixty-six thousand dollars, damn, market the beast much Kash? Of that, only about two hundred thousand of that was distributed to fifty people, none of whom are named. The Kash Foundation should probably use some of that money it’s allegedly raising for charity to hire a copywriter for its website, which contains the following crime against grammar splashed across the homepage. America’s backbone—its dreamers, its doers, its creators—is under attack.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Is he really using the money that he’s raising by selling Kash patel branded hoodies to fund lawsuits against the lame stream media? Unclear. But it is clear that he does like to file lawsuits. Since 2019, he’s sued the New York Times, CNN, and Politico. But remember, even though he’s a lawyer, that doesn’t mean he’s a good lawyer. Each of those lawsuits have been thrown out or dismissed.

Erin Ryan:  The crusty the clownification of Kash in full swing, Patel hit the MAGA freak podcast circuit and even launched a pod of his own, Kash’s Corner, which sucks.

[clip of Kash Patel]: If President Trump wants to say from now until the end of time he won the 2020 election, yeah, that’s his constitutional right to say so. Are we gonna start prosecuting Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer?

Erin Ryan:  He’s like so boring.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  No, that is like content that was produced in the 1990s specifically to be aired at 2 a.m.

Erin Ryan:  Kash’s Corner is a production of the Epoch Times, a far-right media organization affiliated with a Chinese religious sect called Falun Gong, which the Chinese government classifies as a heretical cult. Falun Gong is also behind Shenyun, that Chinese ballet that is constantly leaving pamphlets shoved in your front gate and building lobby. Falun Gong is also associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Interesting that Q was such a fan of Patel back in 2018, and then later a right-wing media company affiliated with an organization that is also affiliated with QAnon would produce his podcast.

Erin Ryan:  For legal reasons, we’re just mentioning these things alongside each other. We’re not implying anything.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Mm-mm. Patel also did some consulting for the Qatar World Cup. A complaint was filed against him over his failure to disclose that work when he took the job as FBI director, but the day after the complaint was filed, Pam Bondi swooped in and changed the rules to help Patel avoid criminal charges for the omission.

Erin Ryan:  Oh my god. In 2022, when the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago over all the government documents that Trump had shoved into his chandelier bathroom in random storage areas after leaving the White House, Patel blabbed that Trump was legally in the clear because he declassified a ton of them on the way out. Somebody in Trump’s orbit would go on to call Patel unhinged and crazy and eventually Patel was forced to testify before a grand jury. Later he lied to Congress when he said he was not allowed to discuss that testimony.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  In 2023, Patel finally wrote a book for big boys. It’s called Government Gangsters, and it’s about how cool and tough Kash Patel is. The title refers to the popular far-right allegation that the federal government is rotten with deep state actors who are bent on thwarting the glorious dreams of Donald Trump. But given Patel’s track record, it seems like he considers anybody who has any business having a high-level government job as suspicious.

Erin Ryan:  In Government Gangsters, Patel famously included a list of more than sixty enemies that he would later go on to say were not actually enemies when he was asked about it during his confirmation hearing.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  On the list is basically everybody who has ever looked at him funny, including Adam Schiff, Rod Rosenstein, John Bolton, and Bill Barr.

Erin Ryan:  I feel like the first draft of that list was written in crayon. [laughter]

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Erin Ryan:  Patel has spent so much of his life focused on building a career based entirely on vibes that he hasn’t bothered to find love. But in 2023, love found him. Totally legitimate love with a young woman named Alexis Wilkins.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Their relationship seems so unsuspicious and authentic.

Erin Ryan:  Completely normal and regular. For one thing, they’re perfectly matched in age. When they first met, Alexis was 24 and Kash was in his early 40s. Now she’s a more seasoned 27 and he’s 45. They’ve got a ton in common, such as they were both alive in the year 1999. Here’s Alexis describing where they met in a way that sounds like everything is on the up and up.

[news clip]: So how did you meet Kash Patel? / We met in Nashville at a event that we both went to, at a friend’s house. [laughter] / Okay, so you you weren’t set up, you just happened to meet? / Yes, we just happen to meet.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  That’s it. We just happened to meet. No charming story, no meet cute, no nothing. We were at an event. Kash and Alexis just look like they belong together. They’re equally physically attractive, as you can see by this side by side, both of them solid Nashville eights.

Erin Ryan:  Solid Nashville eight.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Solid.

Erin Ryan:  Alexis spent time in England and attended a Swiss boarding school called Collège du Le Monde that was also attended by Tucker Carlson before her father’s job moved them to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she lived until she attended a Wackadoo Christian college and started a career as a country music singer. In addition to singing the national anthem at off brand UFC fights and minor league hockey games, she currently works for Prager University, a media company known for pushing far right propaganda aimed at children, which is run by a CEO that served in the Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Because of these biographical details and the fact that she recently sued somebody who jokingly implied that she’s a Mossad agent, we cannot emphasize enough how straightforward this relationship seems. Nobody has ever seemed less like a Mossad honeypot than Alexis Wilkins.

Erin Ryan:  Absolutely no. No one just listen to how natural she sounds when rebutting the wild theories about her.

[news clip]: Among others who have come out of Prager U is Candace Owens. And as far last time I checked, she doesn’t really sound like she’s part of Mossad. So you, going through the Prager U process of becoming a star does not turn one into an Israeli spy. And you’ve never lived in Israel. You you’re Christian as far as I can glean. Is that true? / That is true, yes. I am Christian. That’s been the most interesting thing is you you find out things about yourself that you’ve never put forth and have never, you know, believed in your life and and you read them on the internet. But yes, I am a Christian.

Erin Ryan:  Megyn Kelly is doing like 90% of the lifting in that interview.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Totally.

Erin Ryan:  She’s like feeding her the answer that her listeners need to have their fears that she’s Mossad assuaged. Like we’ve been joking about it, but like she would be better at this if she were a spy. [laughter]

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Exactly. When Trump was re-elected in 2024, Patel quickly rose to the top of the list of potential appointees to high-level positions in law enforcement. This was concerning because as we know, Kash Patel is an idiot and a simp in addition to being a petty little bitch. Trump nominated Patel to beign director of the FBI shortly after his inaguration.

Erin Ryan:  Now did Kash Patel have any experience working for the FBI? No. Did he have any legitimate law enforcement experience? Also no. Did he in fact gain a national profile through his work attacking and smearing the FBI? Yes.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Still in the nothing matters LOL era of Trump 2.0 Patel skated to confirmation.

Erin Ryan:  With his adoring girlfriend who loves him for his handsome looks and incredible sense of humor by his side, Patel was sworn in on the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu holy book. It should come as a shock to nobody that some of the more rabid corners of the MAGAverse, your Groypers, your Chris Rufos, etc., did not take kindly to the fact that Patel is not a white Christian guy.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Of course they didn’t. As soon as he took over at the helm of the FBI, Kash got to the important work of kicking out members of the deep state, many of whom just so happen to be women in minorities. Remember, diversity only matters if it helps Kash Patel get a job.

Erin Ryan:  Shades of Supreme Court justice and patron saint of pretending he’s not a DEI hire, Clarence Thomas. Rather than pick a deputy to support him who had any FBI experience whatsoever, Patel appointed Fox News’s veiniest host, Dan Bongino, to serve as his second in command. On his first day on the job, Patel transferred 1,500 DC-based FBI employees to field offices, a huge expense with little payoff to speak of. In the ensuing months, FBI resources have been diverted from things like chasing down and busting up child sex abuse rings, enforcing anti-corruption laws, and investigating terrorism threats, to supporting immigration enforcement efforts and backing up law enforcement in blue cities where crime has been declining for years. Kash Patel’s dumbass only cares about pleasing Donald Trump because being close to Trump makes him feel important. He doesn’t care about the law, he doesn’t care about kids. Just taint tickling the boss.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  While Kash has been cracking down on trusted law enforcement professionals for such offenses as supporting Kamala Harris for president or kneeling in honor of George Floyd, he’s been cutting brakes for his buddies.

Erin Ryan:  In high-level positions in law enforcement and intelligence, it’s standard for employees to be given polygraph tests before they’re granted access to state secrets. But not for Patel and his deputy, the emotionally unstable podcaster Dan Bongino. Bongino and two other newly hired high-level FBI employees were exempted from the standard polygraph, in a move that sources that spoke to ProPublica classify as unprecedented. Patel’s tenure as FBI director has been anything but smooth sailing. That might be because, as the Atlantic’s Elaina Plott put it, he’s an inexperienced lackey who can forget the repeated rake stepping that was the FBI’s response to the public assassination of right wing podcaster Charlie Kirk back in September.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Oh, you mean when Patel sent a tweet hours after the shooting that claimed that the FBI had a suspect in custody and then had to retract that statement because they didn’t actually have the right guy? And then we found out that he sent that tweet around the time he was spotted dining at a fancy restaurant in Manhattan?

Erin Ryan:  Look, Alyssa, all I’m saying is, that if one of my friends, or even like a distant acquaintance that I’d met a couple times, if one of them had just bled to death from a gunshot wound to the neck on camera hours before, I would not be heading out to a fancy dinner. I don’t care how hard it is to get into Raos.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Well Patel then flew out to Utah, which is also an odd move for an FBI director, as usually field offices prefer to run their own investigation.

Erin Ryan:  Patel rushing to center stage sure runs contrary to what he said on many a podcast, which is that his job as FBI director is to get agents what they need and then get the hell out of the way. Well you can’t get much more in the way than Kash Patel after Charlie Kirk’s murder. Here he is taking more credit than he should be for the investigation.

[clip of Kash Patel]: Charlie was shot at 12:23 P.M. on Wednesday. The first FBI agents on arrived on scene in sixteen minutes with Chiefs of Police at 12:39 and secured the scene. At my direction, the FBI released the first set of FBI photos of the suspect at ten A.M. Local time on 9/11. Shortly thereafter, the FBI reward of a hundred thousand dollars was released at 10:45 A.M. Local. Myself and Deputy Director Bongino arrived on the scene at approximately 5:30 P.M. The governor led a press conference last night at approximately 8:00 P.M., where at my direction the FBI released a never before seen video of the suspect. And just last night, the suspect was taken into custody at 10 P.M. local time.

Erin Ryan:  It’s like he’s been put on a pip and he’s trying to argue for himself to keep his job. Like what have you you know, like when DOGE emailed everyone and was like, Say what you did over the last it that’s what it sounds like he’s doing. He’s like dictating an email justifying his work.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Totally. Law enforcement officers famously love it when their superiors swoop in and take credit for the work they did.

Erin Ryan:  Also, the FBI didn’t do shit to apprehend the suspect. The man charged with killing Charlie Kirk turned himself into a family member, allegedly. Emphasis on allegedly. Kash Patel’s FBI was so disorganized and manic after Kirk’s murder that they left many, many questions unanswered or with nonsensical answers. And that’s the kind of information ecosystem where conspiracy theories and distrust sprouts and thrives. Take a look at Candace Owens’s popularity in the wake of Kirk’s death. If Kash Patel hadn’t parachuted in and messed all over the investigation, like an AI generated Donald Trump throwing poop out of an airplane, we wouldn’t be here.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  To make things more complicated, a month before Kirk’s assassination, the director of the FBI’s Salt Lake City Field Office, a 20-year FBI veteran named Mehtab Syed, was fired.  Syed was one of many of the women and minorities that Patel did away with after he took the top job at the Bureau, just a few months after she’d first been promoted to the position. According to one source who spoke to MSNBC about her, prior to her promotion, she’d been a quote “legendary field agent.” Guess we’ll never know how she would have handled the investigation differently.

Erin Ryan:  I mean, it couldn’t have been handled more poorly or more cringily than how Patel handled it. Remember this moment during one of the Kirk related press conferences? IMHO truly distills the corny performative masculinity of Kash Patel in just a few seconds.

[clip of Kash Patel]: To my friend Charlie Kirk. Rest now, brother. We have the watch, and I’ll see you in Valhalla.

Erin Ryan:  You’re not invited to Valhalla, dude. Are are you gonna die grisly on on a on the battlefield? Is that your pl—is that in your plan?

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  I mean, I don’t know who he thinks he is, but he’s not. Just days later, the FBI claimed that a man had carved the words anti-ICE into bullet casings before firing on an ICE holding facility in Dallas. But by that time, the Charlie Kirk investigation and communication around it had been so comically flailing that though it was clear that the FBI wanted the public to believe that ICE agents were being attacked by Antifa militias, everybody was kind of like, sure, Jan.

Erin Ryan:  Of Kash being a little much, the way over-the-top challenge coin that he issues to FBI agents who do a good deed. Alyssa, you’re already shaking your head because—

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  I cant, it’s terrible.

Erin Ryan:  You picture it in your head. It’s terrible. So challenge coins are kind of like college football helmet stickers, but for law enforcement. The coin under Kash is shaped like the symbol for the Punisher, who is like absolutely the totem of corny masculinity in this day and age. The Punisher is a Marvel character that famously hates the cops. Just in case anyone forgets that under Kash Patel, the FBI is a dudes club for dudes, two of the Punisher symbols’ teeth are replaced by revolvers. This honestly looks like something a middle school boy would doodle in his notebook during detention he’s serving for carving a swear word into the chest of the dead frog he was supposed to be dissecting in biology class.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  In addition to eroding the trust in the FBI and breaking the sound barrier and coriness, Kash has, like his piss colored and pig colored god Donald Trump, used his position to enrich himself.

Erin Ryan:  Now, there’s a law in the books that for security reasons the director of the FBI must fly private. However, this law’s existence didn’t prevent Patel from loudly whining about his predecessor Christopher Wray’s use of private jets to indulge in such extravagances as hanging out with his family.

[clip of Kash Patel]: Chris Wray doesn’t need a government funded G5 jet to go to vacation. Maybe we ground that plane. Fifteen thousand every time it takes off. Just a thought. We’re not the guys running around on private jets and somebody maybe in Congress should ask for how many flights on a private jet Director Comey took or my predecessor Director Wray took, and how many personal trips they took.

Erin Ryan:  Alyssa, one of my favorite tweets of all time is a picture of Chris Christie at one of the RNC events and he’s pointing. And the tweet is that picture captioned when another boy has a balloon. [laughter] And I feel like the vibe of that, like a little kid being like, I want like that’s what that knowing what we know about how much how much little Kash loves his plane, I think right now he was just jealous. He was jealous that another boy got to ride on his airplane.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  And now he has his plane. Fast forward to the Kash era, and reports just came out that Patel has been using the jet to fly to such vital events as a UFC fight in Florida, an off-brand wrestling tournament in State College, Pennsylvania, where his girlfriend was singing the national anthem, date nights in Nashville, a New York Islanders game, and back and forth to his house he shares with another man in Vegas.

Erin Ryan:  And while Patel has said he reimburses the government for the equivalent of the cost of a commercial plane ticket for each personal trip he takes on the $60 million jet, it does operate at a loss. And it didn’t look great for him to be zipping around like a horny Kardashian during the government shutdown when the air traffic controllers and TSA agents responsible for his safety weren’t getting paid. And as Kash Patel himself said while bitching about Christopher Wray, every time that thing takes off, it costs the taxpayers $15,000.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  To make matters worse, in mid-November it came to light that Patel had ordered a literal SWAT team of elite FBI agents to serve as personal protection for his twenty-seven-year-old country music sensation girlfriend.

Erin Ryan:  But can you blame him when she’s putting out such American treasure virtuoso vocal performances as this song, which is called Countryback? Let’s watch approximately five seconds to get a sense of the scope of her talents.

She’s so bad. I complain about radio country, but this is so much worse. Country music at least has like an artificial soul. This has like no soul whatsoever.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  No, that was bad. Also, we’re about to have a rare moment of agreement with another recent fucking guy, Pam Bondi. News reports have circulated that despite their public face of unity, the attorney general is privately annoyed with Patel. Yes, the woman who is such a kiss ass that South Park depicted her with having human poo all over her nose thinks Kash Patel is a bit much, allegedly.

Erin Ryan:  I do love that for her though. [laughter] I do love that she just is spending all of her day with like a low grade annoyance at having the most annoying coworker ever. Patel’s complete lack of a backbone or soul of his own has made it tough for him to get and keep his story straight regarding the Epstein case, because he, like so many right-wing grifters, made hay in the very recent past of claiming that an Epstein client list existed and it was filled with powerful elites who were being protected by or who were themselves members of the deep state.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  We all know what happened next. After much hullabaloo, it came to light that Donald Trump himself appeared in the Epstein files. Reports state that a thousand FBI staffers were assigned to go over the Epstein-related documents in the Bureau’s possession and redact all instances of Trump’s name earlier this year. Suddenly, in July, some of the very same people who had spent so much time riling the MAGA world into a frenzy over Epstein were telling people that there was just nothing to see there.

Erin Ryan:  Among them Kash Patel. While Pam Bondi has taken a lot of heat, Patel has gotten off pretty easy on this one, which you know, it’s the FBI that’s been in possession of these documents for the longest. He probably should be getting some more shit about this.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Now that thousands of documents subpoenaed from the Epstein Estate have become public, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino and other conspiracy mongers have decided that their new tack is to blame the Epstein Estate for keeping them from authorities. The Epstein Estate disagrees with this characterization and has claimed that they hadn’t hidden anything from investigators.

Erin Ryan:  Well, this puts Kash Patel in an awkward position, as he and the Attorney General have been claiming for these last several months that the FBI and Justice Department had already been pouring over all the things in the Epstein files, and that back in July they’d completed this review. And there were no additional prosecutions necessary, and it didn’t make any sense for them to release any more evidence publicly.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  So either the Justice Department and Kash Patel’s FBI were lying then they hadn’t actually gone over all the evidence they had access to, or they’re lying now when they say that they’ve begun an investigation into prominent Democrats who communicated with Epstein in the documents cache.

Erin Ryan:  But why not both? They could be lying about both things.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  They could.

Erin Ryan:  Unfortunately for Patel, the MAGA proletariat won’t back off the Epstein issue as easily as, say, a government official who was only pretending to care about the sexual abuse of girls because it was politically helpful for them at the time. Patel, Bondi, Bongino, and the rest of that clown car about to be blown up by the bouquet of Acme brand dynamite disguised as flowers that they brought to Washington. [laughter] He’s embattled, right? He’s he’s got a bunch of bad headlines, but he keeps surviving because he’s exactly the kind of follower that Trump likes. Trump knows that the most ardent loyalty comes from surrounding himself with people who would have no chance to get the money and power they have under anybody else. That’s why there’s so many fucking losers working for him. You know, the most pathetic thing about Kash Patel is that he bleeds with a desire to be something that he’s not. Like he wants more than anything to be a 6’2 GigaChad, headbutting other meatheads in a fighting gym. But rather than acknowledging and attempting to dismantle the system that privileges white frat boys over non white non Christian Americans, he thinks that if he joins their fight, he’ll get to become one of them. But no matter how hard he simps, he will never be the person that MAGA wants. When he sent out a good natured post on X acknowledging Diwali, honestly, probably one of the least toxic and disinfo ridden things he’s ever posted, he got a ton of blowback from frothing racists. But maybe if you just try harder Kash, maybe one day they’ll accept you. Just look at what happened to Maximilian Robespierre. The high-minded French revolutionary turned reign of terror cheerleader? Or how about a Siberian peasant Rasputin, who ingratiated himself to the Russian Tsar and Tsarina as the people of Russia grew increasingly disillusioned by the Romanovs? Or how about a group called the Association of German National Jews, which supported Hitler in the early 1930s, despite the Nazi Party’s open anti Semitism? I tell you what happened to those groups of people, but I don’t want to ruin the surprise. So, Alyssa, how do you rate Kash Patel in our matrix of fucking guys?

Alyssa Mastromonaco:   Well, we’ve established he is not intelligent. [laughter] This is not a smart man. So let’s go with we have reckless dumbass, right? Because he’s not smart enough to scheme. So reckless dumbass. And then opportunist?

Erin Ryan:  Yeah.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Right.

Erin Ryan:  I agree. I mean like the the evolution of his political beliefs from being like pro DEI when he was in law school to now.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  Right.

Erin Ryan:  It’s it’s very it it’s giving opportunist for sure.

Alyssa Mastromonaco:  That about wraps up the time we have for this episode of This F*cking Guy. If you like what you’ve seen, hit subscribe, share with your friends, and leave us a comment if you’ve got an idea for a future f*cking guy we should spotlight.

Erin Ryan:  This episode was written by me with an assist from Alyssa Mastromonaco. Thank you, Alyssa. Caroline Reston is Hysteria’s senior producer. All of the rest of the credits, as well as links to our sources, like Marc Fisher’s New Yorker profile of Patel and Eliana Plott’s work at the Atlantic, can be found in our show notes below. Take care, be well. Remember that there’s no Rao’s in Valhalla.

Alyssa Mastromonaco: And fuck that guy.