Scoop: Fact checking the latest attacks on Kash Patel

John Bolton made some sensational claims about Kash Patel — but they have been repeatedly contradicted on the record by many others.

John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor, raised some eyebrows when he claimed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to head the FBI, “was [not] in charge of a directorate during my tenure as national security adviser or thereafter, as he contends in his memoir and elsewhere.”

The sensational claim has been discredited by both Patel’s fellow Trump administration alumni and his still-active biography listed on the Biden administration’s Department of Defense (DOD) website.

Robert O’Brien, who served as Trump’s National Security Advisor immediately following Bolton, also wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that “Mr. Patel served as the National Security Council’s senior director for counterterrorism when I was White House national security adviser. I was able to count on him to get any job done, no matter how complex or difficult. Mr. Patel handled some of the nation’s most sensitive issues with care and discretion.”

Iit’s not only O’Brien who has noted that Patel served in senior government roles.

DOD notes on its website that “before joining the NSC, Mr. Patel served as the National Security Advisor and Senior Counsel for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), where he spearheaded the investigation into the Russian active measures campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election.”

Patel’s DOD biography continues: “Concurrently, he oversaw sensitive programs for the Intelligence Community and U.S. Special Operations Forces and worked to enact legislation to fully fund the multi-billion dollar budgets supporting intelligence and counterterrorism operations worldwide. Mr. Patel joined the HPSCI following his tenure as a terrorism prosecutor at the Department of Justice (DOJ), where he led investigations spanning multiple theaters of conflict and oversaw the successful prosecution of criminals aligned with Al-Qa’ida, ISIS, and other terror groups. Mr. Patel also served as the DOJ Liaison Officer to Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), working with our nation’s most prestigious counterterrorism units to conduct collaborative global targeting operations against high value terrorism targets.”