'Exaggerated his own importance': Kash Patel gets brutal fact check from NYT
When Kath Patel wrote his memoir last year, he claimed to have been a critical piece in the investigation of the attack on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi in 2012. But a new report found his claims were grossly exaggerated.
The New York Times investigated Patel's "Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy," in which Patel touted himself as the investigation's leader. He reiterated the claims in a September podcast of “The Shawn Ryan Show.”
"He has both exaggerated his own importance and misleadingly distorted the department’s broader effort," the Times said, citing public documents and interviews with several law enforcement officials.
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“By the time the D.O.J. was moving in full force to compile evidence and bring prosecutions against the Benghazi terrorists, I was leading the prosecution’s efforts at Main Justice in Washington, D.C.," Patel wrote in the book.
His quote from the podcast repeated the claim: “I was the main Justice lead prosecutor for Benghazi for a while.”
Patel's department at the Justice Department did not run the Benghazi investigation. While the main Justice Department helped support it, it was run out of the Washington, D.C., U.S. attorney's office.
The timeline also doesn't match up. The FBI's Benghazi probe began shortly after the incident in 2012. Patel didn't start working at the Justice Department until January 2014. According to the Times, he left in April 2017, "about six months before the first Benghazi case went to trial."
Patel was in charge of helping mobilize Justice Department employees to contribute to the work being done in the D.C. office.
"He took up the task when a predecessor in the counterterrorism division left; records show that person started a detail working in a Senate office in November 2014. And at a later point, before leaving the section, he is said to have passed off the role to another colleague after friction with the prosecutorial team," the report said.
Patel has also said the Justice Department begged him to join the prosecution team, but current and former officials dispute this, too.
Donald Trump's transition team was asked for comment about the discrepancies and backed up Patel. They even mentioned that the department had awarded him for his work on the Benghazi case. That was false, however. While he was awarded, it had nothing to do with the Benghazi case.
Patel also acted as if Barack Obama's administration never prosecuted those responsible, only taking one to court.
“I remember this meeting with then-A.G. Holder," Patel told the podcast. "And we had a deck of like 19 guys we wanted to prosecute. You know, JSOC had them rolled up and we wanted to get them all. They killed four Americans. You know, it’s a legit terrorist attack. And the basic general response from the F.B.I. and D.O.J. leadership was ‘it’s only politically convenient to get one guy.'"
In fact, the Times reported there were "complaints against about a dozen militants" — but they were filed under seal, which he likely would have known if Patel was involved. Patel also claimed that 19 people were in custody, but there was only one person in custody at that time.
Robert D’Amico, a former FBI agent who worked on planning to capture the main person involved in the attack, said that executing missions to obtain the others "just wasn’t feasible. You would have needed thousands of troops and invaded a country to get all of them.”
While the Obama administration captured the leader, Patel downplayed the seriousness, even going so far as to say, "They went and got basically the wrong guy. And then we prosecuted that wrong guy."