Carol Leonnig
speaker
372 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 6 Nov
Carol Leonnig’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 2.
Appearances
The Bulwark Daily · Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations · 12 Feb 2025
podcast
the Democrats and the Senate Judiciary Committee that he would never be involved in any political retribution, and he's not aware of any plans to get rid of anybody. Okay, fast forward. Dick Durbin, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says he has multiple quote-unquote whistleblowers. We use the term carefully. Credible sources who come forward to him to say that
that those acting directors, Driscoll and Kassane, were being told at that very moment on Wednesday and Thursday, the Wednesday before the hearing and the Thursday of the hearing, that Kash Patel was the person who wanted these people gone.
In fact, in contemporaneous notes taken by an FBI official, it says KP wants fast movement on this and that Stephen Miller had been calling- Maybe that was Kristaps Porzingis.
Right, right. I mean, I think what's interesting to remember about Kash Patel is that he's an interesting witness on the stand, right? He told the entire public in the middle of the Mar-a-Lago records dispute when it became news and reporters were learning that the FBI was investigating whether Donald Trump was hoarding classified records in 2022.
Kash Patel, his loyal soldier, shows up on podcasts and interviews saying, I saw Donald Trump declassify all this stuff. He has ultimate power. I saw him declassify to the fullest extent of the law all of these records, as if the Mar-a-Lago records had been declassified and that wasn't a problem. Later, he was brought before a grand jury, and that's not what he said, according to sources.
And in fact, testifying on Thursday last, Patel was pressed on that too and said, hey, wait a minute, I didn't say he declassified all those records. I said I saw him declassify a lot of records. So he's a wily witness, Patel.
It depends on your view. But if you counted how many times he used that favorite phrase, I can't recall as I sit here today. It's not ringing a bell. But if you gave me more information, you know,
One of the things that FBI employees and justice employees watched with shock as they are literally watching his testimony live in their offices or in their remote work locations, as they're watching this, they're like, wait a minute, you said you don't know some of the prosecutors that were fired in Jack Smith's office? Because there's one particular one that Booker asked him about.
And these were people that interviewed Patel for hours in the grand jury. So how could you forget that person?
The problem is, you know, I don't know that we're going to get the answer, Tim. You're absolutely right. There's no gray matter here. It's black, it's white, one or the other. And I'm not going to put a finger on the scale and say who is or isn't telling the truth, because I'm all about facts. But Kash Patel has not been a very careful, precise, or clear narrator in many other instances before.
I mean, debating we... saying he doesn't recollect a prosecutor interviewed him for hours in the grand jury, saying he's not aware of the appointees that are some of his best friends being installed inside the FBI, people we're told he handpicked. But I don't think we're going to get an answer in any timely way.
We've had 17 inspector generals fired by the president in the last several days, right? And now... The Democrats of the Senate Judiciary Committee are asking the inspector general for the Department of Justice, one of the only ones that was not fired, to investigate this as quickly as possible. I don't see how this is going to happen quickly.
And I think it's going to be challenging for an inspector general to deliver on this question. Because remember, just yesterday, the inspector general for USAID, just to put this in context, was fired as soon as he delivered a report, fairly blistering report, explaining what the impact of Donald Trump's and Doge's cuts in that agency were.
You are one of the best read, most observant folks I know. You know what Speaker Johnson said the other day, which was basically like, I'm delighted about what Elon Musk is doing.
For all the reasons you mentioned and all the questions you've raised, you know, they're about as low as they can go. There was a goodbye party for a person I'm not going to mention. I was not an invitee, just to be clear, but I was reporting a little bit around the edges of this party of a person who'd been forced out.
And there was a funereal kind of quality as described by several of the guests, you know, like everyone was in the Biden political cadre that ran the Justice Department. Remember, there's only one political at the FBI, but there's quite a few at the Justice Department. That cadre is incredible.
was preparing for a pretty bracing landing of the 47th president and his administration and what that would mean for the Justice Department and the FBI that is a component. But even they are gobsmacked. And one of the reasons is what you cited, you know, like, you got to believe that at the FBI, truth and truthfulness in congressional testimony would be important.
Another thing that they felt was super important, and they talked about at the party was Kash Patel may be the only nominee for FBI director who felt compelled to to take the Fifth Amendment in testimony in a criminal investigation, the Mar-a-Lago documents case. Adam Schiff mentioned this rather prominently in the hearing, in the confirmation hearing.
Kash Patel was the, you know, sought to be immunized because he believed he might incriminate himself if he answered questions truthfully in the Mar-a-Lago case and got a federal judge to hear his plea that he could not testify that he had to take the Fifth Amendment and she ultimately agreed and found that he had a reasonable basis to think that he had criminal exposure.
He's walked a really interesting line and he's viewed as extremely heroic by agents across the building. He has a good reputation, right? He's got 24 years of experience, had just been named, I think, the head of the Newark office, a pretty tough office and an important one, especially in terrorism and narcotics. And
Showing 341–360 of 372 · page 18 of 19
← Previous
Next →