Mark Fisher

that needs new juice to zap them into the headlines for that day.

So Kash Patel, as he's admitted, is given to conspiratorial notions.

He sees conspiracies in fact patterns, and obviously you want any crime fighter to look for patterns in the facts that they are assembling.

But in Kash Patel's case, it often goes a bit beyond the available facts.

So, for example, Patel has believed for many years now that he is a target of a media conspiracy to portray him in a dark light and to make up things about him.

And so he has sued a series of news organizations.

Claiming that they have defamed him.

He sued the New York Times.

He sued CNN.

He sued Politico.

In every case, he got a big splash in the news.

And in every case, he ended up withdrawing the suit or seeing it thrown out by a judge.

In the case of the January 6th assault on the Capitol.

Kash Patel has, for a couple of years, been presenting the theory that the FBI itself had recruited operatives of one sort or another who were in the crowd on January 6th and who were perhaps encouraging the rioters to be more aggressive in their attack on the Capitol.

He's never presented the slightest evidence for this, and yet he continues to present this idea even as director of the FBI.

He has said that there may have been such people and they may have very much egged on the crowd on January 6th, sort of portraying the January 6th attack almost as an inside job.

Yes, it's absolutely right.

The January 6th attack took place at the very tail end of the first Trump administration.

So if, as Patel theorizes, the FBI in 2020 and the first days of 2021 –

was using its own confidential sources and placing those sources within the militia groups that were plotting the January 6th attack, it's perfectly reasonable to ask, does that mean that the first Trump administration was in some regard responsible for the attack?