The Wall Street Journal Lets Its Anti-Kash Patel Bias Seep into Its News Coverage

Be vigilant for media bias as the debate unfolds.

President-elect Trump announced on Saturday that he would be nominating Kash Patel to replace FBI Director Christopher Wray before the expiration of Wray’s 10-year term. The leftist establishment promptly began raining fire and brimstone down on Patel’s head. The knives are out at the likes of MSNBC and The Guardian. The latter, for example, wanted to make clear in the title to its article that Patel is a “conspiracy theorist:” “Conspiracy theorist, Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to lead FBI, faces Senate blowback.” These unreformed leftist outlets are at least open about their biases.

Media coverage of Patel

Loony Tunes rants from MSNBC are the norm, but we might expect something different from the supposedly more objective analysts and editors at media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal. But in this instance, the initial coverages by MSNBC and the Wall Street Journal are indistinguishable.

Let’s compare. Here is MSNBC’s lede from its first article on Saturday about Trump’s selection of Patel:

President-elect Donald Trump has picked MAGA loyalist Kash Patel as FBI director, signaling his intention to overhaul the intelligence agency he has long criticized. Patel is expected to face an uphill battle for Senate confirmation.

In its initial coverage, also on Saturday, the WSJ hit the same tone. Its “Trump Picks Kash Patel as FBI Director” is an anti-Patel opinion piece masquerading as straight news. The author, Sadie Gurman, sets the tone in her lede where she describes Patel as “a fierce loyalist who has promised to upend the nation’s premier law-enforcement agency."

Donald Trump has chosen Kash Patel to be Federal Bureau of Investigation director, moving to force out the bureau’s current leader, Christopher Wray, before the end of his 10-year term in favor of a fierce loyalist who has promised to upend the nation’s premier law-enforcement agency.

It is difficult to substantively distinguish between these two opening paragraphs. For both MSNBC and the WSJ, Patel is a “MAGA loyalist” or a “fierce loyalist.” If anything, MSNBC is a bit more circumspect — it says that Patel will “overhaul” the FBI, while the WSJ has him prepared to “upend” it.

Given Trump’s experience with James Comey, who targeted both Trump and his National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn from Day 1 of the Trump administration, and the unrelenting efforts to imprison him, many would not blame Trump for wanting a “fierce loyalist” to head the FBI. And given Director Wray’s failure to fire anyone involved in the FBI’s myriad abuses, such as its pervasive misrepresentations to the FISA court to enable its spying on the Trump campaign, the FBI certainly needs someone who is not part of the business-as-usual crowd, but who will “upend” it.

But Gurman’s exposes her and the WSJ’s real bias a short time later when she contrasts Wray and Patel:

Trump would be pushing out Wray, the bureau’s restrained and circumspect director who has tried to steer the agency through years of political storms. In his place, he would put a swaggering campaign surrogate who has become one of the president-elect’s most trusted lieutenants. (All bolded emphasis is mine.)

You see how that works? Who but the most die-hard MAGA supporters could possibly favor firing a director who is “restrained and circumspect,” and replacing him with a “fierce loyalist” who is nothing but “a swaggering campaign surrogate?”

Does Trump really have enemies in the FBI who should be investigated? Not really. In the same paragraph, immediately after the above quote, Gurman says that Trump has only “perceived enemies.”

Trump would be doing so about three years before the end of Wray’s 10-year term. He seeks an ally willing to wield the bureau as a weapon against perceived enemies—including some within its ranks.

The WSJ’s very statement, intended to smear Trump and Patel, illustrates one of the key problems. Trump does indeed have enemies — real, not just “perceived” — in the FBI. Remember its lawyer, Lisa Page, and her paramour, Peter Strozk, who created an “insurance policy” to make sure Trump would not be elected and take office? The FBI is supposed to be apolitical, not taking partisan sides or fabricating scenarios to steal an election. And remember that the government rewarded these two love birds with a $2 million settlement to compensate them for the release of their incriminating text messages. Even though Page and Strozk have moved on, Wray has done nothing to convince the American public that their partisanship is not still infecting the FBI. The FBI clearly is in need of an “overhaul” or “upending.”

The Journal also attempts to debunk any notion that the FBI has targeted conservatives, including Trump and his conservative supporters. Patel, you see, holds onto these views that are “outside the mainstream” — that is to say they are crazy — which the “restrained and circumspect” Wray assures us are “insane.”

Republicans for years have accused the FBI of overzealously targeting conservatives, a charge Wray, a Republican who served as a top Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, called “somewhat insane to me considering my own personal background.” But Patel has long articulated views that are outside the mainstream. Some inside the bureau—including those who have been critical of some of its decisions—have been dreading the prospect of Patel at its helm.

Insane? Among other abuses, the FBI has targeted traditional Catholics and parents protesting insane government-run school policies; it has conducted early-morning SWAT-like raids on such suspected conservative criminals as abortion protestors and Roger Stone, a Trump-supporting elderly political activist; it has launched unrelenting investigations and lawfare against Trump himself and a myriad of his campaign officials at all levels from the low-level Carter Page to the pre-planned set-up of National Security Director Lieutenant General (Ret) Michael Flynn; it conducted an unrestrained search of President Trump’s personal residence, complete with staged photos of supposedly highly secret classified documents, and searches of his wife’s underwear drawer and other areas beyond the scope of the authorizing warrant.

Wray tells us that it is “insane” to think that the people who have done this have targeted conservatives. And Gurman and her editors at the WSJ think that it is Patel whose views are “outside the mainstream”?

What the Wall Street Journal omitted

Given the likelihood that Patel would be nominated for a key position in the Trump administration, the WSJ likely had a prepared bio of his positions and experience ready for inclusion in its initial portrait of him. But its sole reference to this was that his career

includes stints as a public defender, a federal prosecutor, a top House staffer and an aide in Trump’s first White House and Pentagon.

That’s it. Other than those brief and generic references, the WSJ did not see fit to describe Patel’s positions and extensive experience which include the following:

• Experience both as a defense lawyer and a prosecutor

  • Work both as a state (Florida) and federal public defender

  • Duty as a prosecutor in the DOJ’s National Security Division where he oversaw prosecutions of terrorists connected with ISIS, al Qaeda, and other terror groups

• Legal liaison to the Joint Special Operations Command, which includes Delta Force and DEVGRU (Seal Team 6), and other Tier 1 units

• Senior counsel for counterterrorism to the Permanent House Permanent Select Committee for Intelligence

• Senior aide to Congressman Devin Nunes, House Intelligence Committee chair

  • While in this position, Patel was credited with a key role in investigating and documenting the abuses of the FBI and DOJ in connection with the deceptive FISA applications that were designed to permit spying on the Trump campaign.

• Deputy Assistant to the President as a National Security Council official

• Senior Director of the Counterterrorism Directorate

• Chief of Staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller

• Deputy Director of National Intelligence

• Oversaw the execution of complex and critical priorities, including the elimination of al Qaeda and ISIS senior leadership and the rescue of American hostages.

• The foreign terrorist leadership eliminated included ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and al-Qaeda militant Qasim al-Raymi.

• Led a secret mission to Damascus in early 2020 to negotiate the release of American hostages.

This article intentionally eschews any effort to present or analyze arguments for or against Patel’s confirmation. But by pointing out these subtle markers of bias, I hope that it will assist readers in considering the avalanche of news and opinion articles and TV presentations about the Patel nomination.