Kash Patel's FBI Criminals

The Payback Squad Is A Stain On The Bureau

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Kash Patel built a slush fund inside the FBI to hand out fat cash bonuses the men who do his (and by extension, Todd Blanche’s and Donald Trump’s dirty work. This is what the rot consuming our Republic looks like up close.

There’s a particular tell in the way a regime decays, and Kash Patel just gave us the textbook example. When the people in charge of the law start paying cash, out of view of oversight and largely off the books, to the people who break it for them, you are no longer watching a Justice Department. You are watching a retribution protection racket with a federal seal on the letterhead.

Let’s be precise about what we now know, because the precision is the point. According to a letter from Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Patel signed off on more than a million dollars in taxpayer-funded “bonus” payments to a small, curated circle of agents.

Not for valor. Not for cracking a kidnapping ring or rolling up a cartel pipeline.

For loyalty.

The recipients sit on what the Bureau internally calls the Director’s Advisory Team, plus the agents who guard Patel’s body and, conveniently, witness whatever there is to witness. Some of these men collected five consecutive payments of roughly eight thousand dollars apiece, pushing nearly forty grand per person on top of salaries that, in several cases, had already blown through the statutory caps Congress set precisely to prevent this kind of thing.

The money went out so fast, to so few, that Raskin says the account ran dry and some of the payments bounced. Bounced. The director of the FBI was firing taxpayer cash at his loyalists with such frantic, grasping speed that the checks started coming back like a degenerate gambler’s rent check.

There is a word for an institution where the boss raids the treasury to reward the muscle, and it is not “law enforcement.”

Now connect it to the machine it feeds.

The Director’s Advisory Team isn’t a book club or a think tank.

Inside the Bureau, they have a nickname, and the nickname tells you everything: the Payback Squad. The reporting is damning in its specificity.

This is a team of agents assembled to build cases against the president’s enemies, the way you’d assemble a pit crew, except the car is a federal grand jury and the race is a vendetta. Their assignment is to manufacture a “grand conspiracy” theory, the fever dream that a cabal of former officials secretly conspired to wrong Donald Trump, and to turn that fever dream into indictments.

Their next intended trophy is John Brennan, the former CIA director. Among the names doing the work is John Eckenrode, a veteran of the John Durham misadventure, that years-long, multimillion-dollar fishing expedition that produced almost nothing but the satisfaction of the grievance that launched it.

The Durham well ran dry, so they dug a new one and called it the Payback Squad.

This is where Todd Blanche walks onstage, and where the corruption stops being a Patel problem and becomes a Justice Department problem, root and branch.

Blanche is the acting attorney general, and in a matter of weeks he has compiled a record that would have gotten a Tammany Hall ward boss arrested. He revived a prosecution of Jim Comey so flimsy that career prosecutors had already concluded no crime occurred, the now-infamous seashell case, built on a Insta post and a presidential grudge.

He installed an eighty-one-year-old Trump loyalist, Joseph diGenova, who I knew in the Before Times as a barking lunatic, to drive the Brennan investigation, but only after the career prosecutor in Miami who actually knew the file got shoved out the door for committing the cardinal sin of doubting the case had merit. He indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center.

He has reportedly greenlit investigations into Cassidy Hutchinson, into E. Jean Carroll, into ActBlue, a parade of the president’s tormentors marched one by one toward a grand jury. And here is the exquisite hypocrisy: this is the same Todd Blanche who, as Trump’s defense lawyer, wrote with wounded eloquence about “biased prosecutors” who “pursued charges despite the evidence, rather than based on it.” He knew exactly what a vindictive prosecution was. He could spot one at fifty paces. He just decided he’d rather run them.

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Quick exercise. After you finish reading this, go look at the front page of Fox News. Then Newsmax. Then, The Daily Wire. Then check your favorite MAGA podcaster’s feed.

Count the words “Patel,” “slush fund,” “Payback Squad,” and “bounced.”

I’ll save you the suspense. You are going to find approximately zero. The Guardian has the slush fund. NOTUS has the Payback Squad nickname. Jamie Raskin has the letter.

But on the half of the American media ecosystem that 70 million voters live inside, the story does not exist. It is being actively, deliberately, and professionally disappeared in real time.

This is why I read Ground News every day to check my facts…and my assumptions.

Ground News pulls a single news event together from across the spectrum — left, center, right, foreign press…and lays it side by side. Who covers it? Who buries it? How they frame it. What facts does each outlet leave on the cutting room floor?

The Blindspot feature is the killer app. It surfaces stories one half of the media is refusing to touch. The Patel slush fund. The bounced bonus checks. The Payback Squad. The Brennan grand jury. The diGenova install. The Comey seashell case. You see, in cold, clean visualizations, exactly which outlets are silent, which are screaming, and which are working overtime to convince their audience that none of it is happening.

For a recovering Republican strategist who helped build the message-discipline machine Fox runs on and now spends his life dismantling it, Ground News is not a luxury. It is a defense system. It is how I keep from being played, and how you keep your Facebook uncle from being played, either.

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Patel and Blanche are not just spending the institution’s capital. They are betting that half the country will never see them spend it. Don’t be in that half.

Now, back to the racket.

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So you have Blanche at Main Justice supplying the legal cover and the prosecutorial muscle, and Patel at the Bureau supplying the agents and, now we learn, the cash bonuses to keep them motivated and quiet.

That is not two scandals. That is one apparatus. The DOJ writes the indictment, the FBI builds the case, and the slush fund pays the men who do both. It is vertically integrated corruption, the kind you usually have to fly to a failing kleptocracy to study in the wild.

Here is the part the MAGA cheering section never wants to think about, because thinking about it requires a time horizon longer than the next news cycle.

You cannot un-ring this bell.

The Justice Department is not just a building or a budget line; it is a hundred years of accumulated trust, the radical and fragile idea that the federal prosecutor coming through your door is doing it because of what you did, not because of who you voted for or who you crossed. That trust is the only thing that separates a subpoena from a shakedown.

And it is the slowest asset in American life to build and the fastest to destroy. Every juror who now wonders whether the case in front of her is real or political, every agent who watches the Payback Squad collect its bonuses and quietly updates his understanding of how you get ahead at the Bureau, every honest line prosecutor who decides the integrity isn’t worth the career risk and walks, every one of them is a brick pulled out of a wall that took generations to lay. Patel and Blanche are not spending political capital. They are spending the institution’s capital, the real and irreplaceable kind, and they are spending it like men who have already bounced the checks.

When this passes, and it will pass, because these things always do, the rebuilding will take a generation, and some of it will not come back at all.

The decorated agents who got purged to make room for the loyalists, men like former Acting Director Brian Driscoll, a Medal of Valor recipient, do not come back. The norm that a prosecutor can doubt a case and say so without losing her job does not come by memo. You will be able to rename the Payback Squad. You will not be able to un-teach the lesson it taught every ambitious agent watching.

Which brings us to the reckoning, and I want to be very clear-eyed about it, because false comfort is its own kind of lie.

Right now Raskin is in the minority, and the minority cannot compel a thing. He can write letters. He can demand documents by June 29. Patel can, and so far has, simply ignored him, secure in the knowledge that a ranking member has subpoena power roughly equivalent to a strongly worded Yelp review. That is the present tense, and it is genuinely grim.

But political winters end.

When the House flips in November, and the forecasts increasingly suggest it might, the entire calculus inverts overnight. The letters become subpoenas. The polite requests become compelled testimony under oath. Every bounced bonus payment becomes a document Patel must produce or be held in contempt to withhold.

Every member of the Director’s Advisory Team becomes a witness. Every dollar of that million-plus becomes a line item somebody has to explain to a committee with the power to make the explaining hurt. Patel, who has spent his career writing enemies lists and promising retribution, is constructing the most meticulous paper trail of abuse in modern Bureau history, and he is doing it in a town where the gavel changes hands. The man who built the Payback Squad should spend some quiet evenings contemplating the precise meaning of payback when the subpoenas finally run the other way. I am so excited to see Patel under oath…and Kash, buddy…we’re also visiting the Poodle Room, and reports you’re a blackout drunk. Enjoy!

And contemplate it he should, because the people he is targeting and the people who will eventually hold the gavel have learned the same lesson Trump’s own deputies admitted out loud. Blanche himself, at CPAC, said the quiet part into a live microphone: everybody’s afraid that if they lose, they’ll all be investigated. He understands the machine perfectly, because he is the machine. He just assumes he’ll never be on the wrong end of it. That is the assumption every operator of a corrupt regime makes, right up until the morning he is wrong.

Let me say the thing plainly, without the comfortable euphemisms that let people pretend this is normal politics played a little rough.

This is not “tough on crime.” This is not “draining the swamp.” This is not even, despite the Bureau’s own grimly honest nickname, merely “payback.”

Payback is personal and bounded; it ends when the grudge is satisfied. (Well, mostly. I’ve been known to drive a bit harder on this front than some.)

What Patel and Blanche are building has no natural endpoint, because it is not about settling scores. It is about establishing a principle: that the apparatus of federal law enforcement belongs to one man, points only in the direction he aims it, and rewards the people who pull the trigger.

A justice system that exists to punish the leader’s enemies and pay the leader’s enforcers is not a corrupted democracy. It is the functioning core of something else entirely, and we have a word for that thing, and squeamishness about using it is exactly how it wins.

It isn’t payback.

It’s fascism.

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