#paybacksquad — Public Fediverse posts

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.

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.
#ToddBlanche
#KashPatel
#JohnEckenrode #PaybackSquad

https://www.againstallenemies.net/p/kash-patels-fbi-criminals

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...

#JohnEckenrode #PaybackSquad
https://www.againstallenemies.net/p/kash-patels-fbi-criminals

Here's the report from last night concerning #JEdgarBoozer and #MafiaDon's #PaybackSquad:

https://www.ms.now/the-briefing-with-jen-psaki/watch/kash-s-boozy-boasts-backfire-as-drinking-questions-follow-him-to-another-hearing-2499857987823

#JEdgarBoozer #Patel... the former Podcaster turned #FBI Director... was quite open about his drinking before #DisasterDon was elected to a second term, and now denies all the reports about his excessive drinking are true.

But an EVEN MORE disturbing report about #MafiaDon's FBI (if that's even possible) is that they have assembled a #PaybackSquad to go after his political enemies. 😒

I keep thinking back to how aghast people were during #Watergate to find out Nixon had an "enemies list".