#max blumenthal

Will Sommer at The Bulwark:

FBI DIRECTOR KASH PATEL’S RELATIONSHIP with country music “sensation” Alexis Wilkins (his word, not mine) has infuriated a legion of right-wing media figures who once counted Patel as an ally. Pro-Trump pundits don’t care much about the $5,000-per-hour jet he’s been taking to see Wilkins in Nashville. They don’t even seem bothered by the Wall Street Journal report that Patel also used the jet to visit a Texas hunting lodge implausibly named the “Boondoggle Ranch.” Instead, they are getting fed up with Wilkins’s penchant for suing conservative commentators over their claims that she’s an Israeli intelligence “honeypot” who’s only dating Patel to control him on behalf of the Mossad. “Kash Patel has to step down,” Candace Owens tweeted on Monday, in the wake of another round of Wilkins lawsuits. “This is excruciatingly embarrassing. He’s a teenager in love representing the Federal government.”

The baseless claims that Wilkins is a Mossad agent date back to the spring, when Patel and Dan Bongino, the FBI deputy director, started to tell eager Trump supporters that billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein really did kill himself. The honeypot accusations got worse when the Justice Department, with Patel’s participation, abruptly decided to stop releasing Epstein files. This abrupt about-face from Patel, who had claimed before taking office that the FBI was holding back a real Epstein client list, created a conundrum for his admirers. And, as is their wont, some seized on a truly conspiratorial explanation: that Epstein was, in reality, an Israeli agent and that Wilkins, nearly twenty years younger than Patel, was a Mossad agent trying to cover it up on Israel’s behalf.

The Mossad connection to Wilkins is thin, even by the standards of right-wing media conspiracy theories. For one, Wilkins is a Christian. Still, her critics have seized on her work for right-wing content outlet PragerU, whose CEO worked in Israeli military intelligence, as the sole piece of evidence that she’s a Mossad operative.

Wilkins hasn’t taken it quietly. Since the initial Epstein blowup, she has been filing lawsuits against right-wing media figures. In August, she sued former FBI agent and Patel nemesis Kyle Seraphin, who responded in a recent court filing that he was using “satire” and “hyperbole” when he suggested she was a honeypot. But the real drama picked up this week, when far-right commentator Elijah Schaffer revealed that Wilkins sued him on October 28 for $5 million over his own post about the honeypot allegation. Wilkins also sued conspiracy theorist Samuel B. Parker for his own honeypot suggestion on October 31. Schaffer isn’t taking the lawsuit quietly either. In a video posted Monday, he said he was being punished for criticizing Israel. “This is a proxy lawsuit to bully me,” Schaffer said, accusing Patel of being the hidden hand behind his girlfriend’s case.

[...] Comedian Tim Dillon skewered Wilkins in a skit where he pretended to sing one of her country songs, while inserting praise for Israel. Photoshopped pictures of Wilkins in a beekeeper outfit, or with Patel as a honey-addled Winnie the Pooh circulated online. Even former Hercules star Kevin Sorbo, as mainline a MAGA celebrity as you can find, was concerned. “So we can’t seem to get the Epstein files, but we can weaponize the justice system against Americans without evidence?” Sorbo wrote on X. “This is disturbing…” Even figures on the far left have been hooked. Max Blumenthal, a hardened anti-Israel writer for the Grayzone, warned that Wilkins’s lawsuit could open Patel up to discovery: “He’s risking the Bureau’s opsec to save his relationship!”

Why didn’t Wilkins’s initial lawsuit against Seraphin kick up a similar furor? I think it’s because Seraphin is a former FBI agent whose audience skews toward boomer conservatives who are more focused on rooting out the Deep State and fretting about who got a promotion at which FBI field office. Schaffer, on the other hand, is a journeyman racist with connections across right-wing media after working for the Gateway Pundit and the Blaze. Schaffer blew up his promising perch as a quasi-late-night host at the Blaze after allegedly sexually assaulting a coworker and inspiring a sexual harassment lawsuit from a separate coworker in 2022. After that, he went on to run The Rift, a YouTube channel where he regularly struggles to clear 1,000 views per video.

In an ethically sane world where international law was determinative and not merely a tool of power's convenience, Blinken (and Biden, Harris, etc.) would have a warrant for his arrest from the ICC for abetting war crimes and genocide.

hazami BREAKING NEWS— Journalists confront US Secretary of State during his last official press briefing. The role of media is to be a watch dog of governments— not to cover up their lies.

Journalists Sam Husseini and @maxjblumenthal show us courageous journalism.

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