• President-elect Donald Trump’s picks to staff his next administration have been…questionable. His selection over the weekend of Kash Patel to lead the FBI fits into that mold: Patel is a MAGA enthusiast, a 2020 election denier, and a conspiracy theorist who says he’s ready to go after Trump’s political enemies! Ken Klippenstein, a national security reporter, helps us dig into how Patel could help Trump reshape the agency and its mission.
• And in headlines: Republicans and Democrats blasted Biden for pardoning his son Hunter, a New Yorker article details more damning allegations against Trump’s Defense Secretary pick Pete Hegseth, and the Supreme Court looks poised to side with the FDA in a case around vaping.

• Check out Ken’s Substack – KenKlippenstein.com
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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Tuesday, December 3rd. I’m Jane Coaston and this is What a Day, the show where we’re checking in with the folks who published the Oxford English dictionary who named brain rot as 2024’s word of the year. Are you guys okay? You know, that’s two words, right? Brain rot? Look, we’re here if you need to talk about what words are. [music break] On today’s show, the Supreme Court hears arguments related to flavored vapes and the danger to children. And more drama about Trump’s Department of Defense pick Pete Hegseth. Let’s get into it. President elect Donald Trump’s White House picks have been questionable at best, and his selection of Kash Patel to lead the FBI over the weekend has folks asking the same old question, why? Well, he’s got all of the makings of a Trump nominee. Patel is a MAGA enthusiast, a 2020 election denier and a conspiracy theorist. Patel worked for the National Security Council before becoming chief of staff to the acting defense secretary at the end of Trump’s first term. Before that, he was a public defender and DOJ prosecutor, and he was a key player in trying to discredit the FBI investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. In his post on Truth Social announcing Patel’s nomination, Trump wrote that Patel, quote, “played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. Standing as an advocate for truth, accountability and the Constitution.” In fact, Patel was so passionate about the, quote, “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” that he wrote a children’s book about it called The Plot Against the King, a wonderful tale that follows characters like keeper Comey and King Donald. Patel also casts himself as a wizard named the Distinguished Discoverer. 

[clip of Kash Patel] I have written the first ever children’s Russiagate book. It’s called The Plot Against the King. It is a fantastical telling by me, the Russiagate chief investigator under then-Chairman Nunes, of how we triumphed to put truth over evil. 

Jane Coaston: That is levels of Internet poisoning not seen before. Anyway, Patel has made it clear that he’s ready to go after Trump’s political enemies. Here he is on Steve Bannon’s podcast last year. 

[clip of Kash Patel] We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you. 

Jane Coaston: Trump’s kind of guy, eh? Patel faces two hurdles before he can take the helm of the FBI. One, a senate confirmation. Oh, and the seat has to be vacant. Christopher Wray, the current director of the FBI, still has three years left of his term. Wray could resign from the job to make way for Patel. Or Trump could just fire Wray once he’s back in office. Only two FBI directors have ever been fired. But given that one of them was fired by Trump himself in 2017, James, a.k.a. keeper Comey, firing Wray isn’t out of the question. The only other FBI director to get fired was William Sessions. He was fired by Bill Clinton in 1993. Knowing that it’s possible for Patel to assume office sooner rather than later, I wanted to dig into his plans for the FBI and what impact he could have on the agency’s mission. So I called up Ken Klippenstein. He’s a national security reporter writing on Substack at KenKlippenstein.com. Ken, welcome to What a Day. 

Ken Klippenstein: Hey, good to be with you. 

Jane Coaston: So I want to start with a very basic question, which is what the director of the FBI does. What would Patel be in charge of if confirmed by the Senate and obviously if Christopher Wray gets fired? 

Ken Klippenstein: So the FBI has over 50 field offices across the country. And what the FBI director does is he has a role in determining what are the priorities that the FBI is going to focus on, because threats are always changing. You know, historically, they’ve gone through narco terrorism and, you know, state actors, non-state actors. So it’s an important role. And crucially, it’s a very bureaucratic one because as you can imagine, when you have 50 different states that you’re thinking about, what are all their unique regional and local concerns, um coordinating all of that is not a trivial matter. 

Jane Coaston: You did the very noble task of reading his memoir, which is entitled Government Gangsters: The Deep State, The Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy. And I want to talk about Patel’s definition of the truth and his ideas for government reform. Like many of Trump’s supporters, Patel is constantly talking about the Deep State and how corrupt Washington is, very big drain the swamp energy. But who or what is Patel talking about when he says the deep state? 

Ken Klippenstein: He actually did get into some specifics. And what I realized was that the coverage that’s sort of portraying him as this firebrand, he’s going to just burn it all down and blow up the system. I think in some sense that’s giving him too much credit because if you look at what he sketches out in his memoir, his ideas are much more small bore than I would have thought. He says I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the Deep State. That’s the FBI headquarters. He says something like that and it generates a lot of headlines. Oh my God, he’s just going to shutter the FBI. But you go on to read the specifics about how he’s going to do that. What he ends up doing is he would just send those 7000 employees, not terminate any of them, send them all out to the field offices that I was describing before. And as he describes, have them, quote, “chase down criminals.” So that doesn’t really change anything. At no point in the memoir does he say those 7000 employees should focus on X instead. There’s no articulation of a new strategy. So it sort of felt like window dressing in a lot of ways. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. And something that you pointed out and that stands out to me is that Patel is almost as fixated on Trump’s very, very specific grievances as Trump is. He has a hit list of sorts in the book with people like Rod Rosenstein. Can you remind me, who are they? 

Ken Klippenstein: It’s these characters. It’s these figures. It’s these weird grievances. I haven’t heard half of these names in five years. Most of them are retired. They would have been important people during the Obama administration. I mean, he lists, for example, um the former CIA director, John Brennan. These days, he goes on MSNBC. He’s a commentator, like he’s not inside anymore. I mean, so he gets exactly what he wants. And these guys are made to testify in front of Congress. What does that change for the rest of us? How does that affect the 99% of the country who doesn’t know who any of these people are because they don’t live in Washington, you know? 

Jane Coaston: Right. I think one of the names is uh Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder. Who–

Ken Klippenstein: Yes. That’s right. 

Jane Coaston: — now he has like does like states and democracy work or something like that. But again, that was eight, nine years ago. And–

Ken Klippenstein: Right. 

Jane Coaston: You did mention this earlier that, like you agree with Patel when he says that we could cut some intelligence jobs and downsize–

Ken Klippenstein: Oh yeah. 

Jane Coaston: –departments. But like one, it doesn’t sound like he actually wants to do any of that. But what do you think Patel and his fellow people who are very fixated on 2017 get wrong when it comes to their reasoning for why the government is in need of reform? Because, I mean, my theory has always been, oh we want to investigate you. We don’t want no investigations. We want to investigate you back. 

Ken Klippenstein: Yeah, in so many ways, this was the mirror of some of the worst overreaches and unhealthy tendencies of the hashtag resistance types in 2017, which I thought was the irony at the heart of all this, which is that he’s talking about politicization being a problem. And I’m sure that’s a problem to some extent. You know, the FBI director is picked by the president. It’s going to have a political valence to it. We don’t have to look very far in the bureau’s history to see where it did awful things. I can understand the concerns about politicization, but you don’t solve that with more politicization, which seems to be what is on offer here when you’re going to, you know, investigate all these guys. And so it’s kind of like a fighting fire with fire thing. But then you lose me when you say we’re going to fight it by having this highly political crackdown on leakers to try to root out these, you know, politically motivated whatever within the agency. It sounds a lot like what they’re complaining about in the first place. 

Jane Coaston: I think my my last question for you is, let’s say Patel gets this job. What do you think the impact would be on the FBI more broadly? Like there are lots of real issues with the FBI. Like the FBI screwed up the investigation into Larry Nassar and USA Gymnastics. 

Ken Klippenstein: Right. 

Jane Coaston: The FBI has screwed up investigations into tons of other stuff, including repeated– 

Ken Klippenstein: Failing to anticipate January 6th. 

Jane Coaston: Failing to anticipate, you know, a lot of other things. There’ve been a lot of huge issues with what they have investigated, what they haven’t investigated. But he doesn’t seem interested in any of that. 

Ken Klippenstein: Yeah. And if you look at the specifics of some of the things he proposes, even stuff that I’m sympathetic to, like, for example, um he wants to put public defenders on the FISA court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But all of it revolves around the reason he’s interested in that is because of his belief that FISA was weaponized against the Trump administration. I don’t think the concern originates in the very real problems that the FBI and the intelligence community has and um the solutions he proposes, to the extent that I agree with him, I realize, oh that’s because it connects to the whole Trump persecution narrative. And so it makes me wonder how sincere any of that is or how effective it would be because he won’t be looking at it from a how do you improve the institution standpoint If the priority is how do you get these guys that were unfair to the former president, the guy that appointed me? That’s going to result in very different outcomes than trying to fix the system in a way that it yields better results for the, you know, hundreds of millions of people that live in the country. The stuff that we’re all affected by. Failing to anticipate 9/11, failing to anticipate January 6th, just intelligence failure after intelligence failure. That’s the stuff that affects all of us. He has almost nothing to say about any of it. And it just reminds me of  that Nietzsche quote, “When doing war with monsters, you should take care not to become one yourself.” It feels like that’s what happened with this guy because he did start as a public defender. I know public defenders. It’s a very honorable line of work. I get the sense that he’s someone who did actually care about these things. But the way that it’s articulated to fight back against the quote unquote “deep state,” it’s articulated to him in such a way that, oh you’ve got to focus on these 45 bad guys, that it ends up neutralizing any effect he might have had in being able to rein in the excesses and things that are ineffective about these institutions. So there’s a kind of tragic quality to them, I think. 

Jane Coaston: Well, that’s incredibly helpful. Ken, thank you so much for joining us. 

Ken Klippenstein: My pleasure. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with national security reporter Ken Klippenstein. You can follow his substack at KenKlippenstein.com. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment. But if you like the show, make sure to subscribe. Leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts. Watch us on YouTube and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: And now the news. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of Joe Walsh] For Joe Biden to do something like this. Trump, nobody’s above the law, we’ve been screaming. Well, Joe Biden just made clear his son Hunter is above the law. 

Jane Coaston: Former Illinois Republican Representative Joe Walsh went on MSNBC to vent about President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter. The pardon has sparked frustration from both Republicans and Democrats on Monday. Hunter’s pardon Sunday night means he won’t be sentenced for federal gun and tax evasion charges. Part of the reason why people are angry is because Biden did something he promised he wouldn’t. Here’s a clip of Biden speaking with ABC News anchor David Muir in June. 

[clip of ABC’s David Muir] Will you accept the jury’s outcome, their verdict, no matter what it is? 

[clip of President Joe Biden] Yes. 

[clip of ABC’s David Muir] And have you ruled out a pardon for your son? 

[clip of President Joe Biden] Yes. 

Jane Coaston: Democratic Colorado Governor Jared Polis said of the pardon on Twitter, quote, “This is a bad precedent that could be abused by later presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.” Still, the White House defended Biden’s decision. Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday aboard Air Force One, Hunter was singled out because of his last name. 

[clip of Karine Jean-Pierre] And so the president believed enough is enough and the president took action. And he also believes that they tried to break his son in order to break him. 

Jane Coaston: To be clear, Biden is not the first president to exert his power amid controversial pardons. In fact, Trump pardoned a laundry list of his own friends and allies, including Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, and Charles Kushner who Trump just appointed U.S. ambassador to France. Israel and Hezbollah continued to trade fire even after they agreed to a cease fire last week. CNN’s Clarissa Ward reported that Israel continued its attacks despite the agreement. 

[clip of CNN’s Clarissa Ward] CNN spoke to a U.N. peacekeeping source who says that Israel has violated that cease fire about 100 times. But there are many people on both sides of this border who are desperately hoping that this doesn’t escalate further. 

Jane Coaston: Hezbollah retaliated Monday, its first strike since the ceasefire. But White House national security spokesman John Kirby said the deal is, quote, “largely holding.” Here he is speaking to a gaggle of reporters aboard Air Force One Monday. 

[clip of John Kirby] We went from hundreds of rocket attacks to basically zero by Hezbollah and dozens of airstrikes by Israel to one or two per day. Um. So there’s been a dramatic reduction in the violence. 

Jane Coaston: Oh. Okay. Regardless of how shaky it seems right now, both Israel and Hezbollah insist the cease fire is still in effect and it’s supposed to last until late January. The scandal around Trump’s pick to be the next secretary of defense keeps growing. According to The New Yorker late Sunday, Fox News host Pete Hegseth was forced out of leadership jobs at two nonprofit veterans organizations he ran. The report cites a complaint by former employees of one of those groups, Concerned Veterans for America. Hegseth was its president from 2013 to 2016. And the allegations include a number of pretty crazy things that, if true, should probably disqualify you from running the Pentagon. Like Hegseth got so drunk at multiple company events that he had to be carried out. That he and other members of his team sexually pursued the organization’s female employees and grouped them into party girls and not party girls. And that’s not all. In a separate complaint, another former employee described how in 2015 they witnessed Hegseth chanting, Kill all Muslims, at a bar in Ohio while on a work trip. In a statement to The New Yorker, an adviser to Hegseth said, quote, “We’re not going to comment on outlandish claims laundered through The New Yorker by a petty and jealous, disgruntled former associate of Mr. Hegseth’s.” Never mind that the report included complaints from multiple employees. Hegseth already faced serious questions about whether he’d won Senate confirmation. Last month, news broke that Hegseth paid a settlement to a woman who accused him of sexual assault back in 2017. Hegseth denied any wrongdoing and local police didn’t bring charges in the case. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday in a case over flavored vapes and the danger they pose to children. The justices seemed unlikely to side with the vape manufacturers who claimed kids wouldn’t be interested in flavors like mother’s milk and cookies. Hmm. The makers argued that they are not targeted at kids and instead designed to help normal adults with normal palates quit smoking. At issue Monday was whether the FDA kept changing the goalpost for how it regulated flavored vapes. But Justice Elena Kagan didn’t seem convinced. 

[clip of Justice Elena Kagan] I guess I’m not really seeing what the surprise is here or what the change is here like. Like everybody basically knows that flavors are um are particularly dangerous in terms of kids starting the use of smoking products. 

Jane Coaston: The FDA maintains that its message has been consistent. The agency says it denied millions of applications because manufacturers couldn’t prove the flavored vapes had to benefit to the public. The Supreme Court will make a decision on this by next summer. And that’s the news. [music break] One more thing. How do you think the economy is doing? Is it good, bad? Now, here’s another question. How do you know? This past Black Friday was a record breaker for online purchases. According to Adobe Analytics, which tracks retail spending, Americans spent $10.8 billion online on Friday. Between 10 a.m. Eastern and 2 p.m. Eastern, shoppers spent $11.3 million per minute online, per minute! That is a ton of money being spent, and that’s a ton of money being spent at a time in which many voters believe or at least did believe that the economy is doing poorly. 61% of voters in battleground states told pollsters at Reuters in October that the economy was on the wrong track. Now, I know. Prices have been a big issue for everyone, especially on food. But I have another broader theory. As far as I can tell, how everyday Americans feel about the economy is more of a vibes question than a facts and figures one. Here’s an example. Politico polled voters before the election and after the election about how they viewed the economy. A week before the election, just 8% of self-identified Trump voters described the economy as on the right track. But after Trump’s victory, that number swung to 28%. And for Harris voters, before the election, 59% said the economy was on the right track. After the election, 46. Nothing changed. Nothing at all. I mean, Joe Biden is still president until January 20th. And yet Trump voters think the economy got better after the election. And Harris voters think the economy got worse. During his first term, Trump spent a lot of time talking about how great his economy was doing a lot of time. 

[clip of montage of President elect Donald Trump] The stock market reached yet another all time in history, all time high today. The stock market is soaring to record levels, boosting pensions and retirement accounts for hardworking Americans. And look what’s happening with our markets, people get it. 

Jane Coaston: But as Vox reporter Nicole Maria detailed in March of this year, the stock market did better under Joe Biden. And despite, you know, the knock on effects from a pandemic that killed millions of people worldwide, unemployment is now back to pre-pandemic levels and the economy is continuing to grow. And yet millions of Americans are convinced that stocks were higher and the economy was way better in 2018. And apparently many other Americans are convinced that the economy was doing great until Election Day and then became less great. How much does our perception of the economy play into how the economy actually does? For that matter, how does our perception of crime impact how we think about crime? How does the news we read or the news we don’t read impact how we think about what’s going on at all? What I’m saying is I think how is the economy doing, is a way more complicated question than we thought. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe. Leave a review. Don’t worry about the Oarfish washing up on the beaches of Southern California that Japanese fishermen think are omens of doom. Because I’m sure it’s fine. And tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading and not just about oarfish, which are weird and I’ve decided I don’t like them, like me. What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and let’s just avoid the deep ocean. There’s nothing good down there. It doesn’t want us. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Raven Yamamoto. Our producer is Michell Eloy. We had production help today from Tyler Hill, Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters and Julia Claire. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. 

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