Inside the DOJ’s relentless search for a 'deep state' conspiracy against Trump

After returning to the White House on January 20, 2021, President Donald Trump made a point of picking staunch MAGA loyalists for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI — including FBI Director Kash Patel, former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche (now acting AG) and federal prosecutor Jeanine Pirro. And according to New York Times reporter Devlin Barrett, the Trump-era DOJ relentlessly searched for evidence of a "deep state" conspiracy against the president.

"It was an investigation long sought by Kash Patel, the FBI director, and it was announced not in court papers, but through a haze of cigar smoke on Joe Rogan's podcast in early June of last year," Barrett explains in the Times. "Mr. Patel's prized criminal inquiry, known as 'the grand conspiracy case,' sought to tie together actions by a group of people that President Trump blamed for various investigations into him, going back to the examination of possible ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, and extending into events surrounding the 2020 election and the criminal prosecutions of Mr. Trump in 2023 and 2024."

Barrett continues, "In the view of Mr. Trump and his supporters, there was a 'deep state' cabal that had sought across multiple administrations and agencies to bring him down. Mr. Patel told Mr. Rogan he had found a secret room of evidence inside FBI headquarters confirming his long-held suspicions."

Patel, according to Barrett, believed that old DOJ files showed evidence of a conspiracy against Trump — and that obsession "became a defining feature of the Trump administration's politicization of the Justice Department." But DOJ veterans who weren't MAGA loyalists, Barrett reports, pushed back.

"Some of the documents related to events from 2016 and 2017 that Mr. Patel wanted examined, specifically the actions of James B. Comey, who was the FBI director at the time, and John O. Brennan, who had been the CIA director," Barrett notes. "Mr. Patel wanted both men investigated for lying to Congress and suggested that the documents supported charging them…. The premise of the 'grand conspiracy' was that Mr. Comey and his allies had concocted the FBI's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential contest to damage Mr. Trump, and that conspiracy extended into the 2020 election and the 2022 appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate him."

Barrett adds, "To Mr. Patel, the case consolidated years of his complaints and accusations about Democrats and national security officials. To many career Justice Department veterans, the case looked more like Frankenstein's monster — a motley assortment of long-dead investigations that were now supposed to be stitched together and brought to life."