What was meant to be a quick hearing turned into a full afternoon of questioning for an FBI agent instructed to investigate other agents that director Kash Patel assigned.
AlterNet covered the details of the Tuesday hearing from start to finish, but one detail toward the end of the proceedings revealed a startling link between this case and President Donald Trump's weaponization of the FBI and Justice Department against Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, two agents who worked to protect the 2020 election.
During questioning, Floris' defense attorney, Margaret Donovan, asked FBI Special Agent Bryan Witt where the case came from.
"Director [Kash] Patel directed the investigation," said Witt.
A July letter referenced several potential crimes, including 18 USC 1512, which is witness tampering, victim and informant intimidation and obstruction of official proceedings.
Witt explained that the directive was handed down in July and given to the Kansas City FBI office.
"I was assigned through chain of command," he added.
"Is that normally how investigations play out?" Donovan asked.
"I've not had a tasking from a director in my career," Witt said. He agreed that it was "unusual."
The announcement from Trump he's referencing comes from the July 17 speech in which the president alleged, again, that the 2020 election was stolen from him. CNN's full annotated transcript of Trump's remarks doesn't mention Hunter Biden or the laptop.
National security expert Marcy Wheeler caught the same moment. A key piece of the work done in 2020 by the two agents, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, was that they fought to prevent foreign governments from meddling with the election.
"Jeanine Pirro and Todd Blanche and Kash Patel were so determined to ensure nothing like that happens between now and Tuesday — to ensure that no one at the FBI would reject frivolous claims of election fraud by criminalizing doing so — that they flubbed the charges they filed against Floris and Benavides last week," Wheeler said.
What the lawyers for Floris and Benavides did was gather enough evidence that Wheeler said "will surely be used in lawsuits and, hopefully, impeachment or criminal indictments in the not too distant future."
Lawfare's Anna Bower said in her post-hearing analysis that House Judiciary Committee witness is Steve Castor, the counsel for the House Judiciary Committee and a former Trump impeachment defense attorney.
Witt said that he'd only spoken to Castor on Monday. The hearing happened on Tuesday. As it turns out, Castor wasn't in any of the interviews of the FBI agents who are accused of lying. In fact, he may not even have read the interview transcripts. The DOJ said it couldn't discuss what Castor knew because the "Speech and Debate Clause" protects him. It's typically used for officials, but on rare occasions it applies to top committee staff.
It meant that Witt had no real basis to allege that Benavides comments to the committee mattered.
The defense attorney also got Witt to admit that he lied in his affidavit that the agents were "sworn to tell the truth." In fact, he said on the stand that neither was sworn in.
Wheeler said that attorneys typically do this to explain to a jury what was wrong. In this case, the judge doesn't need someone to connect the dots that Witt lied. But Wheeler thinks that the lawyer did this for Witt specifically.
"I suspect Safer did this for Witt’s benefit, to make him think, to demonstrate to him how easy it is for someone to take an inadvertent false statement and make it a crime, to put him on the defensive," she said. "But for the vagaries of political fortune, Witt could be the one facing charges, not Benavides. And with that demonstration, Witt’s testimony may have shifted from defending the trumped-up charges to telling the truth."
Indeed, it was after that he threw some folks under the bus. Defense lawyer Margaret Donovan isn't merely any defense lawyer. She's part of the duo that founded the Washington Litigation Group. The other is Norm Eisen, who has attacked Trump by name. As Wheeler explained, Eisen writes lawsuits the way most people write emails. Donovan has spent the past year helping FBI agents who were fired by Patel.
"Her FBI complaints feature loads of detail about how Kash Patel, personally, knew he was violating the law when firing her clients," said Wheeler.
In another case, Donovan laid out evidence that Patel lied to Congress at least twice.
"On behalf of the FBI Agents Kash has fired, Margaret Donovan has spent a good deal of time accumulating what could be an impeachment of Kash Patel if and when Jamie Raskin gets a gavel in January. And by rushing through charges against Floris and Benavides on a complaint, Jeanine Pirro gave her an exceptional opportunity to do far more of that," said Wheeler.
