It’s easy to forget that during his confirmation hearing early last year, Kash Patel assured senators that the FBI under his leadership “will not go backwards.” He added that there would be “no politicization” at the bureau.

Nearly two years later, the FBI isn’t merely looking backward; The Atlantic reported that it’s become “preoccupied” with Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat and with the president’s election conspiracy theories in general, at the insistence of the conspiratorial former podcast personality who leads the bureau. From the article:

In recent months, Patel has been briefed on the FBI’s “election integrity” investigations in Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, and beyond. Officials told me their understanding is that many of the election-related investigation requests came directly from the White House, many times with the instruction that “this is a big deal for the president” or “this is a push from 47.”

But all of that attention hasn’t yielded results. In meetings, Patel has expressed frustration that there have been no new findings, and instructed staff to “look harder” or “look again,” according to three people familiar with the conversations.

Of course, the agents’ failure to uncover evidence to bolster Trump’s misguided ideas has nothing to do with the intensity of their efforts and everything to do with the inconvenient fact that such evidence doesn’t exist.

But the problem isn’t limited to Patel and the FBI. Reuters reported late last week on Kurt Olsen, who recently stepped down from the Justice Department’s “grand conspiracy” investigation, who spent months trying to uncover evidence to support the president’s conspiracy theories, specifically related to the 2020 race, only to produce nothing.

Meanwhile, at the DOJ, where long-standing rules require prosecutors to independently assess whether the evidence presented to them justifies further action, MS NOW recently reported that federal prosecutors have been warned that they risk termination if they decline to pursue the kind of voter fraud cases the president wants to see.

The Associated Press reported soon after, “The Trump administration’s campaign to root out noncitizen voting is demonstrating what critics of President Donald Trump’s election conspiracy theories have long argued — that it’s incredibly rare, difficult to prove and has not been shown to change the outcome of elections.”

The pattern isn’t exactly subtle. The DOJ has tried to help advance Trump’s election conspiracy theories. So has the Department of Homeland Security. And the FBI. And the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Collectively, they’ve produced nothing — “look harder” and “look again” directives notwithstanding.

For his part, the president has dealt with these failures by pretending they’re successes.

As recently as June, he sat down with The New York Post’s Miranda Devine for a podcast interview, in which he said, in reference to the 2020 race, “It’s been proven to be rigged.” Proved by whom? He didn’t say.

The quote, however, was hardly unfamiliar. The president declared at an Oval Office event in April, “They’re finding out the 2020 election was totally rigged.” Who are “they”? And what did they “find out”? No one knows. Two weeks earlier, Trump similarly told Fox News, “Look, the election was rigged. You know that; I know that; everybody knows that now. It’s all come out.”

For Trump, it’s simply a foregone conclusion that his election delusions aren’t just real; they’ve been proven — by “them,” and the unidentified information that’s “come out,” thanks to what “they” have “found out.”

Amid all of this nonsense, at literally no point has the president made even the slightest effort to substantiate his claims with evidence despite the extensive efforts of much of his administration.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Team Trump keeps trying (and failing) to find evidence to bolster election conspiracy theories appeared first on MS NOW.

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