Rampant FBI misconduct, election fraud, the deep state. Such were the weekly topics on “Kash’s Corner,” the eponymous online show hosted by President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the FBI.
From 2021 to 2023, Kash Patel made content for The Epoch Times, a news organization known for its far-right conspiracy theories, its association with a Chinese dissident religious group, and, since June, a sprawling multimillion-dollar money laundering scheme allegedly perpetrated by one of its top executives.
NBC News reviewed 79 episodes totaling over 45 hours of content featuring Patel and his co-host, Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek, neither of whom is accused in the federal case. Together, they spun detailed but unfounded claims of conspiracies involving government officials, law enforcement agencies, the media and tech companies, among others, all aiming to rig elections, silence conservative voices and undermine Trump’s presidency and re-election.
Billed as a show where the former deputy director of national intelligence would “break down the biggest issues of our day, from the origins of Covid-19 to the politicization of the intelligence community,” “Kash’s Corner” offered commentary on the news, often with a conspiratorial flourish.
The show, available only to Epoch Times subscribers, could receive fresh scrutiny as Patel faces Senate confirmation hearings. His lack of experience, his promotion of politically motivated conspiracy theories in a book vilifying the FBI, and his public remarks promising to “come after” judges, lawyers and the media involved in Trump’s many legal investigations are also likely subjects.
It wasn’t just his namesake show. Patel was a constant contributor across Epoch Times properties, appearing on other shows, on the sister television network NTDTV, and in the outlet’s Jan. 6 documentary. The last “Kash’s Corner” dropped in August 2023 with an announcement that Patel would be appearing on other shows and that the “Corner” would be back after the election.
The details of Patel’s contract with The Epoch Times aren’t known. (Financial disclosure forms filed by talk radio and Epoch Times host Larry Elder during a failed presidential run showed the company paid between $1 million and $5 million for a similar show.) A representative for Patel declined to comment.
Jekielek and The Epoch Times did not respond to requests for comment. In a June statement on the money laundering allegations, The Epoch Times said it “intends to and will fully cooperate with any investigation dealing with the allegations,” and noted that its chief financial officer, Bill Guan, had been suspended “until this matter is resolved.”
Turning the ‘Corner’
“Kash’s Corner” debuted in the summer of 2021, when after years of increasingly powerful roles within Trump’s national security agencies, the former federal prosecutor was out of a full-time job following his boss’ election loss.
That January, he began consulting for Trump’s Save America PAC, which devoted most of its spending to the ex-president’s legal bills. (Patel ultimately earned $325,000 for the job.) In April, he started “fundraising consulting” for the campaign committee Friends of Matt Gaetz, pulling in $145,000 that year, following news that the far-right congressman was the subject of an underage sex-trafficking investigation (Gaetz has denied the allegations and no charges were brought). Patel also set up a website, Fight for Kash, where he solicited donations for undefined legal efforts that promised to “strike a major blow to the far-Left media and Big Tech!”
It was a consequential moment for The Epoch Times, too. After years of struggling, the once-fringe newspaper powered by Falun Gong, a religious group persecuted in China, had finally found a foothold in conservative media. The company had spent a small fortune on pro-Trump ads in the run-up to 2020 and was amassing a windfall in the wake of Trump’s loss, increasing revenue by a staggering 685% over two years, to $122 million in 2021 — revenue that would later come under federal scrutiny. Executives and editors credited its success to subscriptions driven by their editorial vision, which they said offered a counterbalance to mainstream media, with reports downplaying the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, denying climate change and fearmongering about vaccines.
Patel, a major force behind an effort to undercut the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, made sense for The Epoch Times, an outlet that had grown its audience in part by exposing what it dubbed “Spygate,” a disproven conspiracy theory alleging President Barack Obama had spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign as part of an intricate plot to meddle with the election and tar the incoming president with scandal. In one episode of “Kash’s Corner,” Patel called The Epoch Times’ intricate chart laying out the conspiracy theory, including red strings, “the best one ever created in history.”
In March 2021, Jekielek first interviewed Patel for an “Inside Story of How Spygate Was Uncovered” edition of his show, “American Thought Leaders.” By April, Patel had a show of his own.
A.J. Bauer, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Alabama who studies conservative media, said Patel brought a shared worldview and White House credentials that lent an air of authority to claims that are usually only found on the fringes.
“I think it was circumstance and dovetailing ideology around conspiracism and the notion of a deep state out to get Trump” that landed Patel at The Epoch Times, Bauer said. “And I imagine that Kash — sorry for the bad pun — brought cache.”
Fraud allegations
Patel joined The Epoch Times as it appeared to be among the most successful media upstarts in the U.S., surging at a time while many other outlets were struggling to build an audience or turn a profit.
The company said it was making money through subscriptions and donations, claims that federal prosecutors now say were false.
According to an indictment unsealed in June, Guan, The Epoch Times’ chief financial officer, oversaw a group within the company’s Vietnam office called the “Make Money Online” team. Allegedly, the team used cryptocurrency to buy stolen funds, including debit cards loaded with fraudulent unemployment benefits, at a discount, and then funneled the laundered money into Guan’s and The Epoch Times’ bank accounts. Guan has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
Prosecutors claim the alleged money laundering scheme netted the group some $67 million.
There’s no reason to believe that Patel, Jekielek or anyone else in the newsroom was aware of any alleged fraud.
It’s unclear if or how the FBI was involved in the investigation, whether and how it would be in the future, and how having a former Epoch Times content creator as director of the agency might affect any investigation going forward.
The initial press release noted the charges against Guan were the result of a joint investigation between the Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General and the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, along with “law enforcement partners.” The prosecution is part of an operation by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces focused on “dismantling high-level criminal organizations.” The FBI is a member agency.
A spokesperson for the FBI referred questions about the investigation to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Public affairs chief Nicholas Biase declined to comment.
‘Just the beginning’
If Patel offered legitimacy to The Epoch Times’ short-on-substance claims and connections to Trump that culminated in a 2022 Mar-a-Lago interview with the former president, he also brought a firebrand persona who was comfortable courting fringe audiences.
Patel became a frequent guest on Steve Bannon’s “Real America’s Voice” show, where he promoted his books and Trump-themed merch, and made his most controversial statements, including an appearance last year where he imagined what he might do with federal power: “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” he said. He qualified those remarks last year, telling NBC News that he only intended to pursue those who had broken the law.
Things were slower over at “Kash’s Corner,” less self-promotional and more cerebral, where he had more than half an hour to lay out his version of the world. Most shows ran between 30 and 40 minutes.
On the FBI, Patel said it needed “a huge overhaul,” charged its leadership with “going after political targets” and putting “the law second,” and praised three FBI agents who had been stripped of their security clearances and been put on leave for either being at the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 or sharing conspiracy theories about the attack afterward. (Patel’s foundation also provided “grants” of unknown size to those ex-agents.)
“We’ve proven the illegitimacy of the FBI and its actions,” he said in December 2022, falsely citing “Russiagate” and Hunter Biden’s laptop as evidence the FBI has been “completely politicized.”
Later that month, he suggested the FBI was part of a Big Tech conspiracy to censor Americans and promoted a debunked theory that the FBI paid Twitter to censor conservatives as part of “the largest disinformation campaign to rig a presidential election.”
“This is just the beginning, and if anyone thinks that it was a one-off, they are completely wrong,” he said. “What, is the FBI going to come around and say, ‘Now, oh, we were just spending government dollars to help safeguard a nation’? I mean, that’s going to be the epithet they come back with, but we now know the true nature of their corrupt ways.”
Patel often invoked what he labeled a “two-tiered” justice system. “The FBI and DOJ [are] politicizing targets and manufacturing crimes. They’re basically saying, show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,” he said on a 2022 show.
In another 2022 episode, Patel voiced his concerns about what he termed the FBI’s “confidential human source corruption cover-up network.” He claimed the agency used confidential sources during the Jan. 6 riots for political purposes, asking whether rioters had been goaded by agents to commit crimes and questioning the related convictions. Did “those confidential human sources engage people who are not going to conduct criminal activity and convince them to do so? That is the definition of entrapment, which is illegal, and you can’t charge someone who’s been entrapped.”
The belief that confidential FBI sources contributed to the violence on Jan. 6 or that the agency set up rioters is an unfounded, yet persistent one. “Any suggestion that the violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was orchestrated by the FBI is categorically false,” the FBI said in a statement to Politifact this year.
Patel suggested a specific solution: for Congress to use the power of subpoena to uncover crimes and conspiracies via “a Church Commission,” similar to the 1975 congressional investigation into federal intelligence agencies.
“I don’t see how Americans can have any faith in this FBI anymore,” he said in December 2022. “It’s going to take a major overhaul from these guys in Congress when the gavels flipped to conduct some rigorous oversight, but also to retool the FBI and DOJ, so it actually has credibility again. But that’s going to be a multiyear lift.”
As for who should be investigated first, Patel suggested in January that it be Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a physician and immunologist who has become a major target of Covid-era conspiracy theories.
“Fauci, I guess, is the one-word name that you can say is deserving of an entire investigation,” he said.
Trump’s legal woes were a popular subject, too. In multiple episodes last year, Patel repeatedly framed multiple civil and criminal cases against Trump as politically motivated and without merit, including the Stormy Daniels hush money case (“That’s not a crime”); the classified documents case (“When you’re president and you leave, you can take whatever you want”); the E. Jean Carroll case (“Basically, a jury disregards the facts and the law and bases a decision on emotion alone.”); and the federal indictment accusing Trump of conspiring to overturn the election (“The criminalization of thought and free speech.”).
Complicit in nearly every scheme, according to Patel, was the media.
“There’s a whole lot of people out there just thinking, ‘What can I believe?’” Jekielek said in a 2022 show. “It’s hard,” Patel replied. “What they should believe is Epoch Times, but I’m biased.”
