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Keystone Kash Leaps Into New MAGA Civil War

The FBI director took aim at one of President Trump’s close allies.

Kash Patel is embroiled in a new MAGA-on-MAGA feud involving the FBI investigation into the 2024 assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.

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The conservative activist group Judicial Watch has spent years suing the federal government and spreading conspiracy theories about the supposed “deep state,” including filing lawsuits over Hillary Clinton’s emails and Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The group and its president, Tom Fitton, originally applauded Patel’s appointment as FBI director, only to accuse him last year of being “taken hostage by the Deep State” over the Trump administration’s effort to block the release of the Epstein files.

Now, Fitton—who is one of Trump’s favorite legal advisers despite not having a law degree—has gone scorched earth on Patel after he and the FBI accused him of spreading a “CLICK BAIT LIE” about the Butler investigation.

Last week, Judicial Watch announced it had received 48 pages of heavily redacted files from the FBI’s investigation into Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old gunman who fired at Trump during a campaign rally on July 13, 2024, barely missing the then-candidate before being shot and killed by the Secret Service.

The files were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, and initially Judicial Watch claimed they showed that Crooks had exchanged emails with a Butler County sheriff’s deputy before the July 13 shooting.

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“This is a CLICK BAIT LIE by @JudicialWatch which is now nothing more than the fake news media!” the FBI’s “Rapid Response” communications team wrote on X.com in response to a post from Fitton sharing the supposed findings. “Maybe if you spent more time on Facts instead of clicks you wouldn’t be a laughing stock.”

The unredacted documents showed that Crooks had emailed his college instructors, not police officers, the FBI post said.

Patel then shared the Rapid Response post, writing, “Facts over click bait.”

Fitton replied that his organization had “fairly interpreted heavily redacted documents” produced by the FBI and DOJ after almost two years of delays and litigation, and demanded an apology.

“That @FBIDirectorKash would promote this malicious, false and juvenile FBI post is disturbing,” he wrote. “To call me and @JudicialWathc liars for doing so — based on secret material which you have withheld from us and the court — is beneath contempt.”

He then deleted his original post and updated Judicial Watch’s press release to correct the original analysis, but blamed the mistake on the FBI “hiding” the information and continued to blast the FBI’s “dangerous smears.”

The irony is that Fitton regularly accuses his political opponents of being liars while pushing his own baseless conspiracy theories.

He called Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California a “liar in chief” for his role in investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, blasted Wikipedia for being a “smear machine of the Left,” and has generally spent his career accusing the national security establishment, media, Democrats, and federal bureaucracy of various cover-ups.

In the meantime, he has been a major proponent of Trump’s baseless claims that he won the 2020 election, making him one of the president’s most trusted informal legal advisers despite not being a lawyer, Democracy Docket reported in 2024.

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In one of his posts about the Butler shooting, Fitton fumed, “Why is @FBIDirectorKash’s FBI attacking me and Judicial Watch instead of following @RealDonaldTrump’s standard of maximum transparency?”

The Daily Beast has reached out to the FBI for comment.

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