Britain’s The Economist Foams at the Mouth over Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel

Jan. 29, 2025 (EIRNS)—The Economist, voice of the City of London, is terrified that the United States Senate will confirm Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel in their respective nominated positions of Director of National Intelligence and FBI Director when they go before hearings Jan. 30. Hence the back-to-back articles attacking both—the almost 6,000 word article on Jan. 28 entitled “How Tulsi Gabbard Became a Crusader against the Deep State,” followed on Jan. 29 warning that “Kash Patel Is a Crackpot,” with the kicker “Is he also a menace?” The vitriol reserved for both is striking, although the length and detail of the article on Gabbard reveals a deeper hysteria and panic.

It includes extensive profiling of Gabbard—her family background, her military service, claims that she has operated under the spell of a Hindu cult, the Science of Identity Foundation, for most of her life, and is wildly ambitious and calculating. When it comes to former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the London rag charges Gabbard willfully ignored or covered up evidence of his atrocities, which it claims were carried out in joint bombing sorties with Russia against Islamic rebels that the Obama administration refused to touch. Her admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s role in Syria and her denunciation of former President Barak Obama didn’t sit well in London or Washington.

London is panicked that if Gabbard becomes DNI, her priority task will be to clean out the intelligence community of spies “disloyal to the President.” Two executive orders signed by President Donald Trump require that the new DNI undertake a “sweeping review of the intelligence community’s activities during the Biden administration, to identify people who ‘weaponized’ intelligence or interfered in domestic politics, and to take disciplinary action—including dismissal—against offenders.”

The hysteria is likewise evident in Patel’s case. The problem is that if confirmed, The Economist worries, no one can keep him away from “America’s federal law enforcement and intelligence machinery with all its powers of surveillance, investigation and arrest,” and then who knows what might happen. He might ignore the FBI’s “culture of complying with the law”! His “animus toward the national-security establishment” began with Russiagate, and as a conspiracy theorist, he took every opportunity to exaggerate mistakes or faults by the intelligence agencies, labeling top brass at the Justice Department and FBI corrupt “crooks” and “gangsters,” asking “who’s arresting these guys?”

The Economist hopes that actual prosecution against the President’s enemies will be hard, as there are judges, juries, defense lawyers and evidentiary rules to contend with. But “investigations of the type Mr. Patel would oversee involve fewer constraints,” especially if the FBI “can cobble together a national security justification.”