Special to WorldTribune, March 6, 2026

The following are excerpts from Government Gangsters, by Kash Patel in 2023. He was named Director of the FBI in 2025.

The Trump era was, more than anything else, an apocalypse in the truest sense of the word. It was an unveiling. It was a time when suddenly we came to see that unaccountable elites in Washington armed with the powers of the state believe that anything is justified — absolutely anything — to preserve their power.

For years as a public defender, a federal prosecutor, a congressional staffer, and finally a top aide to President Trump, I was able to observe our elites firsthand and see how the system worked. I fought battle after battle against the spiteful mandarins who continually attempted to subvert the orders of the duly elected president to achieve their own political ends.

What is the Deep State?

What exactly is this “Deep State” that I speak of? Some of the characters in this book are elected leaders. Others are yellow journalists in the media who serve as peddlers of propaganda and disinformation at the behest of the ruling elites. Still others are Big Tech tycoons and actors affiliated with non-governmental organizations, who carry water for the Democrat Party and the radical left. But my most dogged opponents were officials within the executive branch itself — members of the unelected federal bureaucracy who think they have the right to rule America, not Congress or the president.

Altogether, these actors have come to be known as the Deep State.

The Deep State is not some highly organized international league with regular meetings at Davos, the UN, or the WHO where they plot global domination. Nor is it limited to single bad officers or bad actors within the vast federal government who make wrong decisions that undermine the public trust. Really, the Deep State is the politicization of core American institutions and the federal governmental apparatus by a significant number of high-level cultural leaders and officials who, acting through networks of networks, disregard objectivity, weaponize the law, spread disinformation, spurn fairness, or even violate their oaths of office for political and personal gain, all at the expense of equal justice and American national security.

Within the government, they operate at the highest levels of almost every agency, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to the intelligence community to the Department of Defense (DoD). In many ways, this bureaucratic wing of the Deep State is the most dangerous.

Eisenhower’s Warning

The existence of an independent, unelected, politicized bureaucracy is not new. It has been operating and growing within our government for decades. President Eisenhower warned about it when he spoke of “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry [that] is new in the American experience,” which he dubbed the “military-industrial complex.”

Eisenhower warned in his farewell address that “in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Eisenhower wasn’t the only one to bristle against independent actors within his own government. President Nixon also faced recurring trouble as bureaucrats continually attempted to stymie his initiatives. Almost every Republican president has come across the Deep State within the government in less obvious ways when the bureaucracy that is supposed to be under presidential authority slow-walks direct orders, leaks false information designed to damage the administration, or presents the president with restricted options on key questions that fit into the box the bureaucrats have already designed.

The Deep State is a cabal of unelected tyrants who think they should determine who the American people can and cannot elect as president, who think they get to decide what the president can and cannot do, and who believe they have the right to choose what the American people can and cannot know.

This is a battle between the people and the corrupt ruling class. It’s a choice between whether America decides its policies and direction by vote, or whether we are ruled by the whims, egos, greed, and power struggles of a small body of incestuous, power-hungry, unelected oligarchs in Washington who hate us and play by their own made-up rules. If they win, we don’t have a democracy, a republic, or a sovereign people anymore. We have a tyranny that has arrogated for itself the right to wield absolute control over the American people.

I have confronted the Deep State as a public defender in Miami and a federal prosecutor at the National Security Department in the Department of Justice (DoJ). I uncovered their inner workings as the lead investigator of the Russia Gate hoax while serving as a staffer in the House of Representatives. And I continued to fight the Deep State as the senior White House counterterrorism official in the Trump administration, the principal deputy to the acting director of national intelligence, and the chief of staff for the Department of Defense.

Part II: Benghazi

Republish with FPI News Service

  Part I: Trump ‘apocalypse’ led to the ‘unveiling’ of the Deep State