Does Kash Patel start his day by kissing a life-sized poster of Donald Trump?
Then he drops to one knee, places his right hand on a copy of “The Art of the Deal” and recites his catechism: “Will I scrub your name from the Epstein files? Yes. Will I allow killer ICE agents to be investigated? No. Will I maintain the resting gaze of a drunk chipmunk? Yes. Will I stop spooking reporters until nobody is left to challenge your divine orders? No.”
On Wednesday, Patel’s FBI executed a search warrant at the home of a Washington Post reporter. The paper described it as “highly unusual and aggressive.”
The reporter, Hannah Natanson, was told “she is not the focus of the probe.” Agents are investigating Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a government system admin accused of “taking home classified intelligence reports that were found in his lunchbox and his basement.”
Lunch box? Is this guy in Grade 7? Also, if you want to hide classified docs, leave them in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. Or a Village People album on Air Force One.
Here’s the chilling part: “Federal agents searched her home and her devices, seizing her phone, two laptops and a Garmin watch.”
This isn’t just highly unusual and aggressive — it’s proof the media is under siege.
Ms. Natanson covers the federal workforce decimated by Elon Musk’s chainsaw. According to the paper, she “has been a part of the Washington Post’s most high-profile and sensitive coverage during the first year of the second Trump administration.”
On Christmas Day, she published a story about her “brutal” 2025: “(t)his year would transform me into what one colleague dubbed ‘the federal government whisperer.’ I would gain a new beat, a new editor and 1,169 contacts on Signal, all current or former federal employees who decided to trust me with their stories.”
I don’t know what documents Perez-Lugones allegedly swiped. But unless they contained top secret details about how Trump cheats at golf or dresses up in drag while watching Sean Hannity, the FBI may have an ulterior motive in searching Natanson’s home.
My guess? Those 1,169 contacts on Signal.
You don’t need to be deft in pattern recognition to see what’s happening.
Seizing one reporter’s devices is a message to all reporters: we are just one search warrant away. The goal is to make journalism feel dangerous. In Trump’s shambolic and solipsistic mush of a brain, there are two obsessions: 1. Himself. 2. The media.
It’s not like the old days when ink-stained wretches feared the jackboots might storm smoky newsrooms to smash the printing presses. Threats to the media under this administration are psychological: fear, intimidation, taunts, exclusion and the coercion of skittish owners who are more inclined to clam up than speak truth to power.
Are you happy now, Jeff Bezos? Maybe get an Amazon delivery guy to take all of your reporters’ laptops to the FBI lab in Quantico.
That might earn you a new space contract.
Over the last year, the doofus-in-chief and his zombies with government lanyards have defunded public broadcasting and sued outlets that dare to enrage him. Where is the Voice of America broadcast as brave Iranians risk their lives to protest a barbaric theocracy? I’m not sure. But check if Kari Lake has diverted any frozen VOA funding to her hair and soft-lens budget.
Under Pete “Jack Daniels” Hegseth, the Pentagon sent the real reporters packing and gave their desks to a menagerie of MAGA dolts and chuckleheads who ask questions such as, “Does the president plan to rebrand Greenland as Redland?”
You don’t need to shoot the messenger when you can mute the message.
The Associated Press remains partially banned from White House events because it refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. The FCC acts like it is the mafia and editorial content is a shopkeeper that refuses to pay protection money. The invertebrates cosplaying as Republican lawmakers believe they can threaten to subpoena any journalist who leaves a boo-boo on Dear Leader’s tangerine skin. The media is considered the opposition.
Trump, a carnival barker of projection and retribution, calls the media the “enemy of the people.” He casts himself as a warrior fighting “fake news.”
What he is really fighting is truth and reality.
Seizing laptops and uncovering anonymous sources? It tracks.
So with the exception of Fox News, it’s going to be a long year for the press. Trying to snag every outrage swimming out of this White House is harder than kneeling over a riverbank to catch a northern pike with your mouth.
The insanity is exhausting. The depth of depravity is bottomless. The pressure to self-censor is constant.
The Washington Post should alter its masthead motto after Wednesday.
The darkness is already here. Democracy dies when the FBI comes knocking.
