‘Morning Joe’ plays Kash Patel’s vow to ‘come after’ media on repeat as he’s picked for FBI director role

“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel said in a 2023 podcast with Steve Bannon, who claimed he was “absolutely dead serious.”

The hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe sounded the alarm on Monday over President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to install MAGA loyalist Kash Patel as the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, focusing much of their attention on Patel’s promise to “come after” the media.

In fact, Joe Scarborough repeatedly aired a 2023 clip of Patel touting Trump’s plan to seek retribution against his opponents if elected, noting that Trump “apologists” on Capitol Hill should be “deeply disturbed by this” and vow to block Patel’s nomination.

Trump sparked widespread backlash over the weekend when he announced Patel, who served in numerous positions in the president-elect’s first administration, as his choice for the nation’s FBI chief. Critics cited his clear lack of qualifications for the position and also cautioned that this was a warning to journalists across the country that Trump was serious about his threats against the free press.

Patel, who has also endorsed aspects of the unhinged QAnon conspiracy theory, has not only pledged his loyalty to the incoming president but also said that Trump should use federal law enforcement and national security organizations to punish his critics, especially within the media.

During a December 2023 appearance on former Trump strategist Steve Bannon’s podcast, Patel declared that in a new administration, Trump would fill the FBI, CIA and DOJ with loyalists who would do the president’s personal bidding. Specifically, Patel said, they wanted to go after media outlets that accurately reported that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.

‘Morning Joe' host Joe Scarborough urges control room to air a clip of Kash Patel again. (MSNBC)

“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” he exclaimed. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminal or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”

In case his audience thought they were joking, Bannon pointed out that they were “absolutely dead serious,” adding that they were explicitly coming after Morning Joe.

After airing the clip for the first time on Monday, Scarborough stopped co-host (and spouse) Mika Brzezinski from introducing a guest to the panel. Instead, he wanted the control room to re-up the footage so that any Republican lawmakers watching that morning could see it once more — specifically those GOP senators who were reportedly opposed to Trump’s nomination of Matt Gaetz as attorney general.

“Could you play that again? Can we do a CC to Republican Senators?” Scarborough snarked. “Hey, Mitch McConnell and Chuck Grassley. Let’s see…Mike Rounds is a great patriot, deeply disturbed by this. He said pretty much just that. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, who certainly stood up to the atrocious selection of Matt Gaetz. We want to play this one again.”

Scarborough wasn’t done after the second airing, though.

“I’d love to also play this one more time for all those Wall Street billionaires who say: ‘Oh, come on, come on. This is just all about tax, guys. He’s not going to get people who prosecute — oh come on!’” Scarborough dramatically said, adding he also wanted to replay it for the Trump “apologists” who’ve claimed he’d never place Patel in that spot.

At the same time, he insisted that this wasn’t about “uniformly” opposing all of Trump’s nominees, saying that he felt Trump had made “effective” nominations for the Treasury and State secretaries.

“This is not only bad for the men and women who run the FBI,” he said after the third airing. “This is not only bad for the rule of law. This is not only bad for the First Amendment. This is not only bad for the United States of America. This is bad for Donald Trump. This is bad for the Trump administration.”

Scarborough continued: “This is not going to end well. So I think the best case scenario for everybody is that Kash Patel—and this talk of Kash Patel — ends like Matt Gaetz’s nomination ended because this will not go well for anybody.”

Amid the ongoing allegations that he paid for sex with a minor, Gaetz withdrew his nomination as attorney general earlier this month after it was reported that at least four Republican senators were not going to budge on their opposition. Meanwhile, Scarborough said he hoped that the same message would be sent to Patel.

“I still believe there will be four Republican senators who will not vote to confirm somebody who says he’s going to throw judges in jail,” he stated. “He’s going to throw bureaucrats in jail. He’s going to throw reporters in jail who did not go along with the 2020 ‘Stop the Steal’ conspiracy theory.”

Notably, the Morning Joe crew ringing the alarm bells about a Trump nominee saying he’d “come after” the media comes weeks after Brzezinski and Scarborough — who have been among Trump’s most vocal critics in recent years — met with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago to “restart communications.”

While the fence-mending visit prompted intense blowback and a viewer exodus, it was reported that the pair mainly sought the meeting out of fear that they would be facing legal and political harassment from the incoming Trump administration.