Miranda Devine: Kash Patel’s FBI promotion of MAGA villain Steven Jensen sends the wrong message

The promotion of Steven Jensen, the architect of the FBI’s overzealous January 6 investigation, to head the Washington Field Office has confounded Trump supporters and crushed their hopes that new FBI Director Kash Patel would reform the bureau and root out those who targeted Donald Trump and his supporters.

As the section chief of the Domestic Terrorism Operations Section at FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, from 2020 until October 2021, Jensen also oversaw the FBI’s controversial operations targeting parents at school-board meetings and Catholics going to traditional Latin Mass.

Plucking him from relative obscurity in South Carolina to head the FBI’s most powerful field office sends exactly the wrong message.

It has caused consternation across the spectrum, from Judicial Watch and the Heritage Foundation to FBI whistleblowers and J6’ers guilty of misdemeanor trespass because they walked through an open door.

While a source close to Patel swears that the director has a good reason to elevate Jensen that will be clear “this week or within a month,” neither he nor his deputy Dan Bongino agreed to an interview and the FBI has refused to comment on the issue.

They hope the furor will blow over.

Feeling betrayed

But FBI whistleblowers who put their careers on the line to expose the weaponization of the bureau feel betrayed.

“Steven Jensen weaponized the FBI to persecute Americans over January 6th,” says Steve Friend, who blew the whistle to Congress about dangerous and unnecessary SWAT raids on cooperative misdemeanor suspects and the manipulation of statistics to make the so-called “domestic terrorism” threat from that day look more widespread than it really was.

After nine years as an FBI agent, Friend resigned after five months of unpaid indefinite suspension for refusing to participate in a J6 raid and is currently unemployed.

“Jensen’s promotion to head the Washington Field Office is analogous to placing Anthony Fauci in charge of Health and Human Services,” he says.

George Hill, a former FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, says Jensen was “the most ardent and supercharged person when it came to rounding up” J6 defendants and a true believer in Joe Biden’s domestic-terrorism narrative that the riot was the worst attack on democracy since Pearl Harbor and that every Trump supporter in and around the Capitol that day was an insurrectionist, a white supremacist and probably violent.

He testified to the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in 2023 about a conference call in which he allegedly heard Jensen berating agents in Philadelphia who were “pushing back” on demands to “round up” J6 suspects.

“The Philadelphia office said, ‘Well, there’s no evidence of any kind of, you know, violent leanings or insurrectionist leanings,’ to which Steve Jensen said, ‘You know, I don’t give a blank, they’re goddamn terrorists and we’re gonna round them all up.”

Jensen has refused to comment, although an FBI source denies Hill’s version of the conversation.

In a phone interview with The Post this week, Hill said he testified against Jensen because “I was just horrified at the breathless manner at which he was doing this J6 roundup of so called domestic terrorists.

Hunted down J6’ers

“He set up the infrastructure for that. He made the decisions, set up the mechanisms whereby all the cases would be opened around the country to give the picture that this was a nationwide problem. Previously it would have been opened up [as one case with multiple suspects] in Washington — but by opening it that way you allowed Chris Wray to sit in Congress and say domestic terrorism was a nationwide problem.

“Jensen and [former Washington Field Offoce boss Steven] D’Antuono were driving the field offices to open cases without predication.”

Hill, who was co-supervisor of the Boston Marathon bombing task force — and so understands the threat of terrorism better than most — says that the investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, the largest operation in FBI history, was a “rainmaker for 100 FBI personnel not only to make their careers but to make bonus money.”

Since the news of Jensen’s promotion was reported approvingly by The New York Times last Friday, the story has taken on a bizarre life of its own on social media, with fights raging between Patel loyalists and various FBI whistleblowers.

A spokeswoman for Patel has been briefing reporters to “trust Kash and Dan” and Bongino has been tweeting cryptic posts on X: “Be cautious of narrative ‘traps,’ let time put the puzzle pieces together, and what we’re doing will make sense. I see and hear you.”

Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch president and veteran warrior for transparency in government, was dismayed by Jensen’s promotion.

“He was a key figure in this domestic-terror push against January 6’ers . . . He treated them all as terrorists and was one of the key instigators in pushing the narrative within the bureaucracy that these folks needed to be jailed and ferreted out.”

There were high expectations for reform of the FBI in the second coming of Trump.

There would be no more of the scary weaponization and politicization of the Trump era. No more hunting down conservatives and Trump supporters.

No more Wray swanning around the country on the FBI private plane and bolting early from Senate oversight hearings to jet off to his weekender in the Adirondacks.

We expected investigations into FBI scandals such as:

• The coverup of Biden family corruption.

• The covert-influence operation to persuade social-media companies to censor The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop stories before the 2020 election.

• The Russiagate hoax that dogged President Trump’s first term.

• The raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Florida home, which included agents rummaging through First Lady Melania Trump’s underwear drawer.

• The raid and covert-surveillance warrant of Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

• The arrest and shackling of Trump adviser Peter Navarro at Reagan National Airport.

• The targeting of parents at school board meetings.

• The targeting of Catholics who attend traditional Latin Mass.

• The targeting of pro-lifers.

We hoped Patel and his fellow MAGA hero Bongino would focus the bureau on real national threats like terrorism and organized crime. They would wipe out the seventh floor and install a handpicked team of high-integrity Untouchables who would hit the ground running, root out wrongdoing and reinstate whistleblowers.

Instead, they appointed a fox to guard the chicken coop.

It’s early days so everyone who admires Patel wants to give him the benefit of the doubt. But there’s no time to waste.