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The legacy media has talked itself into a state of hysteria over the notion that Kash Patel, if confirmed as director of the FBI, will target mainstream journalists for retribution for their years of negative coverage of Donald Trump and all in his orbit.

But how does that square with what Trump, the former and now incoming U.S. president, has actually said, and with the fact that, in recent times, it’s Democrats that appear more often accused of going after members of the media who challenge their party’s approved narrative.

“I’m worried about me — but only as much as I’m worried about all of us,” MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said during an interview with CNN’s Oliver Darcy in June. 

The administrations under Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama each made efforts to unmask reporters’ sources. 

In 2022, the Justice Department’s chief watchdog confirmed that the Biden DOJ had issued a grand jury subpoena to confirm the phone number of Stephanie Kirchgaessner, the Guardian newspaper’s investigations correspondent.

The DOJ was interested in Kirchgaessner’s sources for stories about the child-separation policy under Trump, and the incident prompted new rules to prevent future rummaging through reporters’ phone records.

Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder also approved a subpoena for records from Fox News reporter James Rosen a decade earlier, creating a First Amendment stir. 

Rosen had been reporting on North Korea’s plan to test a nuclear weapon, and his case is particularly egregious since the affidavit described him not as journalist, but as a potential “co-conspirator” in the leaking of classified information under the Espionage Act of 1917.

Although not a journalist in the traditional sense, Julian Assange, whose WikiLeaks in 2010 posted hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic records about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, was the target of a grand jury investigation throughout the Obama administration. In June, Assange pleaded guilty to the Justice Department’s espionage charge in connection with the incident. 

Conservative outlets have also speculated that Catherine Herridge’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop caused her termination at CBS News, though CBS has denied the allegation.

In 2014, two years after Dinesh D’Souza released 2016: Obama’s America, a critical look at the former Democratic president, the filmmaker was indicted for donating more to a senatorial campaign than is legal. He served eight months in a detention center, with many arguing the penalty appears stiffer compared ones others received for similar behavior. 

Gerald Molen, the co-producer of D’Souza’s movie who won a Best Picture Oscar for producing “Schindler’s List,” told this reporter at the time that the Obama administration was “criminalizing dissent through the selective enforcement of the law.”

Echoing that sentiment, Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz told this reporter in 2014 that “It’s a remarkably selective prosecution considering Obama raised millions of dollars under similar circumstances and donors merely faced civil fines while D’Souza is charged with felony violation of federal law.”

After D’Souza served his time and paid a $30,000 fine, Trump pardoned him.

The Obama administration also targeted in 2012 Nakoula Nakoula, who made a crude, short video called “Innocence of Muslims,” which Democrats and most of the media said caused spontaneous rioting in Benghazi, Libya. 

In reality, Benghazi, where four Americans died, was a coordinated attack scheduled for the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. 

Nakoula used an alias, “Sam Bacile,” while making the video, thus was charged with violating the terms of his probation on an unrelated bank fraud conviction. He served a year in prison for the name-change violation.

Outside of those in the media, at least a dozen members of Congress of both parties, or their staff, including Patel, a former lawyer for the House Intelligence Committee, have been notified in recent months that the DOJ spied on their activities.

The House Judiciary Committee is investigating whether surveillance of congressional staffers is lawful, and Patel has filed a lawsuit claiming his civil rights were violated.

In 2017, the DOJ also seized the personal phone number and email records of Jason Foster, who was the chief investigative counsel for Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley on the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time.

Last month, Foster told Just the News that lawyers for Google earlier this year informed him of the seizure of his data, while normally he’d have found out within 12 months had the DOJ not repeatedly, and successfully, under both Biden and Trump petitioned a court to keep it a secret from him.

Beyond the left’s hypocrisy, or tactic, of accusing the right of what itself has been doing, the second part of the equation is Patel’s intentions.

Eleven months ago during an interview with former Trump political adviser Steve Bannon, Patel said he “will go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media.”

”We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said about the 2020 election in which Biden denied Trump reelection. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”

Patel has called the news media “the most powerful enemy the United States has ever seen” and vowed to “prosecute anyone that broke the law, and end the weaponized, two-tier system of justice.” 

Patel’s representatives did not respond to a request for comment, but his form of repercussions against media outlets that, for example, misled the public about the legitimate contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, thus helping his father defeat Trump, will apparently take multiple forms.

For one, he and his surrogates might make sure the self-proclaimed media watchdogs that consistently protect the left-wing narrative while attacking conservatives do not receive federal funding. 

NewsGuard, for example, is a service that rates media outlets that always appears to score those that protect their approved narrative higher than those who do not, and it is used in schools and libraries.

House Republicans and Brendan Carr, whom Trump appointed as chairman of the FCC, are already investigating NewsGuard.

Similarly, the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Trusted News Initiative are being sued by Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., respectively, and Patel would conceivably back these efforts in one way or another. Kennedy has accused the TNI of anti-trust violations, given it is a consortium of legacy media outlets that seek to harm the reputations of smaller, more conservative outlets.

Musk has been appointed to the incoming Trump administration and Kennedy has been nominated to run its Department of Heath and Human Services.

But the left is presuming something more sinister, and some experts are agreeing, at least to some degree.

“Journalists aren’t being hyperbolic. The FBI has immense power, and Patel would be the most overt partisan to wield the power,” said John Pitney, a professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College. 

As many have noted with the defendants who rioted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the legal process is part of the punishment.

Patel, said Pitney, “would not have to win in court. The mere presence of an investigation would force journalists to lawyer up at great expense.  And most journalists these days cannot afford to pay attorneys at $400 per hour.”

The left, in fact, claims that Patel has already created an “enemies list” in the form of an appendix in his book, Government Gangsters. The appendix is titled, “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State.”

The list includes several who are closely aligned with the media, including John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director who is a frequent commentator on MSNBC and CNN; James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence who provides analysis for CNN; and Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr, who criticizes his former boss on a variety of news networks.

Trump has already put elitist reporters on notice by way of announcing that podcasters will have equal access to White House press briefings. Not exactly a threat of legal or financial retribution, but definitely a sign that legacy media’s influence will will wane in the next four years.