Our podcaster FBI director has had his email hacked by the country we’re currently bombing.The Department of Justice confirmed to Reuters that Kash Patel’s personal email was breached on Friday after a group of Iran-linked hackers named “Handala Hack Team” began boasting that they had taken over the account.The Handala group made hundreds of what they claim are Patel’s personal emails available to download on their website. Some emails contain pictures of Patel that cannot be found elsewhere online. Others include what appear to be his phone number and personal email address. The New Republic was unable to independently verify the images and emails shared by Handala. A call to the phone number went to a generic voicemail.Both Reuters and the cybersecurity company Cyble suggested that Handala is run by the Iranian government. “Although the group publicly presents itself as a pro-Palestinian hacktivist collective, multiple intelligence assessments attribute its operations to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security,” Cyble wrote in a blog post.A recent Wired feature on Handala reports that “researchers first spotted the ‘Handala’ brand being used toward the end of 2023, emerging after the October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel and the country’s subsequent bombardment of Gaza.”Handala dedicated the cyberattack on Patel “to the martyrs of the Dena destroyer,” referring to the attack of an Iranian ship by a U.S. submarine on March 4, which killed at least 84 people.“The so-called ‘impenetrable’ systems of the FBI were brought to their knees within hours by our team,” the Handala team wrote on their website. The hackers’ haul of files doesn’t appear to be all that revealing; they released various images allegedly from Patel’s personal email of what appears to be a younger Patel on vacation, along with a document that looks to be his personal resume. Nonetheless, it doesn’t inspire much confidence in national security when this happens to the head of the FBI.Besides his podcasting acumen, Patel is best known for writing books about himself, using taxpayer money for private jet trips to visit his country-singer girlfriend, and misidentifying the culprits of crimes on social media.This story has been updated.
The Trump administration wants people to think Iran’s new supreme leader is gay. Fox News’s Jesse Watters asked President Trump Thursday about the rumor that Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, the hard-line cleric tapped to lead Iran, was a closeted gay man.“Did the CIA tell you that Ayatollah Jr. is gay?” Watters asked.“Well, they did say that, but I don’t know if it was only them. Which puts him off to a bad start in that particular country,” Trump said. In Iran, same-sex acts are punishable by death.The president then launched into a rant against slogans like “Women for Palestine” and “Gays for Palestine” while claiming that “no Republican has ever gotten the gay vote like I did.”But there is no credible intelligence supporting claims of the so-called “Gayatollah,” and the whole thing is a lie, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, as well as two other sources briefed on the plot, told Zeteo.“No one [here] gives it any credit; I doubt anybody in the Middle East does either,” one official told the outlet. “It’s some 20-year-old frat boy in the federal government’s idea of a good joke.”A cohort of administration officials and MAGA insiders teamed up to fabricate a story claiming that intelligence supported gay rumors about Khamenei, who was selected to rule after his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed earlier this month. The story soon showed up as an “EXCLUSIVE” in the New York Post with the headline “Trump briefed that Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is probably gay—and president has priceless reaction.”Trump has claimed that Khamenei is not an acceptable replacement, but admitted he would be open to working with another religious leader as long as they were favorable toward the United States. Now it seems that his administration is trying to turn Iranians against their new leader. “We wanted to mindfuck [the Iranians] with gay shit,” one knowledgeable source told Zeteo. A source within the Trump administration told the outlet that one of their MAGA group chats was titled “gayatollah.”