FBI Director Kash Patel’s incessant desire to uncover a “deep state” conspiracy against Donald Trump ruined multiple federal employees’ careers and turned judges against the Justice Department, The New York Times reported Monday.Patel first announced last summer on Joe Rogan’s podcast—where else?—that he had stumbled across a secret room in FBI headquarters containing evidence that a cabal had been out to get Trump since 2016. The “evidence” was a collection of documents Patel found in government “burn bags,” which are meant to be destroyed. Patel claimed that a “grand conspiracy” would tie together the 2016 Russia investigations, Trump’s 2020 election loss, and the president’s criminal prosecutions in 2023 and 2024. It was certainly a good plot for a movie.“You know how I caught these guys?” Patel gloated. “Because these guys were so arrogant, they would write everything down, and I found the documents.”Unsurprisingly, the documents failed to show the conspiracy that Patel promised. But that didn’t stop him, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and other members of the Trump administration from weaponizing the Justice Department to pursue the conspiracy claims and attack Trump’s enemies.Over the course of 2025, the White House demanded that low-level prosecutors indict the likes of former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Senator Adam Schiff, even when the evidence was flimsy. Todd Gilbert, a Virginia district attorney, was told to investigate the burn bags in relation to Comey, whose name showed up on some of the documents. Gilbert concluded that his office only had jurisdiction to investigate whether the documents in the bags were intentionally hidden. That still would have been a big deal had Gilbert found that to be the case. But even under intense pressure from the White House, the attorney found that nothing was out of the ordinary with the documents, and he refused to impanel a grand jury. Despite his team writing a lengthy analysis to the Justice Department explaining the decision, Gilbert was then fired.Patel and company continued trying to indict Trump’s enemies with brazen disregard for the justice system. James and Schiff became targets, but as with Comey, the Justice Department’s cases against them fell apart. The Trump team did get a win in April after North Carolina prosecutors indicted Comey for posting an Instagram photo showing the numbers “86 47” written in seashells, but that case is almost certainly too stupid to actually get Comey in trouble.The Trump administration’s biased use of the Justice Department is a blatant and awful example of their corruption that doesn’t get as much media coverage as it should. District prosecutors and judges continue to uphold the law, but the pressure on them from above is certainly tremendous, and the next few years will test their limits.