Kash Patel unearths another 'October Surprise' FBI plot targeting Trump before an election

The explosive Arctic Frost investigation documents that FBI Director Kash Patel dispatched to Congress include a revelation of another October surprise where the bureau tried to put its law enforcement thumb on an election scale against Donald Trump.

This one, unlike Russia collusion four years earlier, occurred in 2020.

A memo buried in the middle of the 235-page evidence production that Patel sent the House Judiciary Committee this week chronicles how the FBI’s Washington Field Office rifled through financial records and campaign expenditure reports producing a “tactical intelligence report” trying to link payments between Trump’s re-election campaign and a vendor named American Made Media Consultants (AMMC) to possible casino gambling.

In short, the FBI agents believed an employee of the campaign went gambling at a casino after AMMC got money for campaign work. Not exactly the crime of the century. 

Putting the "October" in "October Surprise"

Remarkably, the bulletin was produced on Oct. 21, 2020 — just two weeks before the Election Day when Trump lost to Joe Biden — and it recommended taking further actions toward opening a “a predicated investigation into Federal election crimes” even though it admitted its assessments that a crime occurred were with “low confidence.”

“FBI Washington Field Office assesses the use of AMMC as a clearinghouse for Trump campaign spending is likely vulnerable to campaign finance crimes by campaign-connected sub-vendors,” the intelligence bulletin said.

You can read the intelligence report below: 

The Washington Field Office said the assessment that AMMC was vulnerable to campaign finance crimes was based on the fact that it only conducted work for the Trump campaign and that it had no website “despite the receipt of over $273 million in disbursements.” 

The intelligence report shows that the Washington Field Office suspected at least two possible campaign finance crimes. It was believed — but not proven — that a campaign official, whose name is redacted from the intelligence report, may have used campaign funds to gamble at casinos during his employment with the Trump campaign. 

“FBI Washington Field Office assesses [redacted] likely used Trump campaign funds disbursed through AMMC to gamble at casinos, including MGM National Harbor,” the memo reads. 

The campaign official, whose name is redacted throughout the FBI report, was identified as the Trump campaign digital director. While not named in the report, Gary Coby became Trump’s digital director in January 2019, and served in that role throughout the campaign season. 

Causality or correlation?

The FBI report indicated that they believed the uptick in the amounts of money the campaign official spent at casinos was tied to the formation of, and monetary disbursements to, AMMC from the Trump campaign, fueling the analysts’ hypothesis that the official was using campaign funds to do so. 

“This assessment is based on the timing of the formation of AMMC and the sudden increase in gambling at casinos by [redacted] that followed,” the intelligence report reads.

The office believed the evidence was compelling enough to warrant further investigation. The authors recommended seeking voluntary information from the casino most visited by the official, believing it could provide further evidence to “support the opening of a predicated investigation into Federal election crimes.”

The probe appears to have been launched following a report earlier that year from a private campaign finance watchdog who warned AMMC was being used as a “pass-through” for the Trump campaign. 

The watchdog, the Campaign Legal Center, a non-partisan 501(c)3 charity, accused the campaign of obscuring about $170 million worth of campaign spending through pass-through vendors, like AMMC, ABC News reported at the time. The Campaign Legal Center was founded by Trevor Potter, general counsel to both of Senator John McCain’s presidential campaigns.

Potter, an old-school conservative, is a frequent critic of Trump. For example, he called Trump’s 2024 election “An Unprecedented and Dangerous Time for Our Democracy,” warning that Trump demonstrated “an unmistakable tendency toward authoritarian governance and a desire for unchecked power.”  

AMMC was also identified by a separate watchdog group who, according to USA Today, said AMMC gave $12.6 million to the groups that organized President Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021, Stop the Steal rally on the National Mall. The company and its employees became a subject of scrutiny for the Democrat-led Jan. 6 Select Committee as it probed Trump and his inner circle.

Now accused of weaponization, they had the correct anti-Trump credentials

The memorandum was part of a batch of Arctic Frost documents turned over to Congress by the FBI. 

The probe, code-named "Arctic Frost," was led by an openly anti-Trump FBI supervisor, and was eventually taken over by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith.

In turn, Smith treated the effort by Trump's allies to submit alternate electors to sway the certification of the 2020 election as a criminal conspiracy. Two prior episodes in American history were not prosecuted as crimes.

The batch also contained the memo that opened the Biden-era Arctic Frost investigation into Donald Trump and hundreds of his allies over their Jan. 6 activities. 

That memo appeared thin on evidence and legal justifications, according to former prosecutors and FBI agents who found significant deficiencies when they reviewed the newly released document, Just the News reported this week. 

Rep. Jordan: "Same old weaponization, same old political focus"

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, says the latest batch of documents confirms that there is a pattern of weaponization in the FBI and federal government. 

“[It] looks like this was just the same old weaponization, same old political focus, focus on politics, going after your political enemies,” Jordan told the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show in a wide-ranging interview. 

“Same mindset that said we're going to put the dossier in the intelligence community assessment, even though we know the dossier is garbage, we know there's no underlying intelligence support,” he continued. 

"That same mindset that was there in 2016 is the mindset we see now in 2022 with Arctic Frost, and then as it transformed into Jack Smith, special counsel later in 2022 — same exact mindset,” Jordan added.