Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) has no patience for how one of President Donald Trump's key nominees appeared to dodge responsibility for sitting for an interview with a far-right conspiracy theorist who has denied the Holocaust.
Walsh, a former Tea Party representative who later became an outspoken critic of Trump and the MAGA movement, was reacting to an exchange between Kash Patel, tapped for Trump's FBI director, and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), at his Thursday confirmation hearing.
"Are you familiar with Stew Peters?" Durbin asked him. "Not off the top of my head," Patel replied. To which Durbin reminded him, “You made eight separate appearances on his podcast. He promoted outrageous conspiracy theories and worked with a prominent neo-Nazi.”
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"What’s so unsettling about Trump and all his top people is how dishonest they are. How f--king dishonest they are," wrote Walsh on X. "They’re all liars."
Peters, a former bounty hunter in Minnesota who built up a far-right audience during the COVID-19 pandemic, has frequently ranted about the "Jewish mafia," according to the Anti-Defamation League, and promoted a Holocaust denial movie, "Europa: The Last battle," as “one of the most important films you can watch to understand what’s going on in the world today.”
He has also pushed conspiracy theories that the Earth is flat, and that the World Economic Forum is engaged in a sinister project to wipe out most of the global population and fuse the remaining humans with machines.
Patel repeatedly sat for podcast interviews with Peters as all of this was going on; indeed, The Bulwark reported, one of his appearances on the Stew Peters Show came just two days after Peters attended an event with neo-Nazi "Groyper" activist Nick Fuentes and proclaimed former National Institutes of Health director Dr. Anthony Fauci “should be hanging at the end of a noose somewhere.” (One of Trump's acts as president in his first week was to revoke Fauci's security detail.)
