If you ever doubted that there’s a deep state, that it’s corrupt, and that it was out to get Donald Trump and his supporters, your doubts will be disabused by FBI Director Kash Patel’s bombshell yesterday. It took the form of an after-action report revealing that there were 274 plainclothes agents on the Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021.

Two-hundred seventy-four.

How could this be, you ask? How could there have been an order of magnitude more agents on site that day than even a deeply suspicious scribe such as yours truly had imagined?

Remember when FBI Director Chris Wray kept stonewalling Congress about whether and how many undercover FBI agents were on site at the Capitol on January 6? And remember when, on December 12 of last year, the inspector general for the Department of Justice issued a report claiming, “We found no evidence in the materials we reviewed or the testimony we received showing or suggesting that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on January 6”? Uh-huh.

We knew that claim to be rubbish, though, based on the accidental admission of Matt Rosenberg, a New York Times reporter who was on site that day.

Think about it: There were enough armed FBI agents there that day to more than offset the relative handful of bad actors — the ones who engaged in real violence against law enforcement.

But that stunning revelation isn’t the most damning part of the 50-page report. No, that would be the numerous individual agent comments about how woefully politicized the FBI had become. One agent, for example, called on the FBI’s leadership “to identify viable exit options for FBI personnel who no longer feel it is legally or morally acceptable to support a federal law enforcement and intelligence agency motivated by political bias.” Said another demoralized agent: “We are supposed to call balls and strikes, regardless of political pressure; now we can’t even be trusted to be on the field.”

Of course, those FBI agents weren’t there to prevent a crime; they were there to document a crime. And if we consider the weird and deeply suspicious case of Ray Epps — who kept telling crowds on the eve of January 6, “We need to go in to the Capitol!” — we can plausibly argue that they were there to encourage a crime.

We don’t know who any of these 274 agents were, or what their specific instructions were on January 6, which means we can’t really know if they incited or participated in any violence. But we have every right to be deeply suspicious. Why? Because this was the same FBI that encouraged, entrapped, and arrested a bunch of knuckleheads for “plotting” to “kidnap” Michigan Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer just prior to the 2020 election, thereby to engender sympathy for the Democrats and smear Donald Trump and his supporters.

And remember: This is the same FBI that helped mastermind and carry out the Russia collusion hoax, which plagued Trump’s entire first term in office and will go down in history as perhaps the FBI’s darkest hour. The same FBI, as we’ve noted, that sat on Hunter Biden’s laptop for nearly a year before the 2020 election; that colluded with Facebook and pre-Musk Twitter to censor the New York Post’s laptop bombshell two weeks before the 2020 election; that helped push the Gang of 51’s “Russian disinformation” letter even though it had already authenticated Hunter’s laptop; that targeted parents who attended school board meetings because they were concerned about CRT and other hard-left ideologies being taught in their children’s schools; that targeted “radical-traditionalist Catholics” in their churches; that repeatedly targeted peaceful pro-life activists; that unlawfully seized the cellphone of a Trump-allied congressman and retired brigadier general; that gave two Republican senators a phony “defensive briefing” about Russian disinformation when they were investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings with Ukraine and other countries; that placed numerous agents provocateur into the J6 crowd and then stonewalled Congress about it; that conducted an armed raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and rifled through the first lady’s underwear drawer because of a documents dispute with the National Archives; that intentionally screened out conservatives and Trump supporters in its hiring practices; and that cracked down on pro-Trump agents and patriotic whistleblowers within the bureau.

Oh, and the same FBI that targeted 92 Republicans and conservative groups with its abominable “Arctic Frost” operation.

In the case of January 6, the overwhelming majority of folks there on the Capitol grounds that day were tourists and patriots who were there to exercise three of their five First Amendment rights: to peaceably assemble; to speak freely about what they believed to be a rigged election; and to petition their government for a redress of that grievance.

That massive FBI presence also causes us to wonder: If the FBI felt strongly enough about the likelihood of trouble that day, why did Nancy Pelosi and DC Mayor Muriel Bowser deny Donald Trump’s documented request for an overwhelming National Guard presence? Why, it’s almost as if the Democrats wanted a riot on January 6 — thereby to irreparably tarnish Donald Trump and permanently remove him from the political stage. Almost. As if.

There’s a new sheriff in town, though, and his name is Kash Patel. And it’s a good thing. Because the more we learn about his predecessors — James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Chris Wray — the more we learn how corrupt they were.

Update: On Saturday, an FBI official told Fox News that these 274 agents “were sent in after the riot had begun to try to control the unruly crowd.” FBI Director Kash Patel criticized both the crowd control mission and the bureau’s former leadership: “This was the failure of a corrupt leadership that lied to Congress and to the American people about what really happened.”