Former Trump official Kash Patel writes children’s book repeating false claim over Steele

Kash Patel, a former Republican aide on the House intelligence committee who Donald Trump weighed installing as deputy CIA director, is publishing a children’s book on Monday that perpetuates the false claim the Steele dossier sparked investigations into Russian collusion.

The book features characters such as “King Donald” and his enemy “Hillary Queenton”.

In the book, titled “The Plot Against the King” and set to be published by Brave Books, Patel repeats Trump’s false claim that the FBI began investigating links between his campaign and Russia based on a dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British spy.

The 35-page tome, complete with an epilogue that details Donald Trump’s false claims about the FBI inquiry, bizarrely uses the tool of children’s fictional characters to provide a revisionist account of the probe that dogged the first two years of the Trump presidency and eventually led to a special counsel investigation.

Over the course of the book, the narrative lionises Patel and depicts him as a wizard who supposedly shows how “the King” Trump was wrongly accused of “cheating” to take the throne.

The book claims the king was accused of cheating by a “shifty knight” – a reference to the Democratic chair of the intelligence committee, Adam Schiff, who claims to have a “paper” from a “steel” box attesting to wrongdoing.

But Patel writes that he then found evidence that the slug “Keeper Komey” – a reference to former FBI director James Comey – put slugs in the “steel” box at the behest of “Hillary Queenton”, who was also vying for the throne – a reference to Clinton.

The wizard Patel then proclaims to the kingdom, the book says, that “the king, King Donald, is innocent” and “did not work with the Russonians” – a reference to Russia – and “Hillary wrote that paper and had her sneaky slugs slide into the steel box”.

In reality the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign after a foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, told an Australian diplomat that Russia had political “dirt” on Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

The information in the Steele Dossier did not reach FBI officials involved in the investigation until almost a year after the 2016 election, and even the then-Republican House intelligence committee for which Patel worked found no evidence for Trump’s claim.

But the illustrated children’s book authored by Patel, a pre-publication copy of which the Guardian received unsolicited, makes no mention of that conclusion, or an additional memo stating conclusively that the FBI investigation did not originate with the Steele Dossier.

Patel enjoyed a rapid rise from an obscure staffer on the Republican staff of the House intelligence committee after he endorsed Trump’s false claims that the FBI wiretapped Trump’s phones and was eventually promoted to chief of staff at the Department of Defense.