Kash Patel's FBI Dangerously Corrupt, Inept, Hurting America

The New York Times documents the bureau's very bad year under its very bad leader.

Every criminal enterprise needs an arm to protect it from truth and consequences. At the FBI for most of the past year, that effort has been ostensibly headed by conspiracy-theorist kook/snake-oil supplement grifter/gold medalist in the Trump suck-off relay Kash Patel, who has replaced the FBI’s usual crime-fighting activities with an obsession with image above all else; inept loyalty purging; fat-chick purging; pointless immigrant-hunting ride-alongs; and a prurient focus on protecting ICE murderers and sniffing out leakers who might be blabbing to the media about how America is less safe now. Plus, everybody competent at the FBI keeps quitting thanks to Patel constantly putting employees between the Constitution and their jobs.

And when Patel is not going into paranoid rage-fits, he reportedly enjoys using taxpayer dollars to party like a single Justin Bieber with his younger country singer girlfriend. Doing actual work does not seem to be his thing.

The New York Times Magazine (archive link) has a deep dive of interviews with 45 current or former FBI employees, a kind of oral history of Patel’s year of pulverizing the FBI’s credibility with everyone (but Donald Trump) up and down and inside and out, from the King of England to the hounds of hell. The whole read (or hour-plus listen) is worth the time. No wonder Patel was so hot to get the Washington Post’s alphabet agency files on any dirt about him, because there’s surely many more embarrassing stories out there.

The filthiest dirt, summarized:

Patel has been loyalty-purging people who were once mostly loyalists.

Patel, Ed Martin and then-future judge Emil Bove reportedly spent a lot of time last year purging and polygraphing FBI employees who at one point had tended to agree with them. After all, though FBI agents are officially supposed to stay politically neutral — and despite what MAGA obsessively needs you to believe — the FBI is hardly and has never been a bastion of liberalism, long predating Trump and James “Butter Emails” Comey. Those FBI employees never thought the leopard would etc.

Said one human-intelligence agent (could be current, could be former, the Times did not specify for people who chose to remain nameless):

“I listened to Kash Patel on a podcast, and the way he viewed Jan. 6 aligned with the F.B.I. rank and file. Agents always thought if you assaulted officers on that day, yes, absolutely, we should investigate and prosecute you. [But] for the rest of them, it was a massive misuse of resources.”

FBI agents do not get to choose what cases they are assigned to. But every single agent who even touched January 6 or Trump cases, like so much as forwarded a single tip that landed in their inbox, or anyone suspected of talking to the media or ever having a beer with Peter Strzok, was either immediately fired, demoted and/or disappeared to some far-flung office, and/or questioned like a criminal and polygraphed. Polygraphs are “voodoo science,” as one source in the piece put it, but nobody on team regime ever had law-enforcement investigation experience anyway. But hooking up agents and screaming in their faces they can do! Hundreds of other employees were also fired with no notice and for no apparent reason at all. Leadership!

Agents still employed at the Bureau who take the oaths they swore seriously now face the choice of leaving now and maybe having a job in three years if sanity returns, or to stay and do unconstitutional things.

Such is how it went for Jill Fields, former supervisory intelligence analyst for violent crime in the Los Angeles field office:

I was ordered to have members of my team run a preassessment on some anti-ICE protesters who allegedly had impeded an immigration arrest. F.B.I. policy says that an investigation can’t be opened based on First Amendment-protected activity. The investigative team who analyzed the video determined that the protesters had done nothing wrong; the officers told them to stay back, and they did.

I was told they had to open an investigation anyway. I pushed back, and they said, Jill, you can either get fired today, or you can get fired in four years — meaning when another administration comes in and starts looking into constitutional violations. And I was like: Then fire me today. I’m not doing something that is fundamentally wrong.

Does this mean whoever is left there now is either desperate for the job, all-in, or some combo of the two?

Follow the money!

The very first thing the regime did was disband the Foreign Influence Task Force, which investigates people who might be working at the direction of a foreign government without disclosing that. Can’t imagine why we’d need that task force, not in this regime.

Image is everything, no surprise there.

The second thing the regime did was pull agents off of major complex investigations into things like, oh, international drug and child sex slave cabals (though they at some point were busily redacting those Epstein files!), white-collar crime and crypto scams, and instead sent agents to work with ICE to stalk immigrants, or make low-level arrests to beef up the arrest numbers, or even reportedly just claim that agents originated local arrests that they decidedly didn’t to plump up the bureau’s stats. Sighed a field office leader, “under Kash, we are counting stuff that has been historically left to local police departments and other agencies and saying, Wow, look at us.”

And in a crisis, Patel knows that the first version of a story is the one that sticks, telling an agent, “‘When a crisis happens, the only thing you need to do is call me. The most important thing in any crisis is controlling the narrative.’ I was like: ‘No, no, no. We actually have to do some work here. We’re going to have to investigate, to solve this.’”

And Patel was probably like we’re going to have to do what, now?

John Sullivan, former section chief in the intelligence division: ​​

[Dan] Bongino called the field office in Detroit. In the normal course of business, if the deputy director calls at a moment like that, they’re asking: How can we help? What do you need? They can turn on all the resources of the organization. But Bongino called and asked, What can I tweet about this?

Safety is job number nope

It is most important and pride-endowing for Daddy Trump to see his kids in their outfits! He loves pictures of FBI and ICE out in their jackets doing things together, Patel with big yellow FBI letters on his jacket, even if he has to squeeze into a ladies’ medium to make it happen. Never mind if the photo op makes no sense, or even endangers agents.

John Sullivan, former section chief in the intelligence division:

We’d been told that when Trump watched footage or saw a picture of a raid, he got mad that he didn’t see F.B.I. raid jackets.

ICE was saying they wanted their teams to commingle with our teams. Tactically, you don’t commingle units that haven’t trained together.

[...]

They also had to juggle Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who wanted to ride in our tactical vehicle to do her TV stuff. That makes all the operators uneasy, and it makes them less safe.

Witnesses being seen as potentially cooperating with ICE also hinders FBI investigations. But investigating actual crimes is the last thing on Patel’s mind, as the truth does not matter anymore.

Patel gaggingly desperate to impress his girlfriend with your tax dollars

Then there’s this whole anecdote from an unnamed “senior executive” involved with Patel’s trip to the UK, too juicy to summarize:

Every May, there’s a Five Eyes conference with the head of every intelligence agency. This year it was in the U.K. Kash Patel is going. In the lead-up to that, his detail starts making crazy requests. He’s got special requirements on everything. And the Brits are getting pissed.

Before the conference, his staff says he’s unhappy because he doesn’t like meetings in office settings. What he wants is social events. He wants Premier soccer games. He wants to go jet skiing. He’d like a helicopter tour.

Everyone who heard about this was like: Hold on. Is he really going to ask the MI5 director to go jet skiing instead of meeting? The schedule is set, and every Five Eyes partner is doing this. They can’t just say that he’s not participating and instead he wants to go to a Premier soccer game. This is a job, guys.

His staff only cared about three things: what his meals were, when his workouts would be and what his entertainment would be. The biggest plan is how he’s going to get his girlfriend in there so she can go to Windsor Castle. He’s got Nicole Rucker as his assistant, like a true executive concierge. And when she’s not getting the food or the workout she wants, she’ll just start screaming at people, Make it happen!

A jet ski and a helicopter for milady and I, chop chop! Is there something more important going on?

His staff was briefed multiple times that the Brits were going to want to talk about an F.B.I. position in London that has been pulled. The F.B.I. is arguably their most important partner. MI5 is 5,000 people. The F.B.I. is 38,000. If MI5 ceased to exist, it would be very bad for us. If we cease to exist, it would be an existential threat for them. That person was working on a ton of sensitive stuff, including embassy penetrations and technology, and they want this position back. So Ken McCallum, the MI5 director, goes to Kash Patel at the conference and says: Hey, we really need this position. It’s so important for our mutual benefit. And Kash says: Yep, that person’s going nowhere. She’s absolutely staying. And the Brits rejoice.

Two weeks later, he reverses himself and removes her. The Brits are outraged. Kash will make promises and he will break them, and he doesn’t worry about that.

On that trip, the heads of intelligence for the Five Eyes went to Windsor Castle and met with the king. There was a photo taken of all the Five Eyes people, some of whom are nondisclosed, meaning their affiliation with the British intelligence service isn’t public. The Brits forwarded that picture as a keepsake for the individuals. They prefaced it with, This isn’t to be shared. But Kash has decided he wants to post it on social media. They have people trying to negotiate with the Brits about whether that’s possible. They’re fighting with the director’s office, like: You cannot post this. Do not do that. And they’re arguing, He wants a picture out.

Patel also has diverted local SWAT teams to be his girlfriend’s security force, like she’s Condoleezza fucking Rice or something:

Whenever the girlfriend is going to sing the national anthem at some wrestling event or some National Rifle Association or Turning Point event, they’re calling the local SWAT team, saying, You’re going to guard her. Meanwhile, in Nashville, those poor bastards — their SWAT team has actually been converted to her protection. They’re not even doing their own SWAT arrests anymore. They’ve got to bring in other teams to do that, because they’re guarding her all the time.

It’s giving 4Chan stan.

Oh well, who ever said the head of the FBI is supposed to be some kind of role model?

[New York Times archive link]

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