Kash Patel, the FBI's Agent of Chaos

Welcome to Doomsday Scenario, my regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and—unfortunately—the fight for democracy in the Trump era. I hope if you’re coming to this online, you’ll consider subscribing right here. It’s easy—and free:

I’m in Austin, Texas, this week for one of my favorite events of the year — the Texas Tribune Festival, where I’m speaking about my atomic bomb book tomorrow with Douglas Brinkley, and also interviewing later today Trump advisor-turned-critic-turned-target Amb. John Bolton and, on Saturday, Amb. Michael McFaul and Col. Alex Vindman, two conversations that should be fascinating. If you’re around, please say hi. Now onto today’s column:

This week’s huge news has to be the latest Jeffrey Epstein revelations, a story that intersects with what can only be called the slow public unraveling of Kash Patel’s tenure director as FBI director. Patel, as you might remember, had long crusaded for the release of the Epstein files and victim lists — only now in office to reverse course, downplay the whole thing, and become one of the leaders of the effort to muzzle the release of further information. Yesterday, he was part of an effort in the White House Situation Room to pressure Rep. Lauren Boebert to change her vote and block the House effort to release more Epstein files.

There was literally nothing in Kash Patel’s background to indicate he was going to be a good FBI director. He was a grifting conspiracist with no meaningful executive management or leadership background, who knew little about the bureau or its traditions, and had never served a day in the military or worked as an FBI agent nor as an intelligence or law enforcement officer. Unlike every modern FBI director before him, he’d never served in a Senate-confirmed role before. Woke snowflake Bill Barr said that the idea Patel could handle a senior job at the FBI showed “a shocking detachment from reality” and would happen while he was attorney general only “over my dead body.” Patel’s former government colleagues said he had little regard for protocols, procedures, or organizational precedents and that his recklessness during the first Trump term had endangered national security and lives. His conflicts-of-interest and questionable personal choices since then abounded: A Russian-friendly filmmaker had paid Patel $25,000 to blast the FBI in a documentary, and Patel indicated he intended to hold onto a million dollars in stock in the Chinese company Shein even while serving as FBI director.

From the start, there was every reason to believe Patel was nominated for the role specifically to undermine the three traditional pillars of the FBI — its Fidelity, Bravery, and, especially, its Integrity. An FBI led by Kash Patel and his somehow-even-less-qualified deputy Dan Bongino, as I wrote in February, was a bureau designed “to troll the libs — and, more dangerously for every American, to weaponize the normally fiercely independent bureau in service to Donald Trump personally.” 

A recent spate of reporting indicates that Kash Patel’s time as director is going about as well as could be expected — which is to say, it’s an organization-soul-crushing and morale-killing disaster that imperils national security.

In many ways, Patel’s time as FBI director is a classic Washington scandal: The slow-motion, slightly-off-the-front-page collapse of an incredibly important institution. I’ve always believed as a reporter that the biggest, most consequential stories play out as repeated mini-scandals that  appear below-the-fold in news coverage. But in case you’ve missed any of them, the collection of Kash Patel mini-scandals is quite something now:

• He’s lost our foreign allies. The biggest story of this week was about how Patel broke an important personal pledge to the head of MI5, the British domestic intelligence agency and, arguably, the FBI’s closest partner in the entire world. MI5’s head had asked Patel personally to preserve an FBI liaison officer in London who was vital to certain advanced surveillance tools the Brits relied on for monitoring Chinese activities in the UK. In the face-to-face meeting, Patel agreed and promised — but then reneged when the White House wanted to cut the position as part of its misguided efforts to trim the FBI budget, “leaving MI5 officials incredulous.” It is almost impossible to capture how critical the intelligence relationship between the US and the UK has been over the last eighty years, as well as the larger English-speaking intel partnership known as “Five Eyes,” which includes the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The idea that you would break a promise to a Five Eyes leader would normally be an anathema to any competent US intelligence leader — and the episode also clearly demonstrates both inside and outside the bureau that Patel doesn’t have the political juice to run the FBI, if he can’t fight and win at the White House for a key position requested by our closest ally.
  

  The betrayal of MI5 stings particularly because as the Trump administration’s illegality and incompetence spreads, we’re seeing some of our closest allies begin to pull back on the foundations of, well, being allies. In recent weeks, we’ve seen the Dutch — which have a fantastically capable intelligence apparatus — begin to pull back on intelligence sharing and Britain has begun to limit what information it shares with the US about drug smuggling, for fear of being implicated in the egregiously illegal military strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific.

• He’s lost the public. The MI5 story might be the most consequential of the week, but the juiciest and gossipiest has to be a tremendously amusing (if it wasn’t about, you know, the leader of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency) Wall Street Journal story about Kash Patel’s shenanigans and preening as director. Come for how during the government shutdown, while his employees weren’t getting paid, he literally took an FBI Gulfstream jet to a place called “Boondoogle Ranch”; stay for the how he’s showing up at meetings in hooded sweatshirts. His exploits in the FBI jet — including using it to fly to hockey games, wrestling matches, and his girlfriend’s country music concerts — are becoming so high-profile that even People Magazine is now covering them. Needless to say, by the time People is writing about a federal law enforcement leader’s personal life, you’ve lost the plot.

• He’s lost his agents, Part I. Patel has spent the year engaged in a highly confusing and capricious house-cleaning of the FBI, largely (but not exclusively) targeting agents who had been involved in the many investigations and prosecutions of then-former President Trump. He also fired the FBI agents who were captured kneeling in a famous moment during the 2020 George Floyd protests, a moment that at the time was lauded for helping to deescalate a tense situation. All told, the firings have targeted upwards of 30 agents, the reassignments even more, and led this month to the FBI Agents Association releasing a blistering statement saying, “Director Patel has disregarded the law and launched a campaign of erratic and arbitrary retribution.” Many senior agents have retired, robbing the bureau of its most experienced leaders. The firings have been so confusing that the US Attorney for DC, Jeanine Pirro, worked to get some of them reversed because Patel had targeted agents who were working on vital cases. A New York Times story traced how some agents have been inaccurately targeted by right-wing influencers and conspiracists — only to be fired by Patel anyway. Lawsuits stemming from the firing campaign allege the White House is driving the show when it comes to personnel at the bureau — which, again, any normal competent director would see as a red line.

• He’s lost his agents, Part II. The stories of Patel’s day-to-day management of the bureau are quite something, as that Wall Street Journal and other articles have traced. Early on, he seemed remarkably uninterested in the daily director’s briefing — holding it just twice a week, instead of daily — and drew criticism for publicly wearing an FBI badge, a move effectively unprecedented for a modern director. (When I was covering Robert Mueller, he kept the director’s badge in his briefcase.) Patel and Bongino hardly evince cool-under-pressure leadership inside the bureau; an internal conference call after the Kirk shooting was described as “profanity-laced.” He’s also started using polygraphs internally, to help stop leaks, to “intensif[y] a culture of intimidation.” As one experienced FBI polygraph expressed in surprise, “I never used them to suss out gossip.”

• He’s lost the attorney general. Yes, technically, the FBI director reports to the deputy attorney general, but in day-to-day practice there’s no more important relationship between an FBI director and an attorney general. They have to trust each other deeply and implicitly. That’s not exactly how things have gone with Pam Bondi, where even right-wing media are now writing about the growing tensions. Patel’s “bonehead screwups” have Bondi gunning for the director — in part because she believes, evidently, that the bureau is trying to undermine her on the Epstein files, a source of tension going back months and one that led to a summer crisis where it appeared Bongino might resign. This feels very much like a situation that cannot last much longer — the center, as they say, cannot hold.

• He’s failing to protect the country, Part I. Since Patel took over — and particularly since this summer’s nationwide immigration push — he has reassigned thousands of highly-trained and specialized agents to tasks that the FBI isn’t equipped to do. As much as a quarter of all FBI agents — including highly specialized counterintelligence and counterterrorism agents in key field offices like Washington, New York, and San Francisco — have been reassigned to assist ICE and CBP with immigration enforcement. In those larger field offices, statistics show that as much as 40 percent of all agents are now working immigration — an issue not normally on the FBI’s radar at all. Chasing terrorists and spies are normally the FBI’s highest priority — in part because the bureau is the lead agency to do that in the government — and reassigning those teams to help ICE and CBP roust day-laborers in Home Depot parking lots is a shocking abdication of our nation’s security. Again, any competent leader of the FBI would understand that and be able to make that case effectively to the White House — the fact that Patel doesn’t, won’t, or can’t is its own indictment of his tenure.

• He’s failing our protect the country, Part II. It was perhaps inevitable that if you appoint an unserious social media influencer to a job that requires sober thought and restraint that Patel would appear temperamentally unfit for the job. In multiple incidents this fall, Patel’s need to score social media cred has appeared to interfere with unfolding FBI investigations. In the hours after the Charlie Kirk shooting — apparently while he was having dinner in New York at the exclusive Rao’s, rather than rushing to headquarters to oversee the investigation — he trumpeted on Twitter that the FBI had the shooter in custody. Ninety minutes, he backtracked, saying the suspect had been released. (The family of the actual alleged shooter made arrangements for him to surrender to authorities the following day, as you may remember.) Patel, who has a weird obsession with calling his agents “cops” — a name that agents abhor and that traditionally is only used by CIA officers to refer to FBI agents pejoratively — then cheered the arrest, saying, “This is what happens when you let good cops be cops.” His comments around and since the Kirk shooting, too, has only made the case harder for prosecutors, especially since Patel himself was involved in processing the crime scene in Utah for some odd reason? “Patel’s handling of the Kirk investigation is a reminder that the skill set required to succeed as an influencer is not the same as what is required to effectively run the FBI. It’s not just amateur hour at the FBI, but influencer hour,” The Atlantic’s Quinta Jurecic wrote. Or, as the New Yorker wrote, the Kirk episode showed that Patel is “play[ing] a G-Man on TV.” (Again, much like People Magazine, by the time the New Yorker’s television critic is writing about the FBI director, you’ve really lost the plot.)
  

• He’s failing our protect the country, Part II. Most recently, Patel appeared to mess up a fast-unfolding terrorism investigation in Michigan, tweeting on Halloween morning, “The FBI thwarted a potential terrorist attack,” at a time when charges hadn’t even been filed yet. According to the Wall Street Journal, “There was one problem: No criminal charges had yet been filed and local police weren’t aware of the details. Two friends of the alleged terrorists in New Jersey and Washington state caught wind of the arrests and moved up plans to leave the country, according to court documents and law-enforcement officials familiar with the investigation. Justice Department leaders complained to the White House about Patel’s premature post, saying it had disrupted the investigation, administration officials said.”

Needless to say the totality of all these scandals, controversies, and missteps would be unsustainable for any other FBI director or intelligence leader in a normal administration. And yet, for now, Patel remains — although in August, the White House appointed Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as a new “co-deputy director” to the FBI, a position that has never existed before, and one that many observers think is effectively a babysitter, a director-in-waiting for whenever Patel finally flames out.

All of this is amusing, yes, but it’s also deeply worrying — we all, as Americans, have a vested interest in a strong, well-functioning FBI that hews closely to the Constitution, protects civil rights and civil liberties, and focuses on investigating the biggest, most pressing threats to our country. I have plenty of my own critiques about the bureau and its sometimes less-than-sterling history, but having covered and written about the bureau for ten years, I also know we are less safe as a country when the FBI is distracted.

The longer this chaos continues, the more our allies feel they can’t trust us, the fewer agents on the streets investigating terrorists and spies, the more likely we’re going to face a catastrophic intelligence failure.

I return, again, to what I wrote in February: “The bells that have rung now at the FBI cannot be unrung. And we will rue the day we didn’t hear them as dire warnings for the country’s future.”

GMG

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