The Disgrace and Danger of Kash Patel, Part II

Back in April, I wrote a column about what seemed-then to be the ongoing unraveling of FBI Director Kash Patel, the thirsty MAGA-influencer-turned-chief-law-enforcement-official who partied hard at the Olympics, protects his girlfriend with an FBI SWAT team, and has no competent staff around him to advise him not to fly the FBI’s jet to a hunting camp known literally as “Boondoggle Ranch.”

The swirl of scandal around Patel seemed like it would imminently end his career, but the Trump administration’s depth and breadth of scandal is such that Patel was able to fade into the background for a few months as others took center-stage. Instead, Trump spent the spring cashiering all the high-profile women in his national security team — attorney general Pam Bondi, DHS secretary Kristi Noem, and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and then spent the summer dodging the possible impeachment of defense secretary Pete Hegseth.

In the last two weeks, though, Patel has roared back to the headlines with a series of scandals — two of which appear to be reaching an apex this week, today even — that underscore the dangerous discord and disorganization at the FBI under his leadership.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

Scandal #1: Personnel Hacked. In what might turn out to be the gravest intelligence breach of the FBI in history — and perhaps one of the worst in all of US history — a criminal hacking group is claiming to have compromised the bureau’s hiring and personnel records. The group, known as ShinyHunters, appears to have “exfiltrated” data on perhaps tens of thousands of current and former FBI employees, both agents and not, perhaps even effectively everyone who has been hired by the bureau in recent years. “We hacked the FBI. We hold data on all FBI employees and applicants,” the group told 404 Media.

The threat of a breach this massive is almost incalculable — and could destroy or undermine a generation of agents who work undercover or on assignments like counterintelligence. It’s not entirely clear what the breach includes, but preliminary information from the hackers seems to indicate it includes everything from home addresses and Social Security numbers to potentially even medical records. News organizations like 404 Media have been able to authenticate that at least some of the data lines up with actual FBI employees. Reuters and the BBC have seen other documents that include mental health evaluations and blood and urine test results.

Ciaran Martin, who used to head the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), and who is not normally known for his hyperbole, told the New York Times that the hack could have a “huge impact” on the bureau, given the uncertainty of where the data might end up, and might ultimately come at a higher operational cost than China’s also-devastating hack of the federal personnel records of the Office of Personnel Management. “Losing the data on 20 million federal employees to the Chinese was bad,” Martin told the NYT. “But you knew the Chinese weren’t going to sell or publish it.”

In the last 24 hours, the hacking group sent out statements saying it was backing away from publishing the data it stole — the BBC’s Joe Tidy says perhaps the group is “simply now regretting hacking the world's biggest police force” — but if this information is out there, even if it’s never published, you can be sure that adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran are hungry for it, and would potentially be willing to pay top dollar for it.

It’s too soon to tell exactly how far-reaching and damaging the reported theft and data extortion scheme may be, but it might just be that Patel is presiding over the most damaging personnel scandal since FBI agent Robert Hanssen was exposed as a top Russian spy — and, depending on how the coming weeks and months play out, it might even turn out to be more damaging in the long-term to the bureau’s mission and personnel and our country’s national security.

Scandal #2: Deputy Director Departs. If you’ve only been following the FBI since Kash Patel took over, it might surprise you that the FBI’s deputy director used to be a job agents worked their entire careers to achieve and then stayed in for a meaningful length of time—often three or four years. It was a position always held, in fact, by a career agent—a nonpartisan appointment.

This week, though, Kash Patel’s “co-deputy director” Andrew Bailey announced he’s leaving, after just a year. That follows the January departure of Bailey’s one-time “co-deputy” Dan Bongino, the MAGA podcaster, who quit in frustration after just about nine months (including a few periods when rumors swirled he wasn’t showing up for work at all).

The “co-deputy” is an invention of the Trump administration. When it became clear that Bongino wasn’t up to the task and that Kash Patel was a fool, the White House tapped Andrew Bailey, a right-wing idealogue who had been Missouri’s attorney general. Bailey was widely seen as the heir-apparent to Patel’s role when his partying and general incompetence finally caught up with him, but now it turns out Bailey is the first to go (which doesn’t necessarily preclude him returning as director someday). To the extent that anyone at all outside the Hoover Building noticed Bailey’s presence at the FBI, it was due mainly to his being an “anti-abortion hardliner oddly preoccupied with the earning potential of aborted fetuses.”

The reason for Bailey’s departure is just as disturbing as one would imagine: He evidently was too focused on the constitution.

As CBS News reported, “From the outset, Bailey's relationship with Patel was troubled. Initially, Bailey was not invited to meetings, according to two sources familiar with their dynamic, with one adding that Patel instructed staff to refer to him as director, to Bongino as deputy director and Bailey as co-deputy director. The sources added that Patel consistently kept Bailey at arm's length and cut him out of meetings the deputy FBI director should attend because Bailey was constantly flagging things that were unconstitutional.”

An additional source of tension appears to have been the recent demotion and reassignment of two senior counterterrorism officials at the Washington Field Office who apparently balked at launching terrorism investigations into threats against Katie and Stephen Miller. The demotions are a good reminder of what to me is one of the most chilling sentences written about Kash Patel, from the New York Times last December that helps explain why Patel continues to outlast the odds given his scandal-laden tenure: “One factor perhaps working in Mr. Patel’s favor: Mr. Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, considers Mr. Patel to be a compliant purveyor of his directives on personnel and policy matters.”

Now, following Bailey’s impending departure, there will be just one “co-deputy,” for now at least, a career agent name Christopher Raia, who has a very traditional background—rising through the agent ranks since 2003 and serving as the case agent on the investigation of Mansour Arbabsiar, who was part of a 2011 plot by Iran to assassinate the Saudi ambassador at a DC restaurant.

Whether the White House installs a new political commissar as “co-deputy,” either to watch over Kash Patel or to help ensure the bureau continues to waste its time on such dumb Trump-friendly assignments as walking street beats in Washington, D.C., remains an open question.

Of the 22 people who have served as the FBI’s deputies, in times good and bad, it’s notable that all of them have been white males. While Pete Hegseth’s crusade to whiten up the Pentagon has received most of the attention, it’s worth highlighting how Kash Patel also forced out the two career women best positioned to rise to be the bureau’s first female deputy director: Jacqueline Maguire, who helped lead the 9/11 investigation and was ordered to resign even before Patel assumed office, and Tonya Ugoretz, who had been the FBI’s top intelligence leader before she was also forced out last year amid Patel’s Quixotic crusade to bolster MAGA conspiracies around the 2020 elections. Ugoretz was a career intelligence analyst and, under a more normal bureau directorship, her choice as deputy would have been an important sign of maturation and recognition of the FBI’s post-9/11 evolutions.

Scandal #3: Kash being Kash. Even beyond these larger questions and challenges about the bureau’s future, Kash Patel’s day-to-day tenure as director remains a national embarrassment, marked by ethical compromises, partisan grandstanding, and MAGA-land associations that would sink any normal presidential appointee to the FBI.

In recent weeks, that’s included Patel appearing with attorney general Todd Blanche at a Trump campaign rally, where Patel said, “I’ve spent 10 years working for President Trump,” and him throwing a temper tantrum and pausing critical international cooperation with Canadian law enforcement over exactly how the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — which, to be clear, has nothing to do with law enforcement or intelligence — characterized the 9/11 attacks. Just this weekend, a photo posted of Patel at the wedding of MAGA darling Alina Habba — who you may remember as the completely unqualified acting US attorney for New Jersey who was forced to resign — and Patel laughing it up with a former FBI informant suspected of being a double agent. It’s the type of relationship that would normally raise all sorts of red flags for FBI counterintelligence personnel — except this time, it is the director himself displaying the red flags!

And then we get to the bestiality. I never thought I would write a sentence that involved the FBI director and bestiality, but the Trump era continues to surprise all of us. At a congressional hearing earlier this month, Patel got into an extended back-and-forth about how the FBI is revising its employment guidelines. CBS first reported the new hiring guidelines a month ago, saying, “The FBI previously refused to hire job applicants if they admitted to hiring sex workers or stealing from an employer — or engaging in acts of bestiality. Today, those acts, which are mostly illegal across the country, are no longer automatic deal breakers for applicants to the nation's top law enforcement agency.”

There appears to be an arguably reasonable explanation for some of the changes — the FBI doesn’t want to punish victims of various sex crimes and human trafficking who then seek to become law enforcement — but the policies don’t appear to actually delineate that nor is it clear, for instance, why someone hiring prostitutes should get the same benefit-of-a-doubt.

In his back and forth with even the Republican senators who questioned him, Patel couldn’t help but play the cute MAGA brawler, cracking a bestiality joke about the FBI’s “great canines.” As David Graham wrote at The Atlantic, “President Trump appointed Kash Patel to lead the FBI not because of his brief experience in law enforcement but because he is a political brawler. The problem, as Patel demonstrated yesterday, is that he is not a very good one: No skilled political messenger would have allowed nearly every headline about a Senate hearing to connect their name and agency with bestiality.”

The incident has led to the first of two great Onion headlines about Patel in the last week: “Dog Can’t Believe Guy She Hooked Up With 10 Years Ago Now Head Of FBI,” followed by the hacking-themed “Kash Patel Phished By Scammer Posing As Kash Patel.”

And therein lies the cumulative problem: The FBI has succeeded across the last century because it has developed — and carefully cultivated — a reputation for rigor, thoroughness, and discipline. (The extent to which it lived up to that model is a subject of much debate!) Patel, month after month, has been mostly failing to succeed at his original mission to weaponize the FBI against Trump’s political enemies, but he is certainly succeeding at turning the FBI into a laughingstock, which in some ways will likely prove even more damaging to our country over the long-term.

Patel has created an environment where the FBI can’t protect its own employees, and where they are now the butt of all-too-many jokes about his own personal behavior and the standards to which he holds its agents.

Nearly a year ago I wrote that “the slow public unraveling” of Kash Patel’s tenure was “the biggest little scandal in Washington.” In April, I wrote, “It’s safe to say that things haven’t improved since.” And the verdict today remains the same — but worse.

October, meanwhile, promises to bring more eyebrow-raising antics: Patel is apparently planning a trip to Russia, a country that (a) is no friend of the United States nor the FBI specifically and yet (b) is quite friendly with Patel, including via a “Russia-linked production company” that evidently previously paid Patel $25,000 to appear in an anti-FBI TV series.

None of this, to be clear, is typical behavior for an FBI director.

GMG