President Donald Trump’s embattled FBI Director Kash Patel has received a scathing assessment of his first six months in office from some of his own employees.
A report prepared by a group of active-duty and retired agents and analysts blasted his leadership as “dismal” and warned that the FBI has become “all f—ed up” and a “rudderless ship” under his guidance.
Sources described Patel in particular as insecure and “in over his head” with “neither the breadth of experience nor the bearing an FBI director needs to be successful.”
The report, which comes just days after Trump was forced to deny rumors that he’s planning to fire Patel, calls the FBI director out for undermining the investigation into right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s killing by sharing too much information too soon, and losing it during a Senate committee hearing in September.
Patel is described by sources as fixated on his personal image, in one case allegedly ordering polygraph tests in a bid to root out FBI personnel who had criticized him.
An even more embarrassing scene is described in Utah in the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, when Patel is said to have refused to disembark from an FBI jet until agents hunted down a medium-sized raid jacket for him and removed their own SWAT patches to decorate his loaner jacket.
“Patel apparently did not have his own FBI raid jacket with him and refused to step from the plane without wearing one,” the report’s authors said.
Patel “did not make a positive impression” on FBI personnel during that visit, according to the dossier, which quotes one source saying both Patel and his deputy director, Dan Bongino, need to “stop talking, stop posing, and just be professional.”
They were both accused of “spending too much time on social media and public relations” and being “too often concerned with building their own personal résumés.”
Sources also described Bongino as “something of a clown” and said they strongly believed that neither Bongino nor Patel had the experience to effectively deal with top-tier threats facing the country.
The 115-page dossier drew on information provided by 24 sources nationwide who remained anonymous out of fear of professional retribution.
It was prepared for the ranking members of the House and Senate judiciary committees and will be presented to them this week, according to New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, who received an advance copy of the report.
Devine hosts the MAGA-friendly podcast Pod Force One featuring members of Trump’s administration and inner circle.
That the report was leaked to her specifically suggests it was designed to inflict maximum damage on Patel and Bongino.
The report’s authors noted that their “pulse check” of the FBI under Patel was never supposed to be a hit piece, but “anecdotal reporting from FBI personnel skewed 80/20 negative.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the FBI for comment.
Patel has not yet commented publicly on the report, but Bongino seemed to allude to it in a post on X. “A LOT of people are very upset at the changes and reforms we’ve made at the FBI,” he wrote. “They will do anything to revert to the old ways of doing things. So they leak gossipy nonsense to media outlets and ‘journalists’ with a clear agenda, and they ignore the historic results and significant reforms we instituted.”
The dossier was clearly not the work of a bunch of MAGA foes, however.
Under the Biden administration, the same group, which calls itself “the Alliance,” issued reports complaining about DEI initiatives and blasting the politicization of the FBI.
The authors also registered “strong and persistent” objection within the agency to Trump’s pardoning of about 1,500 defendants who participated in the deadly attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and wrote that sources were upset that the FBI had compiled lists of the agency personnel who worked on those cases.
They warned of “anger and resentment” over the Trump administration’s policy of forcing FBI agents to help with immigration raids.
Briefing on the missions has been “incomplete and confusing as best, chaotic at worst,” according to the report, leading to agents finding themselves in “tactically unsafe positions.”
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