FBI Director Kash Patel lashed out at a group of active-duty and retired FBI agents who compiled a dossier blasting his “dismal” leadership and accusing him of being more focused on his image than doing his job.
The report, which was leaked Monday to the New York Post, recounted an embarrassing scene that took place on Sept. 11, a day after far-right activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah, leading to a 33-hour manhunt.
After the FBI jet touched down in Provo, Utah, Patel refused to disembark until agents who were busy trying to find Kirk’s killer had tracked down a size medium FBI raid jacket for him to wear.
“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.
A raid jacket in his size was finally located and brought to Patel, but he then wasn’t satisfied with the lack of proper patches on the sleeves, so he wouldn’t disembark until members of an FBI SWAT team “took patches off their uniforms and ran those patches over to FBI Director Kash Patel at the airport.”
During an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham late Tuesday, Patel accused the dossier’s authors, an anonymous group of retired and active-duty agents who call themselves “the Alliance,” of lying and cratering the public’s trust in the FBI. He also said the jacket story was “100 percent false.”
He appeared to put his own spin on the story. “One of my agents handed me a jacket and said, ‘Hey, boss, you should probably wear this. We are going into the command center.’ I said, ‘I would be honored to wear that.’ And then another one handed me the SWAT team badge of the unit that was protecting the area where Charlie was assassinated. I wore that with pride,” he said.
He then insisted that his FBI was “succeeding in ways that no FBI has ever done so before.”
“The institutionalists and the anonymous reporters from the swamp D.C. bureaucracy are the ones we are crushing. And that’s how I know we are winning,” he declared.
He ended his monologue by taking another swipe at California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, recycling his own joke about Christine Fang, also known as “Fang Fang,” a Chinese woman who volunteered on Swalwell’s 2014 re-election campaign before it was publicly revealed in 2020 that she was a suspected Chinese spy.
U.S. officials said they found no evidence she obtained any classified information from Swalwell, who cut contact with her after an FBI briefing in 2015.
“If Eric Swalwell wants to come online and talk about what jacket size I wear, I’m happy to send him a women’s medium so he and Fang Fang can go out again,” Patel told Ingraham, who laughed obligingly.
The Daily Beast reached out to the FBI for comment.
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