The F.B.I. is a rule-bound institution that prohibits its active employees from speaking to the press without authorization. Forty-five people who currently work at the bureau or who left during President Trump’s second term spoke to us anyway — a sign of the extreme alarm reverberating through the agency. (To protect their identities, we are not indicating whether the people we quote anonymously are still employed by the F.B.I.)
To lead the bureau, Trump chose Kash Patel, a former public defender and intelligence official who has amplified conspiracy theories about the F.B.I. Over the past year, Patel has radically changed the bureau’s mission in ways that many former and current employees say have made America less safe.
In response to a request for comment on our article for The New York Times Magazine, Ben Williamson, an F.B.I. spokesman, wrote: “This story is a regurgitation of fake narratives, conjecture and speculation from anonymous sources who are disconnected from reality.”
The current and former employees we interviewed, however, said they fear that the bureau has become a weapon of the White House, upending deeply held nonpartisan norms and leaving the agency nearly unrecognizable.
Patel was embroiled in controversies over his use of government resources and his temperament.
In May, Patel attended a secret conference of the Five Eyes, an intelligence alliance formed after World War II among the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. According to a senior executive, Patel’s detail and staff made a number of unusual requests in the lead-up to the event:
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.
In October, Patel flew on the F.B.I. jet to Pennsylvania to see a performance by his girlfriend, the country singer Alexis Wilkins; they flew to Nashville, and then Patel flew to the Boondoggle Ranch, a hunting resort in Texas that is owned by a major Republican donor.
David Sundberg, former assistant director in charge of the Washington field office: This is among the reasons William Sessions lost his job when he was F.B.I. director — for allegedly misusing government planes and having agents run errands for his wife. That was the 1990s. Since then, having a SWAT team protect an F.B.I. director’s family member or girlfriend — to my knowledge, that didn’t happen when the director wasn’t present. And I spent more than half my career in tactical positions, including three years in which I had programmatic control of every F.B.I. SWAT team.
The F.B.I. diverted more than 20 percent of its work force to immigration enforcement.
Many people we spoke to expressed concern about assigning agents to immigration shifts because it meant that resources were being siphoned from public corruption, cybercrime, white-collar crime, drug trafficking and terrorism. A central U.S. case agent put it this way:
I was working an undercover operation on a neo-Nazi group with a long history of criminal activity. The F.B.I.’s niche in the federal law-enforcement community is these specialized investigations, and now we’re being pulled away from those. If I’d wanted to be a cop, I would have just done that. When I resigned from the F.B.I., I was told they’d have to close the investigation — there was no one else around to pick it up.
The Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement surge has provoked protests across the country. Jill Fields, a former supervisory intelligence analyst for violent crime in Los Angeles, was alarmed by the way federal agencies, including the F.B.I., were treating anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis:
I’ve seen multiple videos of protesters being arrested who aren’t impeding immigration enforcement. Yes, they’re yelling, they’re taunting, but that’s their right. This is what I was worried about and why I pushed back when the L.A. office was asked to investigate protesters last year. It was unthinkable to me then, and now it’s happening. If you start arresting or investigating people for exercising their First Amendment rights, then they don’t have those rights.
Patel has promoted arrest stats that many agents and analysts say are misleading.
On Jan. 4, as the Trump administration approached its one-year mark, Patel claimed on X that he had overseen a “100% increase” in year-to-year arrests and a “210% increase” in the disruption of gangs and criminal enterprises. Here’s how a field-office leader reacted to Patel’s announcement:
When you make F.B.I. agents street cops, you get street-cop numbers. We didn’t used to count immigration arrests, because we didn’t do immigration. Now we do. We didn’t do street patrols in D.C. in the past. Now we do. In the past, we mostly worked the complex investigations the F.B.I. is famous for. Complicated work with wires and sophisticated techniques — all aimed at taking out the entire criminal enterprises or national-security threats. Now, under Kash, we are counting stuff that has been historically left to local police departments and other agencies and saying, Wow, look at us.
(An F.B.I. spokesman disputed this account. “The FBI ONLY counts state arrests when we work cases jointly from partners,” he wrote. “Since becoming director, Patel’s focus has been on partner engagements and joint operations, we do it together.”)
The F.B.I. made changes to its fitness test for new agents that could disadvantage women.
Patel and his former deputy director, Dan Bongino, decided to replace situps with pull-ups. According to a senior executive,
Bongino wanted to have men and women do the exact same pull-ups, which all of the data said would lead to losing a number of female recruits and potentially female agents that hadn’t been tested for pull-ups before.
Bongino said, You can have the best female agent take down the biggest case in our history, but if on the Ring door-camera video she’s out of shape or overweight, that’s going to be the story. He was worried about whether or not they’d look good on a doorbell camera. He said it’s the way these times are.
We also heard from Kayla Staph, a former cyber special agent, about the change:
I score really high on the physical-fitness test. I coached sports. I can do pull-ups when I train for them. But there was still a feeling of diminished value. The test should actually be reflective of our daily duties.
Patel has fired agents who worked on the investigations of Trump.
Senator Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has released documents throughout the year naming agents who worked on Arctic Frost, the investigation into Trump for alleged interference in the 2020 election. Patel has not defended the agents publicly. Instead, he has fired many of them.
Here’s Blaire Toleman, a former supervisory special agent for CR-15, the squad that ran Arctic Frost:
To fire my colleagues like that was shocking. I thought, Shouldn’t it just be me, not the people I assigned to work on a case? I had huge grief about them.
Many people we interviewed said that Patel’s firings have sent the message that employees could later be punished for taking assignments that are politically sensitive.
David Sundberg, former assistant director in charge of the Washington field office: The F.B.I. is accountable for what it accomplishes or fails to accomplish as an agency. We don’t attach responsibility to individual case agents, who don’t even get to choose what cases they’re working.
John Sullivan, former section chief in the intelligence division: The downside of having folks scared about losing their jobs is that you go from being an organization where people come in and do the work to spending time keeping their head down or on LinkedIn looking for jobs.
I want to sound the alarm about how this affects Americans’ safety. I’ve seen it up close, where we have stopped stuff Americans will never know about.
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