FBI Director Kash Patel’s bureau has brought thousands fewer criminal cases than previous administrations, even as he boasts about a historic crackdown on violent crime, according to new review of Justice Department data.
Patel has said the FBI arrested 54,000 violent criminals, a 90 percent increase over the same period under President Joe Biden, but MS NOW reported that his count includes arrests by state and local police and other federal agencies whenever an FBI employee was present – and the bureau admits that many of those arrests aren’t their cases.
The DOJ data, obtained and shared by the watchdog group Justice Connection, shows the FBI has referred 15 percent fewer criminal cases for federal prosecution during Donald Trump’s second term than during the same period under Joe Biden, and the bureau has also made fewer referrals than it did at the same point in Trump’s first term.
Across all federal agencies, nearly 3,800 fewer people were charged with violent crimes during the first 16 months of the second Trump administration than during the comparable Biden period – a 15 percent drop – despite Patel's claims to the contrary.
“Kash Patel is actively dismantling decades of statistical integrity just to feed a political narrative,” said Christopher O’Leary, a former senior FBI official and MS NOW contributor.
“We are seeing a historic institution reduced to a metrics game, where the FBI is poaching credit for arrests made by other law enforcement agencies and departments," O'Leary added. "This artificial inflation of the stats is a deliberate smoke screen designed to mask internal chaos and the mass exodus of experienced talent by manufacturing an illusion of productivity that simply does not exist on the ground."
The FBI didn’t dispute the drop in referrals, but it insisted it has always counted “violent crime arrests where the FBI has equity in the case and investigation.” Multiple former FBI officials told MS NOW that isn’t true.
“It’s never been done,” said former FBI agent Daniel Brunner. “Headquarters did not want false numbers, they wanted the truth from the field.”
Meanwhile, the bureau’s resources have shifted to immigration cases, which made up 59.3 percent of all federal criminal cases filed from February 2025 through July 2026, compared with 35.5 percent in a similar Biden-era period. The FBI has also lost more than 1,600 criminal investigators and 335 analysts since January 2025.
Even at face value, Patel’s 54,000 figure is small next to the 11.3 million arrests made nationwide over the same period.
“You’re talking about a drop in the bucket,” said Jeff Asher, a former CIA analyst who studies crime statistics.
MS NOW also flagged several shaky Patel claims, including one op-ed where he described a jump from 34,000 to 67,000 arrests as a “197% increase,” when it’s actually about 97 percent. He also told Fox News there were “1.1 million fewer” violent crimes, which appears to confuse the total number of violent crimes in 2025 with the decline.
The FBI credited its work with “the largest year of violent crime reduction in American history.” But violent crime has been falling nationwide for several years, since the pandemic-era spike ended.