Dozens of current and former FBI employees revealed what most troubled them about the leaders installed by President Donald Trump in his second term.
The New York Times spoke to 45 bureau sources who work at the FBI or left during Trump's second presidency, and reporters corroborated their accounts by speaking to colleagues or reviewing contemporaneous notes and internal records, and they expressed alarm about FBI Director Kash Patel's response to the assassination of his friend Charlie Kirk, the popular right-wing influencer.
"Whenever there’s a critical incident, one of the first things that happens is a conference call with everybody — all the executives, most of the field offices dial in," said a senior FBI executive. "The director rarely speaks, because someone with situational awareness is leading the call. They’ll say: Here’s what happened. Here’s what we know. Here’s what we need. But we get on, and it’s just Kash berating the special agent in charge in Salt Lake. He’s super emotional."
"And then it turns surreal," that executive said. "He and [then-Deputy Director Dan] Bongino start talking about their Twitter strategy. And Kash is like: I’m gonna tweet this. Salt Lake, you tweet that. Dan, you come in with this. Then I’ll come back with this.' They’re literally scripting out their social media, not talking about how we’re going to respond or resources or the situation. He’s screaming that he wants to put stuff out, but it’s not even vetted yet. It’s not even accurate."
That executive and other sources told the Times that initial information from criminal investigations often turns out to be inaccurate, and that evidence has to be sifted and examined to determine what is valuable, but they said Patel seemed unaware of that basic fact.
"When I was an agent, I did hundreds of these cases," that executive said. "The initial information that comes in is always wrong. There’s too much coming in, and it takes time to vet. And it was obvious that Kash can’t understand that and doesn’t want to understand that."
"Everyone on the call is just like, This guy is completely out of control," the executive added. "On another call, he said, When a crisis happens, the only thing you need to do is call me. The most important thing in any crisis is controlling the narrative. I was like: No, no, no. We actually have to do some work here. We’re going to have to investigate, to solve this."