FBI Director Kash Patel came armed with a stack of statistics to a congressional hearing this week, but a former top official at the bureau questioned his numbers.
President Donald Trump's nominee cited crime data to rebut Democratic criticism of his leadership, but former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and CNN's Evan Perez agreed some of the numbers "seem on their face somewhat preposterous."
"There's a lot of things in some of the statistics that you've seen from FBI Director Patel that don't really relate to any federal crime," Perez said, citing falling carjacking numbers nationwide as an example. "Those are not necessarily core FBI responsibilities. So I'm not sure why the FBI thinks it should take credit for that."
McCabe concurred. "It's a very fair criticism that many of the statistics he referred to are things that really the FBI does not control," he said. "To say that the FBI is responsible for something like a reduction in the murder rate is really overselling it."
The former deputy director went further, questioning specific figures Patel cited, including a claimed 500 percent increase in certain enforcement actions and a count of 1,100 terrorist attacks thwarted. "Those are just numbers that don't exist in that discipline," said McCabe, who spent half his career in counterterrorism, suggesting the totals may be inflated because "this administration has broadly redefined what they consider a terrorist to be."
"We know that Kash Patel is a very good promoter of Kash Patel, and maybe secondarily, the FBI,' McCabe added. "We also know that he has a pretty bad reputation about making statements that are just flatly inaccurate."
Asked whether the numbers were being "massaged" for political effect, Perez said the FBI denies it, but added that the pattern fits a broader administration habit. "President Trump likes the superlatives. He loves shading some of the facts to try to make the administration look better," Perez said. "So I think it's not a surprise that the FBI under this president's leadership is doing some of the same things."
Perez noted the FBI compiles much of its data from local police departments, but said the scale of some figures "does beg the questions that are being raised."
McCabe also was baffled by an exchange Patel had with Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) over changes to the FBI's hiring policies to, in the director's words, "protect victims of bestiality" from being automatically disqualified.
"It's mind-boggling to me that the FBI engaged in this sort of change in its automatic disqualifiers for employment," he said. This is not, in my 21 years in the FBI, I don't ever remember hearing the word bestiality at work, but nevertheless, this is a – even if, and I'm not saying I believe it is, but let's say for sake of argument, that Kash Patel is correct that this was limited only to victims of bestiality, whatever that might be, that is not how the rule change was originally launched to the public that that qualification was never there."
"Secondly, if that was a thing, if it came up in one in 1,000,000 cases, it's not the sort of thing that you would have to change a policy for any disqualifier can be appealed," McCabe added. "Certainly the FBI does not discriminate against the victims of crime in any way in its hiring practices, so it's hard to understand how this is even relevant. It's even harder to understand how a director of the FBI would have engaged in this sort of a rule or process change, because it generates exactly what we're doing now – talking about the FBI in a bizarre and negative way, and that is not something that most FBI directors want to encourage."