Kash Patel's FBI is a total mess
A new lawsuit indicates he's too busy chasing online clout to notice.
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On July 14, Kash Patel summoned an agent with nearly 20 years experience at the FBI to his office. The agent, Steven Jensen, asked Patel not to fire another agent who would soon become the subject of online vitriol from Patel’s MAGA followers. The agent’s wife had stage four cancer and had just days to live, Jensen said.
Patel took it under advisement, then presented Jensen with a “challenge coin,” according to a lawsuit filed by Jensen and two other FBI veterans who were fired in a purge of the agency of anyone deemed disloyal to President Donald Trump. At the top of the coin, “Director.” At the bottom of the coin, “Ka$h Patel.”
Jensen was “crushing it,” Patel told him. Then, on August 8, Patel fired Jensen and the agent he had sought to protect, Walter Giardina.
Jensen and two other FBI veterans — Brian Driscoll and Spencer Evans — are now suing Patel, the FBI, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the White House for what they say are their unlawful terminations.
Their lawsuit, filed on Wednesday, paints a disturbing portrait of a political purge within the FBI — carried out over the last nine months at the alleged direction of the White House — that targeted agents who worked on the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, the classified documents case and ensuing raid at Mar-a-Lago, and anyone who voted for Kamala Harris or harbors personal political views favoring Democrats.
The lawsuit also indicates that Patel and deputy director of the FBI, Dan Bongino, have carried out the purge partly in fear of being fired by Trump, and under the influence — and sometimes direction — of their social media followings of MAGA diehards.
In fact, Patel and Bongino are so consumed by their online presence that it could be affecting the FBI’s ability to solve crimes, the lawsuit alleges.
Jensen “became alarmed at Bongino’s intense focus on increasing online engagement through his social media profiles in an effort to change his followers’ perception of the FBI,” Jensen’s lawyers write in the lawsuit. “Jensen was concerned that the emphasis Bongino placed on creating content for his social media pages could risk outweighing more deliberate analyses of investigations.”
Combined with the threat of “summary firings,” the FBI has experienced “negative morale” and “instability,” according to the lawsuit.
A shitshow inside a shitstorm
The situation inside the FBI is perhaps worse than “instability,” according to Michael Feinberg, a 16-year veteran of the agency who was fired for his friendship with Peter Sztrok, whose disdain for Trump during the Crossfire Hurricane investigation became endless fodder for MAGAsphere influencers bemoaning the “Deep State” during Trump’s first term.
“Under Patel and Bongino, subject matter expertise and operational competence are readily sacrificed for ideological purity and the ceaseless politicization of the workforce,” Feinberg wrote in July. “At a time of simultaneous wars across the globe and a return to great power competition, this makes us all less safe.”
Patel’s focus on social media compared to the more traditional, deliberative real-world presence of previous FBI directors was on full display Wednesday evening as law enforcement scrambled to find the killer of right-wing commentator and political operative Charlie Kirk.
At 6:21pm, Patel posted on X that the “subject for the horrific shooting today that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody.” Less than two hours later, Patel backtracked, tweeting that the person had “been released after an interrogation by law enforcement.”
Sen. Mark Warner, who as vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has warned for months that the political purge within the FBI was “unlikely to make us safer,” said the allegations in Wednesday’s lawsuit offer more evidence of “the FBI being weaponized for political retribution.”
Warner also addressed Patel’s fixation with social media.
“The allegations in this lawsuit only confirm what’s obvious to anyone paying attention: Kash Patel is more focused on curating his social media image than doing the hard work of keeping Americans safe,” Warner told Public Notice in a statement. “Most Americans expect the FBI Director to be focused on threats to our national security, not how many followers he has on X.”
On Thursday night, Patel flew to Utah, where local FBI agents and police were still on the hunt for Kirk’s killer — an unprecedented move for an FBI director tasked with overseeing an agency of nearly 40,000 employees. Patel stood to the side during an eight-minute press conference, saying nothing while wearing an FBI windbreaker. Making matters even more awkward was the fact that Patel recently gutted Utah’s FBI division — including firing Mehtab Syed, the esteemed former head of the Salt Lake City division — for reasons that have still not been explained.
During a Fox & Friends hit Friday morning, Trump announced that Kirk’s killer was in custody. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox confirmed this hours later in a press conference, naming the killer as 22-year-old Utah resident Tyler Robinson.
At the press conference, Patel took much credit on behalf of himself and the FBI for helping to find the killer.
In the end, however, it appears that the killer’s own family simply turned him in to local law enforcement.
Cruel and unusual
Patel and Bongino’s online clout-chasing is simply the b-matter of Wednesday’s lawsuit, which alleges the two men — at the direction of the White House and with help from a handful of political appointees and Trump loyalists — fired Jensen, former acting FBI Acting Director Driscoll, and 20-year agency veteran Spencer Evans as “retribution” for failing to “demonstrate sufficient political loyalty” to Trump.
Patel even admitted to Driscoll that he knew the firings were illegal, according to the lawsuit. In an August 5 meeting between the two men, Patel told Driscoll that higher-ups within the administration “had directed him to fire anyone who they identified as having worked on a criminal investigation against” Trump.
Driscoll assumed the powers that be who Patel said were dictating the terms of the purge included Bondi, the White House, and Trump himself.
According to the lawsuit, Patel’s job depended on his firing of agents who investigated Trump for his alleged theft of classified documents. Nothing that Driscoll, Jensen or anyone else at the agency said or did could prevent the purge from being carried out because “the FBI tried to put the president in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it,” Patel said.
In addition to fearing for their jobs if they didn’t purge the FBI of anyone suspected of holding critical views of Trump, Patel, and Bongino are also operating under fear of retribution from their online followings, the lawsuit alleges.
The two men are so consumed with the chatter flooding their social media feeds that they lack an understanding of basic investigative procedures at the agency, and in some cases are getting information about agents from online sources instead of the vast troves of material at their disposal, according to the lawsuit.
In March, after promoting Jensen to lead the FBI’s Washington office, Bongino called him “to ask him whether the things people were saying online were true, citing the vitriol he had been receiving on his social media pages,” the lawsuit alleges. Bongino’s followers discovered that Jensen was involved in the prosecutions of January 6 defendants who rioted at the Capitol and attacked police in an attempt to keep Trump in power. They demanded Bongino remove him.
In a meeting between the two men, Jensen told Bongino that he had served as section chief of the domestic terrorism section of the FBI, which oversaw January 6 prosecutions and “that this was not new information, and that it was part of his publicly available FBI biography and official personnel file,” which Bongino had apparently not read.
Bongino also expressed dismay at the existence of “burn bags” related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. In May, Bongino again called Jensen to his office.
“Bongino looked as if he had not slept for several days,” according to the lawsuit.
Bongino apparently told Jensen he had found a room filled with classified documents and “burn bags” related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Bongino “expressed shock at the existence of these burn bags.”
But the bags in fact are a “standard method” at the FBI and other agencies “for preparing classified material for destruction when an investigation is deemed closed, or when physical copies of the materials are no longer necessary,” the lawsuit explained. Further, Bongino “appeared unaware” that the material in the bags was likely already stored digitally at the agency.
After discussing the burn bags, surprising Jensen, Bongino alleged that an agent named Walter Giardina had mishandled data. Bongino told Jensen that the allegations against Giardina were “just out there,” and that Giardina “has got to go.”
Giardina has been the subject of scrutiny from Trump supporters like Sen. Chuck Grassley for his involvement in several investigations into Trump and his various alleged crimes and schemes. In June, Grassley wrote a letter to the Justice Department and the FBI demanding information about Giardina’s involvement in Trump investigations, including the president’s ties to Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election on his behalf, violations of the Emoluments Clause, which prevents elected officials from personally profiting from the offices they hold through bribes and gifts, and a case called “Crimson River,” which probed an illegal, $10 million campaign contribution from Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
At the time of the FBI’s discovery of the $10 million payment, during Trump’s first term, political appointees inside the agency killed the investigation, details of which were leaked to the Washington Post last year.
In the May meeting, Bongino asked Jensen to fire Giardina. Jensen refused, noting that Giardina “was a military veteran and was entitled to certain rights which did not allow such a firing.” By July, Patel was preparing to release information on Giardina to Congress for his roles in Trump investigations. Jensen warned that publicly tying Giardina to investigations into Trump would expose him and his family to threats as they were dealing with his wife’s terminal cancer diagnosis.
“In Jensen’s opinion, for Giardina and his family to have to deal with this during such an emotional time seemed inexcusably cruel,” the lawsuit states.
Patel named Giardina anyway, resulting in Grassley’s June letter. In July, Giardina’s wife, Colleen, died at the age of 49. In August, Patel fired Giardina, Jensen, Driscoll and Evans in one-page termination letters.
That’s it for this week
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The arrogant corruption, vindictivenss and debasement of the public service makes my blood boil
Lead by social media approval. There really is no bottom with these people.