Front Burner - The FBI’s controversial Kash Patel

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

In his 14 months as director of the FBI, Kash Patel has not only overseen a radical transformation of the bureau, but has also embroiled himself in a seemingly endless list of controversies.Late last week, The Atlantic published a scathing story with allegations of erratic behavior, excessive drinking, and unexplained absences. In response, Patel filed a $250 million defamation suit against the magazine, accusing it of publishing false and damaging claims.Reporter Marc Fisher joins us to talk about the controversies, the transformation of the FBI, and the implications. Fisher is a former senior editor with the Washington Post, and co-author of “Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power”. He reported and wrote a piece for the New Yorker last fall called “Kash Patel’s Acts of Service.”For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

I'm Lisa Yuso, a digital producer at Ideas, the podcast that likes to feed your curiosity. I ask my colleagues why they think you should listen. Ideas can make you the smartest, most interesting guest at your next dinner party in less than 60 minutes. It's got the best of a storytelling podcast with the best of a great lecture. You can pretty much never predict where an episode will take you, but you can count on every episode to shift your perspective. even just a little. Find and follow ideas wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Aaron Wary, in for Jamie. What is it like to be the head of the FBI? How weird is that? It's completely effing wild. I mean, I don't even know how to describe it. Why is it that we had such an explosion in crime to deal with in the first place? Because the prior administration did not prioritize

fighting crime, I'd shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopening the next day as a museum of the deep state. That's just a sampling of FBI director Cash Patel's podcast appearances. He's been in the job for just over a year, and during that time, he's radically transformed the Bureau and become the subject of a growing list of controversies. Late last week, the Atlantic magazine published a scathing story containing allegations of erratic behavior, excessive drinking, and unexplained absences. In response, Patel filed a $250 million defamation suit against the magazine. So today, the many controversies surrounding Cash Patel,

his transformation of the FBI, and the implications for the future of the Bureau. Mark Fisher is a former senior editor with The Washington Post and co-author of Trump Revealed, an American journey of ambition, ego, money, and power. He reported and wrote a piece for the New Yorker last fall about Cash Patel. Thanks for joining us, Mark. Great to be with you.

Before we talk about the controversies now, surrounding Patel. Let's start with how he came to be FBI director. He was a public defender for many years, then went to work for a Republican congressman, and eventually ended up holding a number of positions in Trump's first administration. How would you summarize his rise to prominence? Ash Patel, very much like his mentors along the way, Congressman Devin Nunez and then President Donald Trump, is someone who is extremely concerned with how he's perceived by his. his superiors and who will seemingly do almost anything, including change his political perspective, in order to curry favor with those who can bring him up the latter.

And that's what happened as he made his way in Washington from someone who, as you mentioned, was a public defender to an arch conservative who was willing to follow Trump in whatever direction Trump seemed to want to go. And so he really sold himself to Trump as someone. who would be the ultimate loyalist who would be beside the president and carry his water, whether it be at the Justice Department, the National Security Council, or, as we've now seen at the FBI. And in some cases, if I understand correctly, wasn't always liked very well by some of the

people in Trump's first administration. That's right. And that was in part because he seemed to have a direct connection to Trump and therefore kind of did an end run around some of the folks who were actually his superiors, such as John Bolton at the National Security Council. Cash had a knack for just appearing at the White House. He arrived at the Oval Office for a meeting that really everyone else there was well superior to him. This is back during the first Trump administration. And there he was kind of acting as Trump's eyes and ears, almost survey.

as kind of a political commissar who would arrange for Trump to get his people, his loyalists, in the places where Trump wanted him. He curried favor not only with the president, but with the president's favorite characters on TV, including people like Sean Hannity, the Fox News pundit. How do you have a 91% increase in such a short period of time? Does that mean that the last FBI was not working, or are they just working going after Trump? It's really simple, Sean. The weaponization of law enforcement is over. The American people gave...

Like Trump himself, Cash Patel has this love-hate relationship with the news media in which he bashes reporters left and right. The simple answer to your question is, you are lying. I can say unequivocally that I never listen to the fake news mafia. Threatens to sue them, sues them. At the same time, he is very much available to them and very much need. needs and uses them to get his messages across to the president and to do the president's bidding. In 2023, after the Trump first term, Patel publishes a book called government gangsters.

The book is finally here. The Biden administration tried to wormhole this manuscript for 10 plus months. We took them to federal court and won. What we talk about in this book is simply how to destroy the deep state. There's a reason Donald Trump calls this the roadmap to winning in 2024. For those of us who haven't read it, what is the basic thrust of that book? The basic thrust of that book is summed up in an addendum at the back of the book, which is simply a list of the politicians, the political appointees, the reporters and other journalists who Patel believes are, if not treasonous, at least deeply disloyal. people who he believes have used the government for their own benefit and who have prevented

Trump from getting his way. This is all part of Cash Patel's belief that there is this deep state that is controlling the United States, that is really running the government in lieu of the elected representatives of the people. And Patel has had this belief for some years. It especially took off after Trump came to office. And it all stemmed. from an odd circumstance when Patel was a lawyer, a prosecutor at the Justice Department, and he was called to Texas to appear before a judge in a case that he was handling. And the judge reamed him out for showing up to court without a suit and tie because Patel had just come back from a trip in order to make the hearing and didn't have the proper attire with him.

The judge blasted Patel in open court and news organizations such as the Washington Post, reported on this about this poor young prosecutor who was just ripped to shreds by a judge. The press coverage of that incident stuck with Patel in a very deep and enduring way, turned him against the news media and gave him this sense that the government was filled with people who were undermining people like him, preventing him from rising and preventing people like Trump from advancing a conservative agenda. He also has this podcast during the time after the first Trump administration called Cash's Corner, which was funded by the Epac Times, a right-wing news organization linked to the Falun Gong, a religious group that's been declared illegal by the Chinese government. And he often talked about the FBI on this podcast. Multiple levels of failures in duty, intentional or otherwise, by people as high as the director of the FBI, the deputy director of the FBI, the head of counterintelligence for the FBI. Peter Strach and others on down. What kind of things did he say about the Bureau, both on that podcast and elsewhere?

He called the FBI essentially a corrupt and politicized organization, especially during the Obama and Biden administrations. He believed that the FBI planned the January 6th assault on the Capitol, or at least he said he believed that, whether he truly did or not as harder to say. He called the FBI corrupt. He demanded that they investigate Anthony Fauci, who was the leader of the public health campaign to curb the COVID epidemic. Patel took it upon himself to defend President Trump in the case where the FBI was investigating Trump's removal of classified documents to Mara Lago after he left the presidency. So Patel really saw the FBI as a rogue organization that was refusing to do the president's bidding, and he believed that it should be cut severely and that its special agents should be removed from the kinds of prosecutions of corruption and political misdeeds that it was involved in during the First Trump administration, and instead oriented more toward the kinds of things that Patel was interested in, such as going after Trump. Trump's critics.

So there was a lot of skepticism about him from Democrats during his confirmation hearing. But when I say that you are the least qualified FBI director in the history of the FBI, that is real, because you are the only one that never even served with the FBI. You were asked about the police officers in the Capitol who testified in the January 6 hearings and you accuse them of lying. Is that correct or not correct? I don't think that's accurate. Okay, Joe Pact podcast, March 2024.

We'll put it on the record. What due diligence did you do? Senator, I didn't record it myself. So you did no due diligence before you promoted this song by these violent felons? Is that what you're telling us? While we're talking about your words, let's talk about the cowards and uniform comment for a moment, can we?

Please. Let me just say right to the point, Mr. Patel. What are you hiding? But he's eventually confirmed in the U.S. Senate by a vote of 51 to 49. And some Republicans, you know, picking up on his vision frame, this is a shakeup that the FBI needed. Since his confirmation, how has that vision kind of been put into practice and what is it meant for the direction and focus of the FBI? Cash Patel has redirected the priorities of the FBI in an unprecedented fashion. He has taken agents off their assignments, removed them.

He's shut down the unit within the FBI that investigates corruption by elected officials. He has fired agents who have worked on the investigations into the January 6th attack. He's fired agents who looked into President Trump's mishandling of classified documents. Now to FBI Director Cash Patel, who has fired at least six agents. agents tied to the 2022 search of President Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate. That's what six people familiar with the matter tell NBC News. But three of those sources say at least 10 employees were ultimately dismissed. He has fired people for expressly what he promised the Senate he would not fire them for,

which is for having been assigned to cases that were critical of Donald Trump. He has fired agents who took a need during a demonstration after the Georgia. Floyd murder back in 2020. These were agents who were trying to build rapport with protesters on the streets, and as part of that effort, they leaned down onto the ground with the demonstrators to sort of not necessarily show their solidarity, but rather to kind of create a relationship with those demonstrators. Patel simply fired them. A photos show at least some of them kneeling. As many as 20 agents have been dismissed. A number of them worked at the Bureau's Washington field office, at least some were reassigned. He fired an agent trainee who had displayed a

gay pride flag on his desk. So in many different ways, he has used his authority over the special agents of the FBI to reorient the work of the Bureau and to take vengeance against agents simply because of the cases they'd been assigned to. There was an op-ed by a former FBI agent in the Times, I believe last fall, she worked for the Bureau for 25 years. And she made the argument that Patel is, quote, consumed by politically motivated revenge and conspiracy theories, distracting the FBI once again from the danger of terrorism, unquote. Have you heard similar concerns in your reporting? Yes, absolutely. The special agents of the FBI, that would tend to be extremely well prepared, many of them have come to the FBI with training in regional studies,

different parts of the world where there are threats against the United States. Many of them are lawyers. This is not just a high-level police organization. It's an organization of real experts doing very sensitive work. And for them to see someone come in and politicize the Bureau in this way has been tremendously dispiriting to them. They are particularly bothered, the agents I've spoken to by Cash Patel's proclivity to embrace conspiracy theories. In his interview last year with Joe Rogan, where Patel sat for hours with Rogan and talked about all kinds of conspiracies like the idea that the Chinese Communist Party was systematically killing Americans with fentanyl in a sort of concerted effort to wipe out tens of thousands of Americans. Their long-term game

is this. How do I, in my opinion, kneecap, the United States of America, our largest adversary, well, why don't we go and take out generations of young men and women who might grow up to serve in the United States military or become a cop or become a teacher? And that's what they're doing when you wipe out tens of thousands of Americans a year. Many FBI agents are just astonished that their boss believes this kind of stuff. I'm Lisa Yuso, a digital producer at Ideas, the podcast that likes to feed your curiosity. I ask my colleagues why they think you should listen. Ideas can make you the smartest, most interesting guest at your next dinner party in less than 60 minutes.

It's got the best of a storytelling podcast with the best of a great lecture. You can pretty much never predict where an episode will take you, you can count on every episode to shift your perspective, even just a little. Find and follow ideas wherever you get your podcasts. Meanwhile, Patel has generated numerous headlines for his own personal behavior and his use of FBI resources. For instance, he's had FBI officers providing security for his girlfriend. We're talking about around the clock SWAT coverage. A statement from the FBI said that this was because of death threats that she faces due to her relationship with Patel. But even

FBI sources have said that kind of security was unheard of. There's also been questions about Patel's own travel. He took the FBI's private jet to Italy for the Olympics and was then seen in that viral locker room video after the U.S. men's hockey team won the gold medal. He was chugging beers with them and there was tons of backlash coming out of that. Patel dismissing critics who questioned why he was in the locker room. For the very concerned media, yes, I love America and was extremely humbled when my friends, the newly minted gold medal winners on Team USA invited me into the locker room to celebrate this historic moment with the boys.

This is on top of what reportedly happened last May ahead of a Five Eyes conference where he is said to have wanted to attend Premier League games and to Jetsky because he doesn't like office meetings. What kind of cumulative impact of this kind of behavior caught on tape in one case have on the Bureau more widely? I think it's had a very deleterious effect in that the FBI certainly has had its problems in the past. And during the extremely long reign of Jay Edgar Hoover, who was the Bureau's first and most influential director, there were instances certainly in which the FBI failed to do its job and instead was politically oriented toward investigations that may have helped the current administration. That said, the work of the FBI, both on the crime front and in terms of preventing terrorism, has been deeply respected by Americans, in part because the FBI had a really good PR campaign going for decades in which TV shows, dramas, gave Americans this sense that the G-man of the FBI got their man

and that they would get out there and catch the kidnappers, catch the crooks, and all of that. So part of that is Hollywood hype, but part of that. Part of that was based on truth. Along comes Cash Patel, and he's kind of undermining this sense of efficiency and smarts on the part of the G-Men of the FBI. And when he flies off to Nashville to visit his girlfriend using the FBI jet, when he heads to a ranch in Texas to stay at a Republican donor's resort, when he is called upon to react to the ship. shooting of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist, and he has to leave a dinner in Manhattan and rush in and arrive late and then issue an unfounded accusation against a purported criminal. In that case, this all undermines the credibility of the FBI in ways that agents

are deeply affected by, and certainly I think the American public feels that this is no longer the kind of nonpartisan and efficient law enforcement force that they'd perceived it as earlier. And now we have these allegations of excessive drinking unexplained absences as reported in the Atlantic. The story claims on multiple occasions the director's security detail had difficulty waking Patel and states that a request was made late last year for breaching equipment to gain entry. To state the obvious, the FBI handles some of the most sensitive national security files in the United States, if not the world. You know, what are the implications for Patel's behavior on the work of the FBI?

This is an FBI where fully one quarter of the agents have been redirected away from their previous assignments to work on immigration cases, to work supporting ICE and Homeland and security in the identification, capture, and deportation of illegal immigrants. That is not the FBI's job. The agents who have been forced to make this pivot, resent it, and feel that there are being taken away from vital work preventing terrorism and going after drug dealers and that sort of thing. So it's had a terrible effect within the FBI.

and the FBI agents tell me that they believe it's had the effect of making the United States a less safe place. And they are just waiting, clenching their teeth and waiting for the terrorist activities that they think will now happen that they believe they could have stopped because they have been redirected away from their work to essentially be support staff for ICE. You mentioned the investigation into Charlie Kirk's assassination. Patel was heavily criticized during that because he declared on social media minutes before government officials were going to brief on what happened, that there was a suspect in custody only to be contradicted moments later. How would you describe the fallout from that and how significant is it that something like that has happened? It's just one and one very large piece of a bigger picture in which Cash Patel has been unreliable as a source of information. He has been quick to make accusations that he then has to either back down from or

simply slink away from. And all of this has an impact on the credibility of the FBI, as well as, on Patel himself. And this is something where just in recent days, we've seen more and more reports coming from Trump's inner circle that Patel is in trouble. This goes back some weeks or months, actually, in which the president was said to be disappointed that Patel has not been a better representative of the administration on TV. We know that the president judges a lot of his cabinet members and top appointees according to how well they come off on television, how well they represent him and his administration. And he believes that Patel has failed at that.

The rashness with which he named a subject in custody after the Kirk shooting is one example. There are others and certainly these expensive travels and the appearance with the hockey team at the Olympics, all of these incidents in which Patel, is appearing in very embarrassing ways, has undermined the president's confidence in Patel. And just before Attorney General Pam Bondi was removed by the president, it looked as if either one of them was next to go as we start to see cabinet members removed from this administration after its first year. As it turned out, it was Bondi who was removed.

But I think Patel has a very keen sense that his job is very much on the way. line right now. Yeah. Do you think, I mean, these concerns were raised in the Atlantic piece that Patel himself was worried about his job. Do you think it's likely that he will be relieved of his duties? He certainly doesn't seem to be secure in that position right now. And that's why I think we're seeing him lashing out at that Atlantic story, filing a $250

million defamation lawsuit. This is something that is very much a page out of the Atlantic story. the Trump playbook, and Patel has sort of followed his mentor in this fashion many times before he has sued various news organizations. In fact, just today, as a matter of fact, a different federal judge and a different lawsuit, this one that Patel filed against somebody at MS now, the former MSNBC channel, in which they had reported that Patel has been more visible at nightclubs than he has been at the FBI headquarters. The judge dismissed that case saying that any person of reasonable intelligence

would not have taken that statement, literally, and therefore it cannot be defamation. But this is classic Trump relations with the press in which, as Trump once told me, he sues news media not to win those cases. He knows he can't win them, but rather to destroy the reporter, to destroy the news organization to make them spend larger sums on their legal defense and to try to chip away at their reputation. We've also heard him field reporters' questions about the allegations in the Atlantic, which led to some pretty heated exchanges. I'm on the job.

I'm the first one in. I'm the last one out. I'm like an everyday American who loves his country, loves his sport of hockey, and champions my friends when they raise a gold medal and invite me in to celebrate. I've never been intoxicated on the job, and that is why we file a $250 million defamation lawsuit, and any one of you that wants to participate, bring it on. I'll see you in court. The problem with you and your report, don't come me off, you ask the question. The problem with you and your baseless reporting is that is an absolute lie.

It was never said, it never happened, and I will serve in this administration as long as the president and the attorney general want me to do so. Does that fit within what you're referring to, sort of going on the offensive when you're faced with negative media reports? Absolutely. This is classic Trump playbook. Patel came out and said, I've never been intoxicated on the job. And that's why I'm filing this lawsuit. And if any one of you wants to have one of these lawsuits, I'm happy to provide that. So he is being aggressive.

As Trump always says, the idea is to win at any cost. and to, when you're criticized, to turn the tables and attack, attack, attack. Trump has these acolytes throughout the administration, Cash Patel being a very premier example of that and very much copying the president's approach. In that piece, last poll, for the New Yorker, you mentioned that case of William Sessions, who, as you write, was fired as FBI director in 93 because he had used FBI aircraft to visit friends and relatives often with his wife. Was that just a simpler time? Given the Sessions example, are you surprised that Patel hasn't faced greater consequences? Well, it's especially ironic

since Patel himself criticized Sessions and other members of Democratic administrations who used government jets for their own personal trips. And it's also true that the FBI director is required to travel on the government's jets rather than on commercial airliners for security reasons. So there's ample justification for Patel to use the FBI's jet. The question then becomes, is it proper for him to be spending all this time going to ultimate fighting championship bouts in Nevada, going to visit his girlfriend in Nashville, going to see hang out with the hockey team in Italy. All of these trips, quite frequent trips to Nevada, which is technically Patel's home, this is all part of the broader picture of Patel seemingly not being terribly devoted to his actual

job. There are complaints from a lot of agents at the FBI that he doesn't show up to some of the mandatory meetings, some of the routine jobs of the FBI director. So this is a lot of the FBI director. So this is in one sense a perennial issue in the government where one party is always accusing the other of abusing the system and taking advantage of the perks of office. But it's also at another level a step beyond that, in which Patel really does seem to spend an inordinate amount of time heading off to events where he's there for his own entertainment, whether it's sitting Cagedside with Mel Gibson, the actor, or sitting with Trump at a fight in Miami. He's presenting the image of someone who's more interested in his celebrity than in the actual work of the FBI.

You mentioned Hoover and his legacy. I'm wondering if we can sort of end on that idea. I think in a lot of ways the FBI is still defined by that first director, Jay Edgar Hoover. And he sort of built the idea, as you say, of the FBI is a very professional, very powerful law enforcement agency, maybe the most famous law enforcement agency in the world. But he also used the powers of his agency for political purposes. How does Cash Patel's tenure, however much longer it lasts, fit into that longer history? And where do you think the Bureau with or without Cash Patel goes from here? This is a question that really bedevils a lot of the people who've devoted their lives to the FBI.

They are wondering how they can restore their credibility in a post-Petal, post-Trump environment. They're wondering what it will take to recruit a new collection of agents who have the expertise and the smarts to be the premier law enforcement. agency in the country, much as there were abuses under Jay Edgar Hoover, where he harassed Martin Luther King and where he went after gay people and anti-war activists, there was also a period of decades of extraordinary achievements by Hoover's FBI, really breaking up the mafia, decimating the Ku Klux Klan. And what differs, I think, in Patel's time, as directors, first of all, he doesn't have that record of accomplishments. And second, he has blown a hole through what was really the kind of paramount rule in Hoover's FBI, where agents

were trained from the very start. Whatever you do, don't embarrass the Bureau. The Bureau's rectitude, the Bureau's reputation was a key element in its ability to fight crime and prevent crime. And I think that is something that has been lost under Cash Patel and the people who love the FBI are wondering whether they will ever be able to get that back. All right, Mark, that's a lot to think about. Thanks very much. Thank you. Shortly after we recorded this interview, the New York Times reported allegations that the FBI investigated Times reporter Elizabeth Williamson. Williamson had written about Patel using government resources for his girlfriend's protection and transportation.

The Times says the FBI agents interviewed Patel's girlfriend, checked databases for information about the reporter, and recommended moving forward to determine if the reporter had broken stalking laws. The FBI said they were concerned about, quote, how the aggressive reporting techniques crossed lines of stalking. The agency ultimately decided not to pursue the case. That's all for today. I'm Aaron Wary. Jamie is back tomorrow.

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