JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
For years, Kash Patel was a fierce critic of the FBI. He once said he would close FBI headquarters on Day 1 and turn it into a museum of the deep state. Well, Patel is now the director of the very agency he once criticized. NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas has been digging in to what Patel has done at the Bureau since taking over. Hi, Ryan.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Hi there.
SUMMERS: So Ryan, if I'm counting correctly, Kash Patel's been in the job for more than a hundred days at this point, so tell us what you've been hearing about his tenure as the FBI director.
LUCAS: Right. So this is important in part because Patel has no prior experience leading anything like the FBI, and this is a huge job. So I spoke with several current and former FBI officials to get a sense of how Patel is leading the Bureau. And first off, he has a very different leadership style from his predecessors. Previous directors were very buttoned-up. They spoke in measured tones. His immediate predecessors, of course, didn't try to make a splash on social media. Patel, in contrast, pushes out flashy videos or photos on social media. There's one of them where he's wearing camouflage and sunglasses as he watches an FBI training exercise, for example.
Now, he's also gone to NHL games and hobnobbed with hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. He's sat ringside for UFC fights in Miami and Las Vegas. One former senior FBI official told me that that sort of hobnobbing, it's not a good look for FBI director. For some FBI folks, there's also a sense that there's a lot of work on the director's plate and that Patel should be working and not sitting in luxury boxes.
SUMMERS: Interesting. OK, so that's his leadership style, but tell us about any substantive changes that he's made so far at the Bureau.
LUCAS: Well, there are a couple of things. He's begun transferring people out of headquarters in Washington, D.C., and redeploying them around the country. Patel has put the number publicly to be around 1,500 people, so that's about 10% of FBI folks in the D.C. area. Some of them are going to the FBI's big campus in Huntsville, Alabama. Others are going to field offices across the nation. And Patel talked about this when he was on the Hill last month. Here's a bit of what he said.
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KASH PATEL: We need their expertise in your states, in your counties, in your towns because the threat to this country in 2025 is everywhere, and we cannot quarterback that mission from Washington, D.C., alone.
LUCAS: Now, the former FBI folks I've spoken to are generally supportive of this plan. They say it's something that has been under consideration for a long time. They say that headquarters in Washington has grown too large, too cumbersome. On the other hand, a number of senior FBI officials have been pushed out under the Trump administration. These are people with decades of experience. So the Bureau's lost a lot of knowledge, a lot of expertise, which matters now because neither Patel nor his deputy have any experience in the FBI.
SUMMERS: Well, what about the FBI's priorities, Ryan? Have they changed at all under Patel?
LUCAS: Well, look, there's a ton of stuff that falls to the FBI to investigate. We're talking foreign spies, terrorists, bank robbers, hackers, white-collar criminals. Patel has said, for his priorities, crushing violent crime and defending the homeland are two of his top ones. That's how Patel's put it. But the primary change really appears to be a shift in focus to immigration enforcement, which isn't a typical FBI mission. Immigration, though, we know, is a major policy focus for the Trump administration.
I'm told most, if not all FBI field officers are now working on immigration enforcement. The push is to do this seven days a week. Former FBI officials say there are likely ripple effects to this because the FBI, of course, only has a finite amount of resources. So if you're putting agents on immigration, you're taking them off of something else, and that could be things like counterintelligence and counterterrorism.
SUMMERS: The Justice Department under President Trump is focusing less on white-collar crime. I wonder, is that the case for the FBI, too?
LUCAS: It is, yes. And as part of that, Patel has disbanded the FBI's premier Public Corruption Squad, which was part of the Washington field office. This was a unit that was involved in investigating Trump himself. One former senior FBI official I spoke with called this decision baffling. This person said, only the FBI does these sorts of corruption probes into public officials, so if they're not doing it, who is?
But at the same time, the new FBI deputy director, former podcaster Dan Bongino, he said last week that the FBI would pour resources into what he called three potential cases of public corruption - the January 6 D.C. pipe bombs, the discovery of a small bag of cocaine at the White House in 2023 and the leak of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade - all of which, I will note, were previously investigated during the Biden administration.
SUMMERS: NPR's Ryan Lucas, thank you.
LUCAS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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