How Kash Patel Wrecked FBI’s Ability to Stop an Espionage Attack

FBI Director Kash Patel is reportedly crippling the FBI’s counterintelligence capabilities, former bureau agents have told The Bulwark.

On Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first day in office in February, she terminated the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force in order to “free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.” She also pared back the bureau’s enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, curbing investigations into alleged espionage. It’s probably not a coincidence that Patel failed to register under the FARA when he consulted for Qatar.

Under Patel’s leadership, 23 percent of the roughly 13,000 total FBI agents have been reassigned to work on immigration enforcement, which is not historically in the bureau’s purview. According to Democratic Senator Mark Warner, nearly 40 percent of agents in the FBI’s largest field offices have been made to work immigration cases. As a result, agents with expertise on foreign adversaries such as China, Iran, and Russia are now handling immigration cases on a rotating basis, according to former agents who left the bureau.

“It’s a disaster,” Robert Anderson, who ran FBI counterintelligence from 2012 to 2014, told The Bulwark. “I’m rooting for everybody because we’re all Americans, Patel needs to wake up.”

As the FBI’s focus has shifted under Patel’s leadership, the House Intelligence Committee has put forth a bill that would place counterintelligence, including the FBI’s ranks of spy hunters, under the purview of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has previously been criticized as a “Russian asset.”

Frank Montoya Jr., a retired FBI special agent who also served as director of the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, told The Bulwark that putting DNI in charge could be “really dangerous.”

“You could be creating a domestic spy agency with even less transparency to the American public,” he said.

To former FBI agents, that proposal undermines years of work developing a wide range of counterintelligence tactics and networks. “It’s tragic. All our work is being destroyed,” Montoya said.

Even though spy-hunting isn’t historically in the DNI’s purview, Gabbard initially seemed anxious to take the reins, claiming the FBI had become too “politicized.” Meanwhile, the bureau pushed back on the intelligence committee’s bill, exposing a power struggle between Patel and Gabbard.

In a statement to The Bulwark, DNI said that Gabbard now “supports the administration’s position, which is in opposition to the legislation.”

As technology becomes more advanced, the threats of foreign adversaries are only growing—and experts are concerned that Patel isn’t doing enough. “Patel is only paying lip service to the Chinese threat,” Montoya said.