'There is no time for either man to learn the job': Former Deputy Director on Trump FBI appointments

(CNN) — FBI Director Kash Patel walked into his new office on the seventh floor of the bureau’s headquarters last week and made an immediate order – he wanted new carpeting and window coverings, calling the office “dingy.”

Patel’s plans to remake the FBI go well beyond redecorating. He wants to overhaul the bureau in fundamental ways that could drastically realign its workforce and the scope of its mission. But like nearly every renovation project, it hasn’t all gone as planned.

Even before Patel arrived at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington as its newly confirmed director last Thursday, there was tension between Trump appointees and career officials at the bureau.

A plan to quickly fire more than 100 mid-level and senior employees blew up into a weeklong standoff between Trump’s acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, and the FBI’s acting leaders, Brian Driscoll and Robert Kissane, who Bove had installed, according to people briefed on the matter.

Bove’s demands for a list of more than 5,000 employees, mostly those associated with January 6, 2021, cases, prompted a chain of events that has blown back on Patel, making his initial week on the job more difficult than it was already going to be.

A handful of former agents who were early supporters of Patel have already stepped away from an advisory panel that was designed to build his credibility inside the FBI, people briefed on the matter said. Presented with Bove’s list of mid-and-upper level employees to oust, mostly over their association with January 6 and Trump investigations, some advisory members quickly rebelled.

“We immediately said ‘No way,’” a former agent said after receiving the list. “They were shocked at our reaction.”

That rebellion in turn prompted President Donald Trump to appoint a loyalist podcaster Dan Bongino as deputy director, quashing Patel’s previously stated intention to continue the tradition of picking a career agent as his deputy, people briefed on the plans said.

The upheaval has raised concerns among current and former agents and officials that terrorist groups or major adversaries such as China, Russia and Iran will exploit vulnerabilities while the FBI is distracted with internal discord.

“They are going to miss something, and we’ll find out that instead of doing their work, some agent was busy filling out a questionnaire,” said one former FBI official, referencing the order from Bove that FBI employees fill out a questionnaire detailing their work related to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. The Justice Department’s ongoing review of that work and the prospect of mass firings continues to loom over the 38,000 members of the FBI workforce.

As the first FBI director to win confirmation without bipartisan support, Patel already faced an uphill battle in running a bureau widely seen as the most establishment part of federal law enforcement.

Now, as he tries to move past criticisms that he’s no more than a Trump loyalist, Patel has to reconfigure a sprawling organization while also building credibility among the rank-and-file. Interviews with multiple current and former FBI employees suggest that the current upheaval Patel is inheriting – and also helping to stoke – has made that job harder.

Breaking with tradition

Some of Patel’s moves in his first week in office have added to the anxiety – but also underscore what a departure he is for a hide-bound bureau dominated by tradition.

Patel, the first FBI director who is not a White man, was sworn in while taking the oath on the Bhagavad Gita Hindu text. In a nod to bureau tradition, he stopped at the FBI’s Honor Wall, a memorial to agents killed in the line of duty, before convening his first full briefing.

In his first full day in office on Friday, Patel convened meetings with senior leaders and announced plans for as many as 1,500 agents and staff to be moved out of FBI headquarters and the DC region. The plan is to send more agents and staff to 55 field offices around the country, and to the FBI’s Huntsville, Alabama, campus. At his confirmation, Patel walked back his previous claim that he would shutter FBI headquarters on Day One and turn it into a museum.

In one of his early meetings, Patel gave supervisors a deadline of February 28 to begin moving people out of the DC area, an order that officials told him was unworkable. Among the questions employees haven’t received answers to: will the government pay the costs for employees to break apartment leases in order to move quickly, according to sources familiar with the matter. Moving FBI employees is a process that can take about 100 days, current and former employees say.

On his first weekend on the job, Patel had to step in to advise employees not to respond to a government-wide email asking them to list five things they did last week. The email appears to be part of a productivity effort by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which Trump established as having only access to unclassified information.

Among ideas said to be floated by Patel’s remaining advisers is installing additional political appointees inside the bureau, which traditionally has one political appointee, the director, according to people briefed on the matter.

Building his team

Shortly after Trump announced Patel as his pick to head the FBI on December 1, transition officials began reaching out to a group of former FBI agents who were disenchanted with the bureau’s direction in recent years and generally viewed recent FBI leaders as politicized.

The plan: to build a small group that would serve as a “director’s advisory team” that would prepare the way for Patel’s arrival and a list of suggested changes to give more power to field offices and less to the FBI’s headquarters and operations in the DC region.

It’s an idea that has wide support among agents outside Washington.

“As headquarters has become bigger and bigger, and more cumbersome, it’s become a real frustration for agents,” says Chris O’Leary, a former counterterrorism chief at the FBI’s New York field office who also worked stints at FBI headquarters.

O’Leary, however, says that many agents don’t understand the importance of the work at headquarters, including working with intelligence agencies to get information to agents in the field. “I spent time at headquarters, so I got to know the beast. Someone has to coordinate cases and it won’t happen in the field.”

When Trump transition officials came calling, they found a ready audience in a conservative-leaning group of agents who already believed the bureau needed an overhaul.

Among them is Tom Ferguson, a former FBI agent and congressional aide to Rep. Jim Jordan, a staunch FBI critic. In social media posts, Ferguson has railed against socialism, “woke” ideology, and what he says is political overreach from leftist politicians and activists. In one of those posts, a bullet point list titled “​I Remember When…”,​ Ferguson wrote that the FBI was once “an esteemed national treasure and hadn’t forgotten their oath to remain apolitical.”

“The FBI is in serious trouble and it needs change,” says one former counterterrorism agent who was set to be part of Patel’s advisory team but has since decided against it.

By late January, Bove shared with acting FBI leaders and some advisory members a list of more than 100 FBI mid- and upper-level employees to be ousted, mostly associated with January 6 and Trump investigations.

Members of the advisory team received the list and were asked to provide input, according to one of the members. Many of them balked at the list, according to people familiar with the matter. At least three former agents stepped back from associating with the advisory team as a result, people briefed on the matter said.

A person familiar with Patel’s thinking says Patel played no role in matters that happened before he was confirmed. He is responsible for actions that he has overseen since taking over last week, the person said.

The former counterterrorism agent told CNN that he left the group because he viewed retribution against agents over January 6 cases as no different from what he viewed as weaponization that occurred during the Biden administration.

Another former agent involved in the group said he never planned to be part of a long-term advisory team and decided to limit his activity to preparing a set of written recommendations that he shared with Patel.

“I could see what was going on and I knew I wasn’t up for that,” the former agent who served decades at the bureau said. “I love the bureau, but she’s my ex-wife and I wish her the best.”

Ferguson and others remain in the FBI as advisers.

Threats loom

Patel says part of the goal of sending more agents out to field offices is to better protect Americans where they live, not just in Washington.

The former counterterrorism agent involved in the Patel group says widespread dissatisfaction with the way the bureau was operating in recent years, means agents can embrace that effort.

“The FBI needs to go back to working cases in the field, and people at headquarters can’t just be people who spend their lives at headquarters,” the former counterterrorism agent said.

But the chaotic recent weeks inside the FBI have raised concerns among current and former agents that distractions could cause a terror plot or other threat to go undetected.

Some agents say that there’s trepidation about pursuing cases related to Russian counterintelligence or criminal matters related to Russia, in part because of fear that their work could be seen to clash with the White House’s efforts to be friendlier to Moscow.

And given threats to punish agents for working politically sensitive cases, expect more agents to be hesitant to open public corruption investigations, some current and former agents say.

“Agents are working more tentatively,” the former counterterrorism agent said.

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