Rachel Poser

Kash Patel attended a secret intelligence conference last year in the UK with some of our closest intelligence partners.

And as part of the conference, they all went to Windsor Castle for a meeting with the king, where a photograph was taken of all the participants, and it was sent around as a kind of keepsake with instructions, please don't share this, because some of the people in that photo were non-disclosed, meaning that their affiliation with the intelligence services was supposed to be a secret.

Their faces were not supposed to be in the press.

Correct.

But Kash Patel is apparently determined to put this photo out on his social media.

And so it creates this minor international incident where the British are saying, please don't post that photo.

You really can't.

And his team is kind of pushing back.

No, we want to put it out.

They didn't end up putting it out.

But it's just an example of the kind of thing that everyone started to have to deal with when Patel was so focused on optics and social media.

Both Patel and Bongino declined our request for interviews, but the FBI spokesman, Ben Williamson, sent us a general comment in response to our reporting.

And I can read it to you.

Please.

He said,

Well, there were a couple of big trends that we noticed in our reporting.

And one of them was how much the day-to-day work of agents and analysts was being transformed by the Trump administration's emphasis on immigration.

The FBI traditionally plays no role in immigration enforcement, but all over the country, agents and analysts were being reassigned from their normal duties to help with the immigration push.

So I spoke to one analyst in Los Angeles who became particularly concerned about this when the Trump administration did a big immigration push there last year.

And her story gives us some really good insight into what this transformation really looked like.