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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. From the moment he was appointed director of the FBI, Kash Patel has invited controversy and concern about what his leadership would look like and how it might affect the agency that's tasked with protecting the United States from threats at home and abroad.
Today, my colleagues Emily Bazelon and Rachel Poser spoke to dozens of current and former FBI employees about how the FBI has been transformed. It's Wednesday, April 22nd. Emily Bazelon, welcome to The Daily. Thanks so much for having us. Rachel Poser, first time on The Daily. Welcome. Thank you. Great to be here.
So we have talked a lot on the show about all of these dramatic ways that the Trump administration has reshaped the role and the function of the federal government. A lot of those results are quite visible. ICE agents in the streets. Prosecutors defying court orders. But one of the agencies that has been reshaped in perhaps less visible ways is the FBI.
The two of you embarked on an enormous, ambitious reporting project to try to really get inside the FBI. So tell us what specifically you were trying to understand about the agency and how it was functioning under the Trump administration.
The FBI, you know, since the scandals of Watergate, since those days, has really tried to operate independently of the White House and to follow the facts without fear or favor. That's a big deal in the bureau. And so when Trump was elected, he had a record of calling the bureau corrupt, of being very angry that he had been investigated.
Well, I think the FBI was a very corrupt institution, and I'm a victim of it in a true sense. I was able to beat it.
And the Trump administration came in and they were really clear about this. The mission of the agency was changing.
Our predecessors turned this Department of Justice into the Department of Injustice. But I stand before you today to declare that those days are over.
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Chapter 2: What controversies surrounded Kash Patel's appointment as FBI director?
What has your reporting shown about his tenure?
So Kash Patel was a highly unusual pick for this role. He had never worked for the FBI and did not have much experience in federal law enforcement at all. He'd been a public defender and he worked as an intelligence official in the first Trump term. He's described by people who know him at the time as not particularly hardworking, but very cocky, ambitious, full of bluster.
Because the subpoena list that Donald Trump should execute in this proceedings— is going to be monumental. I want him to subpoena every government gangster that has ever called him out bogusly. We're going to subpoena Garland, Ray. We're going to put all them in the hot seat.
Most importantly, he's somebody who has spun conspiracy theories about the bureau in the past. He says that Joe Biden rigged the 2020 election. He thinks that there were FBI agents involved in planning the January 6th attack on the Capitol, which is part of why Trump picks him.
I'd shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopening the next day as a museum of the deep state.
I mean, he has this line. He actually talks about shutting down the bureau headquarters and reopening it as a museum of the deep state.
I remember that line. And I remember that there was a lot of concern and speculation and so many questions from outside the bureau about who this guy was and what the agency would even look like under his leadership.
Yeah. And there was a lot of skepticism and concern inside the agency, too. You know, people are looking at this guy and they're thinking, like, how is this person who is so hostile to our agency going to lead it?
One of the first things I did was go on Amazon and buy his book. I listened to some podcasts and I tried to understand his background, how he approached things.
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Chapter 3: How has the FBI been transformed under Trump’s administration?
Can you describe his first day? Like, after he came on board, do you remember what it was like for you? Yes.
I was part of the morning meetings that we would have in which all of the headquarters leaders would assemble in a very large conference room, and we would brief each the director and typically the deputy director. And I think everyone was very anxious to meet the new director and to see what he would have to tell us.
And on that very first day, he made an announcement about changes in staffing to the Bureau.
And one of the first orders that really got people's attention was a big order to move hundreds of field agents out from Washington into the field offices. And that wasn't necessarily a bad idea. There were a lot of FBI insiders who said, yeah, sure, the Bureau has become too conservative. heavy in D.C. and we could disperse people and that might be more effective.
But the way they did it seemed like kind of random and arbitrary and not a lot of thought was going into, well, how do we actually have these people land all over the country in a way that they're going to really be able to do their jobs?
Yeah.
It showed a lack of understanding of what the Bureau at the headquarters level does. And so this was the first instance, I would say, of a pattern that we would see after that of decisions first and then everybody scramble and figure out how to make it happen later.
So this was a signal to Tanya that Patel is not going to be taking detailed briefings and kind of coloring inside the lines. He's going to be moving ahead, making maybe abrupt and sudden decisions that affect how investigations are run without the kind of traditional, very sober and considered analysis that the bureau is used to providing.
And it's not just Tanya Ugoretz who's concerned in these early days. I mean, this is widespread all over the bureau area.
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Chapter 4: What specific changes did Kash Patel implement upon his arrival?
And the more he told me about it, the more I was like, sign me up. I'm in.
Jill was one of those agents for whom the FBI was really her life. She worked there. Her husband worked there. They were true believers.
By the time I got in, I had a three-and-a-half-year-old. So we got him a little FBI jacket. They had the little hoodie jackets that says FBI and got him the junior agent creds. And he was so cute because he would put them on and then he'd put little sunglasses on and he'd go to people and he'd be like, pow! FBI, and show his little junior agent creds. It was really cute.
Jill was an analyst who worked on violent crime in L.A., and that was really her area of expertise. But then, as the Trump administration's deportation agenda ramps up early last year, she and a whole host of other agents and analysts suddenly get tasked to help with the immigration push, something they had really no experience in.
I was stressed out because I was having to pull analysts off of different teams to... Agents were being assigned to immigration enforcement and pulled away from things like public corruption, cybercrime, white-collar crime, drug trafficking, terrorism, things that under the Biden administration and for decades before had been core priorities of the FBI.
They wanted three times as many people working the command post than we would normally have. And I just had logistical concerns. And when asked, it was, well, we've got to do this for optics. We've got to make a show for the president.
So Jill is already frustrated. And then she gets asked to do something that she feels crosses a red line for her.
A group of protesters had been filming agents. They had a megaphone. They were telling people to stay indoors because ICE was in the area. And later that day, we were asked to run pre-assessment checks.
She's asked to have members of her team run a pre-assessment on protesters, which is essentially the first step toward a criminal investigation. And members of her team had been asked to take a look at a cell phone video that their supervisors claimed showed anti-ICE protesters impeding an arrest.
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Chapter 5: What concerns did FBI employees express about Patel's leadership style?
And the next afternoon, she was placed on administrative leave.
I'm a pretty stoic person. I can handle a lot, and it's part of what's made me successful in my job over the past 24 years. But at that moment, I had tears in my eyes.
Then there's going to be an internal investigation of this whole field report and why it was withdrew. The FBI's inspection division contacted me. She's interviewed twice.
So a polygraph's never pleasant.
They polygraph her. And then she gets called in to discuss her options. And she asks, well, what did this review find? And she's told that the review found no misconduct, not by her or anything related to the report.
And so I asked, well, if that's the case, why can't I return to my previous position?
So then she says, well, OK, if the refuse found that I did nothing wrong, can I have my job back? Right. And then they say, well, you're a senior executive, and so your position is at the discretion of the director, meaning of Patel. And then she's told, no, she cannot have her job back. She's going to be transferred somewhere else to another field office. She's going to be demoted.
Ultimately, I decided to leave. And so she left the agency. Taking with her a whole career's worth of experience, this is someone at a very high level who had spent her entire work life at the FBI.
To so casually discard such people as if they were like a used up tissue, you know, with no consideration for what the organization would be losing. It is careless in a way that is... not fitting with the level of trust and responsibility of the leadership positions in the FBI.
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