Kash Patel accused of directing purge at FBI before he’s even confirmed to lead it

WASHINGTON: The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday accused Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI director, of improperly directing a wave of firings at the bureau before being confirmed.
In a letter to the Justice Department’s inspector general, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois cited “highly credible information from multiple sources” that suggested Patel had been personally involved in covertly orchestrating a purge of career officials at the FBI.
“This alleged misconduct is beyond the pale and must be investigated immediately,” Durbin wrote to the independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz.
The accusation comes as the committee prepares to vote Thursday on whether to send Patel’s nomination to the Senate floor. Durbin said that if the allegations were true, then the acting No. 2 at the Justice Department, Emil Bove, fired career civil servants “solely at the behest of a private citizen,” and also that Patel “may have perjured himself” at his confirmation hearing last month.
Representatives for the Justice Department, the White House and Patel did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Durbin sent the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, on Tuesday. He is expected to deliver a speech on the Senate floor about the matter.
In his letter, Durbin recounted a meeting between Bove, who has helped spearhead mass firings of Justice Department prosecutors, and FBI leadership. Bove supposedly told bureau officials that Stephen Miller, a White House aide, was pressuring him on Patel’s behalf to move more quickly in firing senior career officials at the bureau.
Durbin cited verbal accounts from “multiple sources” and quoted what he described as contemporaneous meeting notes as further corroboration. Durbin’s letter said the notes read: “KP wants movement at FBI, reciprocal actions for DOJ.”
Durbin did not identify his sources, but from the context, they did not appear to be direct witnesses to interactions involving Patel or Miller, but rather people at the FBI who heard, or perhaps heard about, what Bove had supposedly said.
In Senate testimony last month, Patel said he was “not aware” of any Trump administration plans to fire FBI officials associated with investigations into Trump. Patel also told the senators, “I don’t know what’s going on right now over there.”
But as a further reason to question Patel’s testimony, Durbin said members of a newly established group of Trump political appointees at the FBI have kept Patel informed. Each member of that group, known as the FBI director’s advisory team, Durbin said, had told one or more FBI officials before Patel’s confirmation hearing on January 30 that they had been in direct contact with him.
The referral to Horowitz comes after Trump summarily fired 17 inspectors general across the executive branch. Horowitz has so far been spared, intensifying the stakes of opening any investigation.
A series of reassignments, forced transfers and ousters across the Justice Department — including firing all prosecutors who had worked on the two criminal cases against Trump — prompted lawmakers to press Patel during his hearing about whether the FBI would be subject to a similar shake-up.
Hours after Patel’s testimony, word began to emerge that about half a dozen of the FBI’s most senior leaders had been told they would be fired within days if they did not retire or resign. A day later, an all-staff memo to the FBI said that Bove had demanded their ouster, along with the names of all agents who helped investigate events related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Bove had served as one of Trump’s criminal defense lawyers before Trump made him the acting deputy attorney general, putting him in the unusual position of overseeing prosecutors he had just opposed in court.
Durbin recounted what he described as two meetings on the day before Patel’s testimony.
On January 29, the acting leaders of the FBI, Brian Driscoll and Robert C. Kissane, convened a meeting at which they warned that “a lot of names were people in the crosshairs” and that a group of top career supervisors must retire or be fired, it said.
That meeting had been prompted, the letter said, by one earlier that day between the top FBI officials and Trump administration appointees at the Justice Department.
At that earlier meeting, Durbin said in his letter, Bove had revealed who was orchestrating the push, informing the FBI leaders that he had “received multiple calls from Stephen Miller the night before. Miller was pressuring him because Patel wanted the FBI to remove targeted employees faster as DOJ had already done with prosecutors,” according to the letter.
The contemporaneous notes cited by Durbin as corroboration appear to be from this earlier meeting.
Driscoll and Kissane apparently resisted Bove’s demands, leading him to instruct them two days later to tell senior leaders that they faced termination, and to demand they turn over a list of all agents and analysts who participated in the investigations related to the riot. Driscoll revealed that demand in the memo to FBI employees later that day.
Bove, in his own memo to the bureau workforce on February 5, accused the FBI leaders of “insubordination,” saying he had broadened his request after Driscoll and Kissane “refused to comply” with multiple requests to help him identify the “core team” of investigators in Washington.
Durbin warned of the potentially deleterious effects of mass dismissals and reassignments across the bureau.
“The leadership and experience vacuum created by these actions has greatly weakened the FBI’s ability to protect the country from numerous national security threats and has made Americans less safe,” he said.