FBI Director Kash Patel has spent much of his first year in office battling a string of insider accusations that he has jeopardized criminal probes with his inexperience, misused an FBI jet for joyriding and has run a “rudderless ship” as head of the bureau.
In key moments when he has faced public glare, Patel has chosen to fire sets of FBI agents and staff, an MS NOW analysis found.
The result has often been the regeneration of headlines. This time, however, they have been about the firings themselves, which Patel’s critics say appears designed to ingratiate him with President Donald Trump.
MS NOW found that in four key instances, Patel’s decision to fire FBI agents and staff came within hours or days of unflattering accounts emerging about him and his competency to run the FBI. The serial purges that followed, according to the FBI Agents Association, were unjustified, illegal and weakened the bureau, which has long been considered the world’s premier law enforcement agency.
“You know he has a trend, when he gets jammed up on something he literally fires people right after,” former FBI agent and MS NOW contributor Rob D’Amico said.
FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said firings are based on internal investigations and findings.
“When individuals are found to have acted unethically or undermined the mission, this FBI fires them,” Williamson said. “Period.”
The most recent example came last month after a series of stories broke from Feb. 19 to Feb. 22 about Patel’s use of an FBI jet to travel to the Winter. Olympics, where he attended the Team USA men’s ice hockey games. Videos surfaced of him guzzling beer and chanting with the team in the locker room, despite Patel’s spokesperson describing his visit as a business trip.
According to two people familiar with the president’s thoughts on the matter, Trump was displeased with these public reports, but primarily by the video of Patel drinking on what was supposed to be a business trip to inspect Olympics security.
“You know he has a trend, when he gets jammed up on something he literally fires people right after.”
Former FBI agent Rob D’Amico
NBC reported that Trump spoke directly to Patel to share his displeasure with him partying with the hockey players after flying to Italy on a government jet.
A day later, on Feb. 25, Patel ordered the firing of at least 10 FBI agents and staff who participated in the investigation of Trump concealing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club after he left the presidency. Two more FBI staff were notified they were fired the following day, on Feb. 26.
With these terminations, Patel targeted an elite FBI counter-espionage unit that investigates mishandling of classified records, but also has an expertise in combatting threats from Middle Eastern adversaries, particularly Iran.
Patel’s order weakening this team came days before Trump launched a bombing strike on Iran in coordination with Israel.
But a similar pattern has played out several times when fresh accounts have raised questions about Patel’s conduct and ability to lead the bureau, MS NOW found. Inside the FBI, staff and agents have been tracking this pattern and growing concerned that Patel is jeopardizing the FBI’s mission as a byproduct of trying to eliminate his bad press and shore up support with Trump, according to multiple FBI sources who spoke to MSNOW.
“The FBI workforce is very intelligent and their job is to put together connected events,” D’Amico said. “They have noticed. They see it for what it is, actions of a selfish and insecure person.”
Under fire — and then fired
UNDER FIRE: In mid-September 2025, Patel faced a string of media reports about a lawsuit claiming he knowingly broke the law when he fired three top FBI officials, including former acting director Brian Driscoll. According to the suit, Patel stated he had to fire them for political reasons and to please the White House.
FIRED: Within a week, Patel ordered the firing of 10 FBI agents who were pictured five years earlier taking a knee to show solidarity with people protesting the police killing of George Floyd.
Internal reviews by the FBI and Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General had concluded the FBI agents taking a knee violated no policy and acted properly to de-escalate a volatile protest.
UNDER FIRE: In late October 2025, a social media influencer revealed flight records showing Patel took his jet to see his girlfriend, a country music performer, sing the national anthem at an event at Penn State.
FIRED: The day after the news broke, Patel fired a 27-year FBI veteran, Steven Palmer, who headed the Critical Incident Response Group that oversees the FBI jet fleet.
UNDER FIRE: On Jan. 22, 2026, The New York Times published an article quoting numerous former and current FBI employees describing Patel as a unserious leader who had demoralized and weakened the FBI. The same day, former special counsel Jack Smith testified that he had substantial evidence to prove Trump committed serious crimes and was certain he could have convicted Trump if the cases had gone to trial.
FIRED: The next day, Patel ordered the firing of six agents who were based out of the FBI’s Miami field office, as well as a handful of senior agents.
UNDER FIRE: February stories about Patel flying on a government jet to the Olympics in Milan brought white-hot spotlight to Patel’s use of FBI resources and his justification for a transcontinental flight on the final days of the games. The flight to Italy was conservatively estimated to cost taxpayers at least $100,000 for the flight costs alone, not counting hotel and other trip expenses for Patel and the two pilots, staff and security detail accompanying him. An FBI spokesman told MS NOW that Patel’s purpose was a business trip.
On Feb. 24, a day after a video emerged of Patel partying in the hockey team’s locker room, a new account emerged from a whistleblower, who said Patel’s use of the director’s jet for a personal trip to Florida in December and his confusing orders delayed an elite FBI evidence team from reaching the scene of a mass shooting at Brown University on Dec. 13. The Quantico-based agents, lacking a government plane, instead had to drive through the night from Virginia to Rhode Island to arrive at the scene the next morning, according to the whistleblower’s account. The whistleblower shared their account with Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., a ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who then asked the Justice Department’s Inspector General and Government Accountability Office to investigate whether Patel’s use of FBI resources was compromising the FBI’s critical mission.
FIRED: On Feb. 25, Patel ordered the firing of at least 10 FBI agents and support staff who had worked on the investigation examining Trump’s withholding of classified records. The next day, the FBI notified two additional FBI staff involved on the same team that they no longer had jobs.
Steering headlines
After this public misstep, Patel also attempted to steer headlines to bolster his preferred narrative of inheriting a weaponized law enforcement agency. The firings of agents and staff in late February came on the same day as a Reuters story in which Patel said he discovered that FBI agents subpoenaed phone records for both him and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles in 2022 and 2023, when they were private citizens.
Known as toll records, such phone metadata is routinely gathered by federal investigators. They would have shown whom Patel and Wiles were calling in periods of time related to the two federal probes of Trump’s withholding of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
The Reuters story also included two FBI officials speaking anonymously, saying the investigators, as part of their probe, improperly recorded a call between Wiles and her attorney, with the attorney’s permission but without Wiles’ knowledge.
“It is outrageous and deeply alarming that the previous FBI leadership secretly subpoenaed my own phone records — along with those of now White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles — using flimsy pretexts and burying the entire process in prohibited case files designed to evade all oversight,” Patel said in a statement to Reuters.
But MS NOW has learned that the investigators did not record any call of Wiles and her attorney, according to three people with knowledge of the work of the special counsel teams. An attorney who represented Wiles in the special counsel investigations told MSNOW he also disputes this claim. He contacted a special counsel team representative last week to ask why Patel’s FBI was making this allegation.
“Any suggestion that I consented to, or would even consider, recording Susie Wiles without her knowledge is false,” Wiles’ attorney said in an email to MSNOW.
The most recent February firings also targeted an FBI squad known as CI-12, which investigates global espionage. The squad is a group of experienced agents who have prosecuted or intercepted spies who have sought to steal some of our country’s most closely guarded secrets and share them with foreign adversaries. The squad specializes in spying operations of foreign state actors, including Iran, and some experts have warned losses on that team could limit the FBI’s window into that country.
Agents on the squad have worked on a host of high-profile cases, including the probe of classified information that John Bolton kept at his home, as well as Monica Witt, a Defense Department contractor and Air Force sergeant indicted for espionage in 2019 and accused of sharing classified military secrets to help Iran.
One former law enforcement official who worked with the elite team said he found the loss of such experienced agents “genuinely frightening” for national security, noting that they helped quickly probe and identify foreign counterintelligence threats and later prosecute bad actors’ crimes.
Three days after the firings, as the United States entered “Operation Epic Fury” in Iran, Patel posted on X: “While the military handles force protection overseas, the FBI remains at the forefront of deterring attacks here at home – and will continue to have our team work around the clock to protect Americans.”
The serial purges of veteran staff have roiled the FBI community, and both current and former FBI and Justice Department personnel have flagged the most recent firings as particularly dangerous for America’s national security.
The FBI’s assistant director for counterintelligence, who oversees many of the espionage squad agents who were fired and is one of the senior-most leaders in the FBI, held a meeting with his staff last Thursday. He warned that he didn’t believe he could save anyone’s jobs and that he expected more firings, according to one person briefed on the meeting.
The assistant director, Roman Rozhavsky, said he understood if agents wanted to leave their jobs, but said he feared they would be replaced with agents lacking their years of experience and hoped they would stay to help keep the country safer, the person said.
The FBI’s Williamson disputed the account of the Assistant Director’s comments at his staff meeting.
“This is inaccurate and not what AD Rozhavsky said,” he told MS NOW.
Carol Leonnig is a senior investigative reporter with MS NOW.
Ken Dilanian is the justice and intelligence correspondent for MS NOW.