You’d think that a dude who was just the centerpiece of a massive New York Times story about how his first year on the job has been “marred by vendettas, mismanagement, and meltdowns” might be engaging in the tiniest bit of self-reflection.
But since that dude is FBI Director Kash Patel, you would be so, so wrong.
Instead, Patel decided to do yet another purge of senior FBI employees for having the gall to investigate President Donald Trump and his supporters for their open, obvious, and well-documented crimes.
FBI Director Kash Patel during his first Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Sept. 16, 2025.
Honestly, it’s sort of a surprise that there was anyone left to purge, but apparently Patel had overlooked several Miami-based agents who played a role in the search for classified documents Trump stashed at Mar-a-Lago. Definitely can’t keep anyone around who was foolish enough to think that laws apply to Trump, right?
Also out are high-ranking agents based in Atlanta and New York. Because the government now operates in secrecy and without accountability, we don’t actually know exactly how many people Patel fired this time around—because the FBI won’t answer any questions about it.
Patel had already telegraphed that he planned more firings, going on Newsmax earlier this month to rail about payments to confidential sources and threatening to fire anyone who authorized payments to help identify Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
It’s not really a surprise that Patel did this not long after former special counsel Jack Smith’s testimony about his investigations into Trump’s crimes, which highlighted the depth and breadth of Smith’s careful work.
Gotta reclaim the narrative somehow, and if you’re Patel, you’re going to think the best way to do it is by firing some more people and showing everyone who is boss.
When it comes to the actual duties of his job, Patel sucks. He’s botched multiple high-profile investigations. Then there was his boasting about having a suspect in custody for the murder of Charlie Kirk, only to have to walk that back a few hours later.
And let’s not forget his dramatic announcement that the FBI had foiled a terrorism plot in Detroit, except that there may not have ever actually been a plot in the first place. And, of course, there was the touting of the capture of a person of interest in the mass shooting at Brown University—a person who turned out to be not connected to the shooting at all.
A cartoon by Mike Luckovich.
He’s diverted actual FBI staff to watch over his girlfriend, the fake country star, and her drunk friends. He does not see running the FBI as warranting much of his attention or as something important enough to even live where his job is located.
The Times piece had a cavalcade of other very on-brand Patel antics, including showing up for major top-secret intelligence conferences with U.S. allies and, instead of going to meetings, watching soccer games, going on helicopter rides, jet skiing, and hanging out with his girlfriend.
With this level of disinterest and incompetence, it's no wonder that Patel keeps resorting to firing people—the one thing he appears to be good at. Well, except for the fact that a bunch of those fired people are already suing Patel because he isn’t smart enough to consistently offer even a fig leaf to justify his purges.
In a normal administration, Patel wouldn’t even be qualified to be an administrative assistant at the FBI, much less run the place. But we live here now.
