When
Kash Patel is under fire, FBI agents and staff get fired
An MS NOW analysis finds
the FBI director often lashes out after his own bad press — by firing
experienced agents and staffers.
MS NOW
EXCLUSIVE: FBI agents concerned Kash Patel is purging staff to distract from
his bad pressMarch 3, 2026 / 07:41
Mar. 4, 2026,
4:00 PM EST
By Carol
Leonnig and Ken
Dilanian
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
Play
Federal
lawsuit alleges FBI Director Kash Patel knowingly broke the law with FBI
firingsMarch 3, 2026 / 07:41
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.
Play
FBI
Director Kash Patel throws temper tantrum after news reports of his private jet
useMarch 3, 2026 / 07:41
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.
Play
Exclusive:
Patel ousts senior FBI agents linked to Trump probesMarch 3, 2026 / 07:41
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.
Play
‘Hypocrite’:
Kash Patel fires agents with Iran expertise in an act of political retributionMarch 3, 2026 / 07:41
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.
Recommended
News
Kash Patel ordered FBI detail to give girlfriend’s pal a
lift home: sources
News
Patel ousts senior FBI agents linked to Trump probes, say
sources
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.