FBI Agents in Coup to Oust Keystone Kash and ‘Clown’ Bongino
Active-duty FBI agents helped put together a blistering report on bureau leadership.
A confidential and highly embarrassing report has leaked, revealing deep divisions within the FBI, even as the Trump administration insists that Director Kash Patel’s position is not in jeopardy.
The FBI’s deputy director dismissed the internal evaluation of the bureau’s leadership on Monday, calling it simply the work of disgruntled employees.
Deputy Director Dan Bongino stated on Monday that “a lot of people are very unhappy with the changes and reforms we’ve implemented at the FBI. They would do anything to go back to the old ways of working.”
He accused them of leaking “nonsense and gossip to the media and journalists with a very specific agenda.”
But the report paints a grim picture of the FBI’s internal workings and the performance of its current leaders.
This 115-page report was prepared by a group of active and retired agents and analysts for the House and Senate Judiciary Committees to assess Patel’s performance during his first six months in office.
The scathing evaluation described Patel’s FBI as “depressing,” “mentally unstable,” and “adrift,” concluding that the director was “in a desperate situation.”
The report also contained an absurd remark referring to Bongino as a “clown.”
The report, initially leaked to the New York Post, spread like wildfire, triggering a flurry of inflammatory headlines in numerous publications and fueling the debate: Was the inexperienced FBI director hurting the Trump administration and the president instead of helping them?
An anecdote, from a source with decades of experience at the FBI, claimed that Patel refused to disembark a plane until he was wearing the FBI tactical vest while agents were investigating the shooting death of Charlie Kirk.
Eventually, Patel borrowed a vest from a female agent.
After complaining about the missing openings in his vest, the agents removed patches to cover the missing Velcro sections, according to the report.
While the report documented a series of incidents and criticisms of Patel and Bongino, it also contained a direct message to management and recommendations.
The report urged them to listen to their employees and suggested redistributing the Bureau’s employee relations surveys.
But Bongino’s defensive reaction hinted at a very different outcome.
He wrote on X: “Judge the results. I work for you, not for headlines.” “Thank you for your support during my tenure at the FBI; I sincerely appreciate it.”
The timing of the report’s leak also raised further questions about its original purpose.
Last week, President Donald Trump insisted that Patel was doing a good job, and the White House denied that the president had considered firing him.
This statement followed an MSNOW report indicating that the president and his top advisers were exasperated by the negative headlines surrounding the FBI director.
While the leaked report, written by current and former agents, was highly critical of the FBI’s current leadership, it also contained criticism of its predecessors.
The report further suggested that a so-called “Trump syndrome” persists among “left-wing factions” within the FBI, and that employees “openly express their contempt” for the president.
