New FBI Whistleblower Report on Kash Patel’s FBI Echoes Months of Complaints

A scathing, new and anonymously authored report that purports to be from current and former FBI employees about the law enforcement agency’s leadership under the Trump administration echoes the concerns that agents have been quietly sharing for months.

FBI Director Kash Patel and the bureau’s deputy director, Dan Bongino, are described as selfish amateurs, more focused on boosting their social media presence than being responsible leaders. Their push against diversity, equity and inclusion policies are lauded in the report but overshadowed by concerns over the sharp shift in resources toward backing up Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation raids. And agents are still reeling over Patel’s willingness to go along with the Trump White House’s punishment of agents who investigated Jan. 6, 2021, rioters.

The 115-page report, which claims to be from “a national alliance of retired and active-duty FBI special agents and analysts,” is littered with details that reflect poorly on Patel. The fact that it was first obtained by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine — who spoke about it Monday night on Fox News — is fueling speculation that President Donald Trump is souring on his pick for FBI director.

“This is not a deep state cabal,” Devine told Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “I know these people. They’re patriots, and they only have the best interest of the FBI in mind.”

Bongino lashed out at the Post columnist on social media Monday night, saying that “deep-state Devine strikes again.” But by taking to X to fire back, the deputy director did exactly what the report criticized him for.

One source who’s in constant contact with current FBI agents told NOTUS that the report’s curious placement in conservative media that Trump watches closely means it’s “knives out for Kash” at the White House.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, dismissed any notion of a rift and called Patel “a critical member of the president’s team.” She also pointed to press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s assertion last week that there’s no plan to replace the FBI director.

The FBI did not respond to questions from NOTUS, including about whether Patel or Bongino had read the report.

It’s still an open question whether the report’s intended recipients — the Republican-controlled House and Senate judiciary committees — will take it seriously. Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. Jim Jordan, the committees’ chairs, have both focused on the Biden administration rather than anything that touches the president.

Pamela Keith, an attorney who represents several FBI employees worried about retaliation, said agents feel distracted and demoralized. She described a kind of Faustian bargain in which agents got the conservative revamp some had hoped for — but at a high cost.

“There is a component that’s particularly happy about not having to walk on egg shells with DEI, misogyny and racism. But it has been replaced by this completely choking fear of the kind of random, unpredictable, unjustified personal and frontline abuse of power,” she said.

The tradeoff means that “everybody is walking on thin ice,” she said, describing how merit has taken a back seat to “personal preference and perception of loyalty.”

Although the report’s anonymous nature makes it impossible to substantiate, NOTUS spoke to more than a dozen former FBI agents and lawyers representing current agency personnel who have described similar concerns for months.

For example, one attorney described an internal letter written by an FBI special agent to their supervisors in the late summer that warned about the heavy cost of having agents interrupt long-standing investigations to be reassigned to go on ICE raids — and how this person felt that they had abandoned confidential sources they’d carefully cultivated for years.

The anonymous group behind this latest report put out two previous documents that criticized policies under the Biden administration. One in October 2023 complained that “the FBI is no longer hiring the best and the brightest candidates” due to DEI mandates, and another in July 2024 claimed that local cops weren’t trusting the FBI because of a perception that the federal law enforcement agency had become politicized. Those reports fueled existing criticism from conservative members of Congress but none of those members have weighed in on the latest iteration.

The report quotes a person dubbed “ALPHA 99” who “served in the FBI for multiple decades” and relayed an embarrassing story about Patel’s personal behavior when the director insisted on flying out to Provo, Utah, to oversee the investigation into the assassination of conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk in September.

The FBI insider claimed Patel “would not disembark from the plane without an FBI raid jacket” when he arrived — opting instead to interrupt the busy FBI special agents and support teams to track down a medium-sized jacket that would give him the proper fit. ALPHA 99 claimed that Patel eventually grabbed a female agent’s jacket, but then insisted on covering up the empty Velcro shoulder panels with official patches, which he ultimately grabbed from a SWAT team member willing to travel to the airport to deliver them.

Democrats jumped on the opportunity to criticize Patel on Tuesday.

“This stark assessment of the damage Kash Patel has done to the nation’s leading law enforcement agency cries out for one — just one — Republican Senator to break the ranks of silence and demand that Kash Patel be held accountable for his mismanagement of the FBI. America deserves better than this self-absorbed FBI Director fussing over his wardrobe in the midst of a national crisis,” the Senate Judiciary Committee’s ranking member, Dick Durbin, said in a statement.

While the public report is at times highly critical of the leaders Trump selected to run the FBI, its overall assessment is a mixed bag showing that some agents welcome Patel’s undoing of liberal policies slowly implemented at the bureau over the past decade-plus — but not with an overcorrection that threatens the FBI’s storied professionalism.

One recently retired division-level official dubbed “ALPHA 95” agreed with the Trump administration’s decision to paint over a mural at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, that mentioned “diversity” — an image that went viral in January. But that same person also relayed how Patel allegedly subjected dozens of FBI employees to “punitive” polygraph lie-detector tests when he learned that they had engaged in a casual discussion over whether it was proper for Patel to insist on being issued an FBI firearm.

“ALPHA 65,” described as a one-time FBI intelligence analyst, claimed that employee morale has plummeted, in part, because Patel and Bongino spend so much time posting on social media even as “employees rarely hear directly from them in a transparent manner to explain why certain things are being changed or why the FBI is taking a different direction.” This person claimed that “co-workers hear more news about the FBI’s mission and operations from news sources and from tweets posted on social media by FBI Director Kash Patel and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino.”

“Anonymous sources from the Wray-Comey era FBI are desperately trying to derail our reforms,” Bongino responded on X. “We are not turning back. Kash and I are laser-focused on keeping the Homeland safe, and on crushing violent crime.”

Meanwhile, several anonymous special agents warned about the notable shift in FBI resources as a backup to ICE agents on deportation raids, with one warning that the diversion has “caused other work to pile up” and a second person cautioning that “the FBI’s positive reputation in the community will suffer because of the FBI’s complicity in executing of mass warrant-less raids.”