For much of the 20th century, there was little question who Americans considered the greatest director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation: J. Edgar Hoover. Really, nobody else was even discussed. Hoover helped to create the FBI from the ground up, and led it for an unprecedented 48 years straight. He revolutionized the field of forensic science, but his real genius was for public relations, creating the image of the heroic “G-Man.” He helped to end the golden age of organized crime in the United States, jailing or killing legendary gangsters like Al Capone and John Dillinger, while his enthusiasm for wire-tapping laid the groundwork for the terrifying systems of mass surveillance that confront Americans today. He was, by most estimates, the most effective law-enforcement agent in U.S. history. Which is why the conventional wisdom is wrong, and the best FBI director is actually Kash Patel.

Director Patel has been all over the news lately, mostly in connection with the word “bestiality,” which is usually not the kind of publicity you want. Last month, CBS News reported that he’d changed the FBI’s recruitment standards, removing a longstanding rule that made “engagement in prostitution or bestiality” an automatic disqualifier for would-be agents. As you might imagine, it was the second part that caught people’s attention. Patel was soon asked to justify himself in a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and had this bizarre exchange with Louisiana’s Senator John N. Kennedy:

KENNEDY: What about the bestiality?

 

PATEL: Same thing, because the regs wrote it up in a fashion before I arrived that addressed prostitution, bestiality, and trafficking. They were there before I got there.

 

KENNEDY: Yes, but tell me what it said before.

 

PATEL: It automatically disqualified any individual who participated on either side of it. Obviously, we are never going to hire the criminal that engaged —

 

KENNEDY: This side of what? The bestiality?

 

PATEL: Yes.

 

KENNEDY: So, you disqualified the animal?

 

PATEL: Well, I don’t think we — we have great canines, but we’re not going to disqualify —

 

KENNEDY: I understand. I’m trying to understand why you did this.

Watching the footage, it’s difficult not to wince. Over and over, Kennedy asks an obtuse question, as if talking to a child in his Foghorn Leghorn accent. (“Not as the animal, but as the human?”) Each time, Patel manages to stick a foot (paw?) in his mouth. Eventually, the FBI director manages to get his reasoning out: that it’s possible someone could be sexually trafficked and forced to engage in “degrading acts of all kind” with animals, and have that come up in their background check, but still want to become an FBI agent in some kind of cinematic comeback story. “At this FBI, we are not going to criminalize and prevent victims from serving the United States of America,” he says.

Which would, actually, be fair enough, although the odds of that exact sequence of events playing out seem extraordinarily low. But as Senator Dick Durbin pointed out, the language of Patel’s rule change applies to “applicants who have been engaged in bestiality, not victims of bestiality,” leaving the whole issue unresolved—and just plain weird.

(Ironically enough, two places where there have been documented cases of forced bestiality were in the prison cells of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and those of the Israeli IDF today, where prisoners have reported that trained dogs were used to sexually assault them as a form of torture and humiliation. But then, the U.S. government gave its support to both of those regimes, and the FBI’s website boasts of its “strong partnerships” with Israeli police. So presumably that’s not what Patel meant.)

In any case, the question of whether the FBI should hire Special Agent Mr. Hands is only one of several bizarre scandals and blunders that Director Patel is tied up in. Or, as Felix Biederman of Chapo Trap House sarcastically put it: “To people with no background in law enforcement, it may seem like Kash Patel’s FBI is fucking up every single high profile case that comes their way. In reality, criminals fear Kash so much that only the most skilled ones are now committing crimes, thus skewing perceptions.”

There was the investigation into the kidnapping of news anchor Savannah Guthrie’s mother Nancy, where Patel’s FBI was blocked from examining the crime scene by the local sheriff’s office, who reportedly “ignored blood found on the missing 84-year-old’s porch[...] thinking it was unrelated to the case.” In the hunt for Charlie Kirk’s shooter, Patel initially announced that the killer was in custody, only to backtrack two hours later and say that, actually, that wasn’t the guy after all. (Oops.) Similarly, Patel announced last October that “the FBI thwarted a potential terrorist attack and arrested multiple subjects in Michigan” before any of the details were confirmed, “including whether the attack actually was imminent,” according to sources within the FBI who were “frustrated” by his jumping the gun.

A common theme in these Inspector Clouseau-style incidents is Patel prioritizing attention from the media over, you know, actually doing any investigative work. Another is that solving crimes—like waging wars—is one field where the usual Trumpian tactic of just asserting your own version of events, over and over, won’t work. At some point you’re confronted by physical reality: you have either opened the Strait of Hormuz or you haven’t, caught the perpetrator of a crime or not.

But then, if you put a podcaster in charge of your security services, what do you expect? The whole Trump administration is staffed by people who have no business being in their roles, from Fox News’ Pete Hegseth as Secretary of War to the WWF’s Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education. Really, it’s a miracle Grimace from McDonald’s didn’t get a cabinet position. But Kash Patel might be the least qualified of the lot. Before 2025 he had never been an FBI agent, and had never led a law-enforcement organization of any kind. He has worked as a prosecutor, though only for about three years. But from 2021 to 2023, his main job was hosting a podcast called Kash’s Corner for the Falun Gong-affiliated newspaper the Epoch Times. There, he talked constantly about how the FBI and other federal agencies were supposedly mistreating Donald Trump and the January 6 rioters; the show’s final episode is titled “Trump’s 3rd Indictment and the Criminalization of Thought and Free Speech,” which gives a sense of the tone. Like a lot of Trump’s new hires in 2025, it’s pretty clear Patel was selected not despite his lack of experience, but because of it, with personal loyalty to Trump being the only credential that mattered.

Patel on a 2025 episode of the Joe Rogan Experience

As a result, Kash has been actively dismantling the FBI in a way that leftist anti-police activists could only dream of. According to the New York Times, one of his first actions in office was to purge the agency of employees who had been involved in investigating Trump’s many, many alleged crimes, along with anyone who’d been photographed taking a knee for George Floyd during the 2020 protests. Sources within the agency also say that Patel has been “freely using polygraph tests to tamp down on news leaks,” including about FBI misconduct, leading to more firings. (This, despite the fact that polygraph lie-detection basically does not work and is not admissible as evidence in court.) And last November, a 16-year veteran of the agency named David Maltinsky filed a lawsuit claiming Patel had fired him simply for displaying an LGBTQ flag on his desk, which Patel called an “inappropriate display of political signage in your work area.” (The FBI has yet to comment on the case.) Today, PBS reports there has been a “wave of resignations” from the FBI “prompted in part by concerns over the Trump administration's politicization of the department,” leaving them short-staffed—which may explain the loosening of recruitment standards that prompted the whole bestiality discussion in the first place.

Those employees who remain at the Bureau risk being press-ganged into fighting Kash’s internet feuds for him. According to Newsweek, when Patel became the subject of mockery from an anonymous Twitter account called—and please forgive the slur here—“@ifindretards,” he wanted the FBI’s assistant director for public affairs to reply with boasts about the FBI’s performance. This was too much for the hapless director, one Benjamin Douglas Williamson, as seen in this text exchange:

PATEL: What I asked you and your team to do is find them, and post our record year results back at them all, continuously[...]

 

WILLIAMSON: Yes. We’re not responding to “ifindretards.” That would look bad on you.

Indeed. Keep in mind, folks, all of the above is being paid for with your tax dollars, with Patel drawing a salary of $228,000 per year. Aren’t you proud?

Patel’s extracurricular activities have been a never-ending source of embarrassment for the Bureau. In his Kash’s Corner days, one of his favorite subjects to rant about was the supposed misappropriation of taxpayer dollars by agents of the “deep state,” especially his predecessor at the FBI: “I’m just saying Chris Wray doesn’t need a government funded G5 jet to go to vacations. Maybe we ground that plane.” Now that he’s in Wray’s position, though, things are different. According to reporting in the New Republic, Patel used a $60 million private jet registered to the FBI “to visit his [then-26-year-old] girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, at a wrestling event at Penn State” last year. This is the behavior you’d expect from a teenager borrowing the family car without permission, not a 46-year-old in charge of a federal agency; when the story came out, Patel responded by making a long tweet declaring that Wilkins is a “rock-solid conservative and a country music sensation,” and then pulling the jet’s listing from the tracking website FlightAware. He also fired Steven Palmer, the FBI official responsible for keeping track of the agency’s aircraft fleet, reducing the agency’s head count once again. (Again, cue Biederman: “Last I checked, the crime scene will still BE THERE once Director Patel returns from the Five Finger Death Punch Couples Cruise next month.”)

At the moment, Patel is suing the Atlantic for $250 million—not for the magazine’s general poor quality, where he might have a case, but for reporting on his alleged drinking habits. According to staff writer Sarah Fitzpatrick, who cites several anonymous sources, Patel has had “episodes of excessive drinking” throughout his brief tenure as FBI director:

Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.

 

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

 

Some of Patel’s colleagues at the FBI worry that his personal behavior has become a threat to public safety.

Patel himself insists that all of this is completely false, hence the lawsuit. But in subsequent months, investigative journalists at MS NOW have reported that the FBI is investigating Fitzpatrick, including her “phone, metadata, and social media contacts,” in what looks like retaliation for her reporting. And Patel’s image problem also isn’t helped by footage of him chugging beers with Team USA hockey players at the Olympics in Italy… where, once again, he traveled by government jet, leaving those boring American crime investigations behind.

But really, Patel’s alleged alcohol problems are not the most worrying thing about him. His blatant conflicts of interest are. In the first place, his former employer was the Epoch Times, where the former Chief Financial Officer recently pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy and money-laundering charges. If that came up on the background check of an entry-level recruit, and not the Trump-aligned director of the FBI, it would likely raise some eyebrows. Certainly, we can’t count on Patel’s FBI to investigate anything surrounding the newspaper or Falun Gong, the anti-communist Chinese religious group behind it, which has been sued for using forced child labor in its “Shen Yun” dance performances. Patel also refuses to divest himself from “between $1 million and $5 million” in stock from the Chinese fast-fashion company Shein, which he reportedly received “in exchange for consulting services.” (What kind of “consulting” Patel, who has no background in fashion or e-commerce, would have done is unclear.) So don’t expect the FBI to go looking into the allegations of labor abuses in Shein’s supply chain any time soon, either.

The most recent banana peel, in a seemingly never-ending series of them in Patel’s path, was a massive cyberattack carried out by a group called ShinyHunters this week. As 404 Media reports, the hackers claim to have breached the Bureau’s defenses and accessed personal information on “nearly all” of its employees, including “names, home addresses, phone numbers, and information on their spouses.” The extent of the hack is currently unconfirmed, but the agency’s recruitment website was down as of Wednesday, and it wouldn’t be the first successful breach; according to the Independent, “a pro-Iranian hacking group claimed to breach an account belonging to Patel, publishing old photographs, a resume, and personal documents online” back in march. So it seems cybersecurity is not exactly a strong point these days, either.

To sum up: Kash Patel is allegedly drunk, arguably corrupt, and definitely a buffoon. He has hit the Federal Bureau of Investigation like a piece of high-speed demolition equipment, transforming a more-or-less competently run agency of professionals into a short-staffed media circus, where people watch their words to avoid offending Donald Trump and argue about bestiality on the Senate floor. If you believe the FBI is an important public service that helps keep Americans safe, his leadership would be an abject disaster.

The thing is, there’s no reason to believe that. This is the FBI we’re talking about here: the agency that tried to blackmail the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and convince him to kill himself, back in 1964. The agency that succeeded in assassinating Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in his bed in 1969. The agency that supplied the explosives for the MOVE bombings in 1985, when Philadelphia police ended a standoff with Black radicals by simply blowing up two city blocks, killing five children in the process. The agency that refused to investigate when a pipe bomb exploded under the car seat of ecological activist Judi Bari in 1990, and instead accused Bari of placing it there herself. The agency that, during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, paid a man with a violent felony record to infiltrate and sabotage activist groups. You get the idea.

At best, the FBI has always had a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence: one day they might help to solve a kidnapping or prevent a terror attack, but the next day, they’ll turn around and inflict racist terror on Black and Indigenous people working for their liberation. Or they’ll create a terrorist attack, grooming some mentally disturbed young person over the internet, so they can “stop” it. (Just read up about the Newburgh Four terrorism case some time: as a federal judge ruled, an FBI informant entrapped a petty drug dealer who would never otherwise have committed any terrorism, and encouraged him to “make a plan, pick a target, find recruits[...] procure guns, and conduct surveillance,” constructing an entire terror plot for him. And how many similar cases are there that never came to light?) So it’s not just that Kash Patel is a bad FBI director; it’s that “FBI director” is a bad thing to be.

And that’s before the second Trump administration came to town. Ever since Trump returned to office in 2025, he and Patel have been hard at work turning the FBI—like the rest of the federal government—into a political instrument for enforcing Trump’s far-right policy agenda. Right now, the agency is operating under the dictates of NSPM-7, Trump’s presidential order to treat political dissent—including “extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality,” otherwise known as anyone who’s not a conservative—as equivalent to domestic terrorism.

Already, we know the FBI has been using facial recognition technology to identify people who protest ICE, and has been using Israeli spy software to “secretly extract data” from the phones of protesters who get arrested. According to recent reporting, “Nearly half of FBI agents in major offices” have been reassigned to immigration-related duties, as have “Nearly a quarter of the FBI’s roughly 13,000 agents” overall. If ICE are the stormtroopers, the FBI are serving as the secret police, all to advance Donald Trump’s agenda of “mass deportation now” and suppress any opposition.

So with all that in mind, why on Earth would we want the FBI to function well? By keeping the agency tied up in scandal after scandal, slashing its headcount, and changing its public image from “relentless G-men” to “possibly a little too interested in dogs,” Kash Patel is doing a useful service. When the president is a would-be despot, it’s a good thing if the secret police are effectively run by Mr. Bean.

Right now, there are rumors that Patel is on the hot seat in terms of his employment, and may soon be fired. We should hope that they’re false, because if he goes, someone actually competent might get appointed to fill the vacancy. We’ve already seen that pattern play out with the Department of Homeland Security, where avowed dog-killer Kristi Noem was ousted and replaced with non-consensual nose-picking enthusiast Markwayne Mullin. Since that happened, Mullin’s strategy of “keeping ICE out of the headlines” has paid off: media attention to its activities has faded, while raids, arrests, and killings have ramped up.

For those of us who aren’t currently in the FBI’s crosshairs, Kash Patel is a wonderful source of entertainment, like a character from South Park come to life. But if the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover still lingers in Washington, D.C., he’s probably shrieking and tearing his spectral hair out every time his successor appears on the news. Good. That’s exactly what makes Patel the best FBI director we could ask for right now.