For more than a century, the FBI has been many things: feared, flawed, ruthless, occasionally unhinged. But it was never unserious. Not until Kash Patel arrived.
Patel hasn’t merely lowered the tone of the FBI; he’s dragged it into reality-television territory. What used to be one of America’s most formidable institutions now resembles a cross between a poorly-scripted Netflix drama and a livestream meltdown. The new 115-page dossier written by current and former agents reads less like a professional assessment and more like a warning label: “Do not let this man near anything that requires dignity, judgment, or adult supervision.”
After reading the details, you can see why.
Let’s start with the tantrum, surrounding the raid jacket. According to the report, Patel refused to get off his plane after Charlie Kirk’s assassination because he didn’t have an FBI jacket with him and was worried about “optics.” Optics. Even Hoover, who may or may not have enjoyed cross-dressing, never melted down over something as trivial as Velcro. Not while he was on the clock, anyway.
Agents scrambled across the state to find him a medium-sized jacket. The only one available belonged to a female agent. Patel reportedly erupted when he noticed two sleeve patches missing, and still refused to step outside. And here’s the part that would be funny if it weren’t so embarrassing: SWAT operators had to take patches off their own uniforms and hand-deliver them to the plane just to coax the director out.
Then there’s the country singer girlfriend saga—the jet trips, the taxpayer-funded security details, the elite SWAT teams reassigned to shadow her across NRA events like overqualified mall cops. The man’s supposed to be leading the most powerful investigative agency in the Western world, not providing tactical babysitting for his 27-year-old partner’s music career.
This is the same Kash Patel who spent years bouncing between conspiracy talk shows, motioning gravely about the “Deep State” while sounding like someone who had binged too much Alex Jones and didn’t sleep enough. A man who wrote children’s books anointing Trump as a monarch, who bowed and scraped like a palace lackey.
Agents described him as insecure, confused, inexperienced, obsessed with attention, and prone to claiming credit for other people’s work. His deputy, Dan Bongino, didn’t escape either—agents called him a clown who never should’ve been hired. One even quoted Bongino telling staff, “The truth is for chumps.” Imagine hearing that from leadership at the FBI, an institution built on the premise that facts matter.
Under Patel, agents report learning about internal operations through his and Bongino’s social media posts, as if the FBI were run through influencers now, instead of a chain of command. The line between federal law enforcement and digital content creation has vanished entirely. It’s humiliating, reckless and dangerous.
He botched public statements in the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, announcing a suspect “in custody” when there wasn’t one. He then quietly reversed himself hours later, not from the command center, but from Rao’s in New York while enjoying dinner. An FBI director who can’t tell the difference between verified intel and wishful thinking shouldn’t be in charge of a lemonade stand, let alone the nation’s top law-enforcement agency.
And yet the White House insists he’s “restoring integrity.” Integrity. This, from the man demanding wardrobe adjustments on the tarmac and deploying elite operators to walk his girlfriend to industry events.
There comes a point where the humiliation becomes too much. A point where a grown man looks in the mirror and realizes he’s become a punchline. Patel is past that point. He’s turned the FBI, once feared and respected, into a traveling circus with federal credentials. The agents know it. His allies know it. The country can see it.