In a stinging editorial piece, the New York Times criticized FBI director Kash Patel for making the agency an “instrument of Mr Trump’s political will”. It said that Patel’s main qualification is his unquestioning fealty to President Donald Trump and so on expected lines, Patel has assigned agents to pursue long-running MAGA grievances. And one of them is to prove that China had some role to play in manipulating the 2020 election. Patel faced intense scrutiny about his private life, his flying with an official jet to meet his girlfriend, his spending time at sporting events etc. He has also been accused of failing to publish the Epstein Files. The NYT noted that Kash Patel, before taking office, called the FBI an existential threat and its employees political jackals. People whom Kash Patel scapegoated are the agents that he now oversees, damaging the bureau’s morale and its effectiveness, the editorial said.It said Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, singled out agents who worked on the prosecution of the Jan 6 rioters and then fired them, or transferred them or pushed them to resign. For example, the FBI transferred Spencer Evans, who ran the FBI’s field office in Las Vegas, after Trump allies accused him of denying religious exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccine within the bureau, the NYT editorial said. “The resulting loss of expertise and experience is chilling. The bureau today has fewer people with the skills to prevent crime, political corruption and foreign espionage,” it said.

‘Poorly thought out hit piece’

Deputy FBI director Dan Bongino reacted to the piece and called it a poorly thought-out hit piece. “This NY Times article is precisely why hard-working Americans simply do not trust the media,” Bongino wrote on X Saturday. “The article is a poorly thought out hit piece which attempts to address the dramatic personnel changes we’ve made, along with the enterprise-wide reorganization Director Patel and I have undertaken.”Bongino provided a snippet of data points proving what they did for the betterment of the agency and said Patel and he have reformed the FBI aggressively.