The NY Times on the NEW Patel FBI….

Things ain’t like the movies or TV……

The Times reports inside info from recent FBI staff that have left the ‘Bureau’….

When President Trump returned to office last year, he declared the Federal Bureau of Investigation a “corrupt” and partisan agency and vowed to clean house. Perhaps that was no surprise. The bureau had investigated him several times.

To run the show, Trump appointed Kash Patel, a former public defender and intelligence official who had never worked for the agency, though he had spun conspiracy theories about it.

Patel immediately began to transform the F.B.I. by undoing its nonpartisan rules and norms, alarming many of its 38,000 employees. He fired people who had worked on the Trump investigations. He assigned 20 percent of the agency’s staff to immigration enforcement, meaning that there are now fewer agents and analysts to stop terrorism, drug trafficking, white-collar crime, public corruption and cybercrime.

One thing that hasn’t changed: Employees still can’t speak to the press without permission. But 45 people who work at the bureau or who left last year talked to my colleagues Emily Bazelon and Rachel Poser anyway — a sign, they say, of how unnerved many people there are.

This new F.B.I., many current and former employees of the agency told them, has made the United States less safe….

Immigration enforcement…

Jet ski diplomacy

Bookkeeping

Camera-ready

There’s much, much more. I urge you to read the whole article.

…

Senior executive 1: I was one of the F.B.I.’s top recruiters. I can’t do that right now. I just got a message from someone I’d talked to about applying, saying, Wow, I got an interview. I had to say, I can no longer recommend that you go work for the F.B.I.

This isn’t my F.B.I. I don’t recognize this F.B.I.

….

image of FBI Director Patel…Kash Patel at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2024. Mark Peterson for The New York Times