TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Today, we're going to talk about FBI director Kash Patel with Marc Fisher, who profiles Patel on the current issue of The New Yorker. It's titled "Kash Patel's Acts Of Service." It's subtitled, "The F.B.I. Director Isn't Just Enforcing The President's Agenda At The Bureau - He's Seeking Retribution For Its Past Investigations Of Donald Trump." Fisher also writes about other controversies surrounding Patel, ranging from whether he's even qualified for the job to his conflicts of interest and how he's transforming the FBI's mission as he focuses on cracking down on undocumented immigrants. Journalist Marc Fisher was a longtime writer and editor at The Washington Post and co-author of the book "Trump Revealed" before becoming a New Yorker contributor. We recorded our interview yesterday morning before both the House and the Senate approved the release of the Epstein files. Start with an excerpt of what Patel had to say about the Epstein files when he testified before the House Judiciary Committee last September. Here he is being questioned by California Democrat Eric Swalwell.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ERIC SWALWELL: You said you don't know the number of times Trump's name appears in the files, so it could at least be 1,000 times, is that right?
KASH PATEL: The number is a total misleading factor.
SWALWELL: But the number would at least be a thousand times.
PATEL: We have not released anyone's...
SWALWELL: But it would at least be a thousand times.
PATEL: ...File that has not been credible. And we have...
SWALWELL: Director, could it at least be a thousand times?
PATEL: ...Released every piece of legally permissible information.
SWALWELL: OK, so...
PATEL: You can characterize the numbers however you want it.
SWALWELL: Reclaiming my time, Director. It sounds like if you don't know the number, it could at least be a thousand times, which leads me...
PATEL: It's not. It's not.
SWALWELL: Is it at least 500 times?
PATEL: No.
SWALWELL: Is it at least a hundred times?
PATEL: No.
SWALWELL: Then what's the number?
PATEL: I don't know the number, but it's not that.
SWALWELL: Do you think it might be your job to know the number?
PATEL: My job is to provide for the safety and security of this country. My job is not to engage in political innuendo...
SWALWELL: And that includes protecting section...
PATEL: ...So you can go out to the sticks and get your 20-second hit in your fundraising article.
SWALWELL: So reclaiming my time, Director...
PATEL: Keep going reclaiming your time because...
SWALWELL: Director...
PATEL: ...The people of California are being...
SWALWELL: If Trump...
PATEL: ...Underserved by your representations.
SWALWELL: The president is not implicated. Why not release everything that involves Trump?
PATEL: We have released everything the president and anyone else's side that is credible and lawfully be able to be released. Your fixation on this matter and baseless accusations that I'm hiding child pedophiles...
SWALWELL: There's also Mr. Massie's...
PATEL: ...Is disgusting.
SWALWELL: ...Interests.
PATEL: Anyone that says that needs to look at the stats alone and go back to the state of California, who's receiving the biggest surge in FBI resources...
SWALWELL: So, Director...
PATEL: ...Through my redeployment because the cities of Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco need it.
SWALWELL: Reclaiming my time, Director. Remembering your oath to tell the truth, did you ever tell Donald Trump his name is in the files?
PATEL: I have never spoken to President Trump about the Epstein files.
SWALWELL: Did you ever tell the attorney general that Donald Trump's name is in the Epstein files?
PATEL: The attorney general and I have had numerous discussions about the entirety of the Epstein files and the reviews conducted by our teams.
SWALWELL: Did you tell the attorney general that Donald Trump's name is in the Epstein files?
PATEL: And we have released where President Trump's name is in the attorney's file.
SWALWELL: It's a simple question. Did you tell the attorney general that the president's name is in the Epstein files?
PATEL: During many conversations that the attorney general and I have had on the matter of Epstein, we have reviewed painstakingly...
SWALWELL: The question is simple.
PATEL: ...Who can...
SWALWELL: Did you tell
PATEL: ...The...
SWALWELL: ...the attorney general that Donald Trump's name is in the Epstein files? Yes or no?
PATEL: Why don't you try spelling it out, if you're going to mock me.
SWALWELL: Yes or no, Director?
PATEL: Use the alphabet.
SWALWELL: Yes or no?
PATEL: No. A, B, C, D, E, F. Don't want to do it.
SWALWELL: Director, it sounds like you don't want to tell us. Did you tell the attorney general that Donald Trump's name was in the Epstein files?
PATEL: Why don't you try serving your...
SWALWELL: Director, did you tell...
PATEL: ...Constituency by focusing on reducing...
SWALWELL: ...The attorney general Donald Trump...
PATEL: ...Violent crime in this country and the number of pedophiles
SWALWELL: Director...
PATEL: ...That are illegally...
SWALWELL: Reclaiming my time, Director.
PATEL: ...Harbored in your sanctuary cities in California.
SWALWELL: Director, reclaiming my time...
PATEL: I'll work with you on that.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Regular order, Mr. Chairman.
PATEL: Do you want to work with us on that?
JIM JORDAN: Time belongs to the gentleman from California.
SWALWELL: Did you tell the attorney general that Donald Trump's name is in the Epstein files?
PATEL: The question has been asked and answered.
SWALWELL: You have not answered it, and we will take your evasiveness as a consciousness of guilt.
GROSS: Mark Fisher, welcome to FRESH AIR. Your profile of Kash Patel was very informative and very interesting. What was your reaction when you first heard Swalwell questioning Kash Patel?
MARC FISHER: Well, this came amid a whole bunch of such confrontations between Patel and both House and Senate members, and it was pretty wild. It was one of the classic ways in which Kash Patel, very much like Donald Trump, values the show above almost all else. And this is one of the reasons Patel is one of Trump's favorites. One of the reasons Patel is in this job is his ability to commandeer the moment, to put on a big show, to present himself as aggrieved and to present himself as an advocate for all those Americans who feel aggrieved.
GROSS: Have you ever heard an FBI director dodge questions in such a confrontational way?
FISHER: No, we've never seen any FBI director like Kash Patel before. We've never seen someone who looks like Kash Patel. The previous FBI directors were all sort of clean-cut, conservatively dressed, very proper...
GROSS: White men.
FISHER: White men, all of them. And Kash Patel is not any of those things. So we haven't seen this kind of approach before. We haven't seen this kind of antagonism before. And we haven't seen this lack of experience before, lack of familiarity with what the FBI does. There is in Kash Patel's background every reason to see why Donald Trump wanted him in that job and every reason to understand why so many people within the Bureau believe he is ill-suited for the position and that he's doing significant and enduring damage to the bureau.
GROSS: So Benny Johnson, who's a far-right commentator and podcaster, was interviewing Kash Patel, and he asked him why the FBI was protecting the world's foremost predators by refusing to release the names on the list. And Patel said, simple, because of who's on that list. That sounds contradictory to what we just heard.
FISHER: Right. So that conversation with Benny Johnson took place a couple of years ago at a point when Kash Patel was on the outside and was agitating for the administration, then the Biden administration, to release this purported client list that Jeffrey Epstein is supposed to have kept. Now-FBI Director Patel has a very different set of facts that he would like people to believe, and that is that there is no client list, never was. And Patel, who had certainly entertained the idea that there was some conspiracy behind Epstein's death before Patel came to the FBI, now that he is the director, now that he's had the opportunity to read the files, he has concluded that this was absolutely a suicide, that there's no evidence to the contrary. There was no hanky-panky. Donald Trump's presence in the Epstein files is minimal and benign.
And so this almost complete reversal on Patel's part is bizarrely accompanied now by Kash Patel saying, how can you not believe me? He gets indignant when people question him about this, including members of Congress. And so Patel says, I am the guy who was pushing for all this stuff to be released when I was out of office. Now that I'm in office and I tell you there's nothing to be released, you need to believe me. And he seems, at least he acts, as if he's astonished that people don't take his word for it.
GROSS: So let's briefly run through some of the things that Kash Patel has been in the news for in the past couple of weeks. So this week, he was in the news for giving his girlfriend, country music singer Alexis Wilkins, a security detail. Tell us briefly why that's unusual.
FISHER: Well, none of the previous FBI directors had executive protection for their spouses, not for their wives and not for any girlfriends. And so it's very unusual for a director to request that kind of protection for someone who's not the director and who's not even the director's spouse. So why is this in the news? Because there are a lot of people within the FBI who find these kinds of requests, these kinds of irregularities, not just unseemly, but a waste of resources. So whether it's providing protection for his girlfriend or providing the director with jet service on the Bureau's jet to take him to various forms of entertainment - hockey games, casino jaunts to Las Vegas, visits to that girlfriend in Nashville, all of this - it comes at great expense to the taxpayer and is seen by a lot of people in the Bureau as a waste of resources.
GROSS: Patel, in response, says he's been paying back the government for these trips.
FISHER: Yes. He pays the government back, or so he says, at the commercial rate - the rate that you and I would pay to fly to Nashville, which is dramatically less than it costs the Bureau to stand up their GV jet and whisk the director wherever he wants to go for that weekend's entertainment.
GROSS: Last week, Patel exempted his deputy FBI director, Dan Bongino, and two other new senior FBI officials who were just recently hired from passing polygraph tests. And keeping in mind that Dan Bongino has access to the top government secrets as deputy FBI director, how unusual is it for the deputy FBI director to be exempted from a polygraph test, which I think everybody in the FBI has to pass?
FISHER: Yeah. The FBI has used polygraph tests for decades as just kind of a routine check on basic security questions that everybody has to pass to have access to the kind of secure information that the FBI traffics in. So obviously, since that's the case for special agents across the country, it's equally the case for the people running the FBI, such as the deputy director, Dan Bongino.
So why was Bongino given this exemption? That's gone unstated by the FBI. The assumption among many current and former agents is that he flunked a polygraph or had reason to flunk a polygraph and, therefore, was allowed to skip it. This is something that does not sit well with others in the FBI because they want to be able to trust the people around them, particularly the people above them, but their colleagues as well. And one thing that gives them that sense of trust is they know everybody's passed the same security hurdles. And when the No. 2 in the agency gets a bye on that, that causes a lot of unhappiness in the ranks.
GROSS: And while we're on the subject of Dan Bongino, Patel had said that he'd appoint someone with FBI experience to be his deputy director. But Dan Bongino had no experience and no experience at the FBI at all, and of course, neither did Patel when Trump appointed him. Bongino had been a Secret Service agent, podcaster and Fox News commentator.
FISHER: Yes. That's exactly right. Bongino was somebody who was known to the president as somebody who did very well on Fox News, who appeared frequently on Fox News. And in the president's mind, the people running the FBI ought to be folks who are well known to the public and who make the president's case very avidly, very effectively. And Bongino is seen as a tough guy. Trump loves tough guys. He loves guys who seem like stand-up, aggressive advocates for the MAGA movement, and Bongino very much fit that bill.
So looks the part. That's the No. 1 qualification, frequently, in Trump's mind. And Bongino fit that part in a way that perhaps Kash Patel didn't. Patel was, in the president's mind, the ultimate loyalist, someone he could absolutely trust. So this was a team that you could see the president really envisioning as complementary. And so the fact that neither of these guys had any experience in the FBI didn't seem to matter much.
GROSS: Well, let's take a short break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Marc Fisher. He recently left The Washington Post, where he was a longtime writer and editor. He's also the author of the book "Trump Revealed." And now he's a contributor to The New Yorker and has profiled Kash Patel in his new article, "Kash Patel's Acts Of Service." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Marc Fisher, who profiles FBI Director Kash Patel in a new article in The New Yorker titled "Kash Patel's Acts Of Service." And the subtitle is, the FBI director isn't just enforcing the president's agenda at the Bureau - he's seeking retribution for its past investigations of Donald Trump.
So there are questions about how Patel got the position as head of the FBI and whether he had the necessary experience and credentials. What position had he held compared to what FBI directors typically have?
FISHER: FBI directors in the past have generally had long careers in criminal justice. There have been judges. There have been prosecutors, people who served as U.S. attorneys, running some of the largest U.S. attorneys' offices in the country, whether that be in New York or elsewhere. They are people who have come up through the system and have long histories of public service.
And so Kash Patel has some of that. Kash Patel indeed has been a public servant his entire life. He's never worked for anyone but the government, except for some small businesses that he started on his own between the two Trump administrations. Patel, however, never had that kind of long-standing experience with the FBI directly, with - he did serve in the Justice Department in the first Trump administration. He was on the national security side of the Justice Department, and he worked on some counterterrorism cases. That's something that the FBI also does. But he didn't have the experience that his predecessors had in running an agency or in the sort of street crime that the G-men of the FBI have always been known for in the public imagination.
So there were a lot of people within the Bureau who were very concerned that he would be coming in without the knowledge base, without the years of experience that would tell him how the FBI works, how its relationship with the Justice Department operates. So there was concern about his relative inexperience. Beyond that, I think there was a lot of concern that he was coming in as essentially a tool of Donald Trump - essentially someone who was going to be sort of forwarding the president's political agenda rather than sort of fighting for the men and women of the FBI.
GROSS: The subtitle of your piece about Patel in The New Yorker is, "The F.B.I. Director Isn't Just Enforcing The President's Agenda At The Bureau - He's Seeking Retribution For Its Past Investigations Of Donald Trump." So in his memoir, in Patel's memoir, he had his list of, quote, government gangsters. Eric Swalwell, who we heard questioning Patel, was on that list. Who has he been seeking retribution against, and what for?
FISHER: Almost from the first day that Kash Patel took over the FBI, he has had as one of his top or perhaps his very top agenda item the calling-out and the investigation of people who the president sees as his enemies - people who the president sees as having investigated Trump himself, the folks who were involved in prosecuting Trump for his taking classified documents down to Mar-a-Lago in Florida when he left after his first administration, the people who prosecuted him on all of the various other things that he was convicted of, financial misdeeds and so on.
So there's a long list of Trump enemies who Trump has talked about during his out years, the four years of the Biden administration. And Kash Patel came into office with that list and with his own list - what he calls his list of government gangsters. He wrote a whole book laying out who those people were, and it was accompanied by a list of at least 60 people who he saw as Trump's enemies and therefore as Patel's enemies. And so he has methodically gone through that list, already begun the process of coming up with evidence and seeking indictments of people like the former FBI director, James Comey, like other top officials of the FBI who were involved in the Russiagate investigation. All of these investigations that characterized Trump's first term - these are now the people who are - have targets on their backs.
And as Patel has now told several people at the FBI, he sees it as his job to go after the people who the president wants prosecuted. The president has not forgotten. That's the line that Patel has used over and over again to explain why he's going after some of these people. It's ironic, of course, because Patel has staked his entire directorship on the idea that everyone who came before him had weaponized the FBI, weaponized the Justice Department for their own political purposes. And yet now he stands accused of exactly the same infraction - of going after people, using the power of the FBI to go after political opponents.
GROSS: So not only did Patel have former FBI Director Jim Comey indicted. He fired an agent for refusing to stage a perp walk for Comey.
FISHER: Yes. That's right. So Patel has fired, by various accounts, dozens of agents for various infractions, most of which he doesn't detail in any sort of way. But the reporting that I did, as well as other news organizations have done, has brought out the fact that Patel has fired agents for things such as having a gay pride flag at their desk or, as you mentioned, refusing to stage the classic perp walk in which the purported criminal is paraded before the cameras, in this case being the former FBI director himself, Jim Comey.
So there is - in the minds of many FBI agents, there's this view of Kash Patel as someone who is vindictive on behalf of Trump and vindictive in ways that seem at least on the surface to be superficially just cruelty for cruelty's sake, compounded by the fact that Patel has told people within the Bureau that he would not fire many of these agents if it were solely up to him - that he's getting direction from the White House, direction from the Justice Department and that he is firing a number of these agents on the president's say-so or to please the president, rather than because Patel himself believes that the agent has done anything wrong.
GROSS: Well, let's take another short break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Marc Fisher. And he profiles FBI Director Kash Patel in a new article in The New Yorker that's titled "Kash Patel's Acts Of Service," subtitled, the FBI director isn't just enforcing the president's agenda at the Bureau - he's seeking retribution for its past investigations of Donald Trump. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Marc Fisher, who has a new profile of FBI Director Kash Patel in The New Yorker, where Fisher is a contributor. He recently left The Washington Post, where he was a longtime writer and editor. He's also the author of the book "Trump Revealed," a biography of the president.
You write in your profile of Kash Patel that he has promoted several conspiracy theories. I want to play a clip, and this is something that you quote in your profile. This is an excerpt of him as a guest on Joe Rogan's podcast on June 6 of this year. And this is Kash Patel describing a conspiracy theory relating to China and fentanyl.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE JOE ROGAN EXPERIENCE")
PATEL: You don't hear of fentanyl deaths in China. You don't hear of fentanyl deaths in India. You don't really hear of fentanyl deaths in England, Australia, New Zealand - our Five Eyes partners - and Canada. The Chinese, in my opinion, the CCP, have used it as a directed approach because we are their adversary. And they don't like us, and we don't like what they're doing when it comes to fentanyl. And their long-term game is this. How do I - in my opinion - kneecap the United States of America, our largest adversary? Well, why don't we go and take out generations of young men and women who might grow up to serve in the United States military or become a cop or become a teacher? And that's what they're doing when you wipe out tens of thousands of Americans a year. It's a long-term plan for them.
JOE ROGAN: Whoa. That is such a dark, dark thing.
PATEL: It is, but we got - we're on it.
GROSS: So that was Kash Patel on Joe Rogan's podcast on June 6 of this year. I hadn't heard that one before. Had you?
FISHER: No. That was a new one on me. But he's got a bunch of them, and he's got a whole book of them in his book "Government Gangsters." There came a moment in that very same interview between Rogan and Patel where Rogan was almost teasing Patel about the fact that he's prone to these conspiracy theories and that he sees the government and the press and politicians as part of this cabal that is out to undermine Trump and undermine the MAGA movement. And Rogan kind of poked him and said, we love conspiracies, don't we? They're exciting. And Patel kind of laughed and said, yeah. They're our thing.
GROSS: Do you see any connection between this China conspiracy theory and Trump's threats to attack Venezuela and sending warships close to there? Do you see a connection?
FISHER: There's a certain constancy to the way in which Trump and Patel think, the way in which they tell stories about their administration's actions. They both are given to dramatic tellings of somewhat fanciful notions about what our enemies are up to and what is motivating them, and they both jump off from some actual facts. Fentanyl is obviously a scourge. It's obviously an enormous problem. It comes in from Mexico, but its component parts are frequently manufactured in China, so there's a legitimate issue there. It's a legitimate crime-fighting imperative for the FBI. That's the fact part.
And then we get into the fanciful. As we hear Patel spin out his notion of why this might be happening, it's very reminiscent of the way Donald Trump frequently portrays issues not just in Venezuela, but around the world, where he sees or is told about some situation, presents the germ of the facts and then extrapolates from there, exaggerates and throws in numbers that can't quite be verified and so on. It all boils down to the show. Both Trump and Patel, very similar personalities in certain important ways, one of which is that they think of every day in their job as the next act in a long-running show that needs new juice to zap them into the headlines for that day.
GROSS: What are some of the other conspiracy theories that Patel has promoted?
FISHER: So Kash Patel, as he's admitted, is given to conspiratorial notions. He sees conspiracies in fact patterns. And obviously, you want any crime fighter to look for patterns in the facts that they are assembling, but in Kash Patel's case, it often goes a bit beyond the available facts. So, for example, Patel has believed for many years now that he is a target of a media conspiracy to portray him in a dark light and to make up things about him. And so he has sued a series of news organizations, claiming that they have defamed him. He sued The New York Times. He sued CNN. He sued Politico. In every case, he got a big splash in the news, and in every case, he ended up withdrawing the suit or seeing it thrown out by a judge.
In the case of the January 6 assault on the Capitol, Kash Patel has for a couple of years been presenting the theory that the FBI itself had recruited operatives of one sort or another who were in the crowd on January 6, and who were perhaps encouraging the rioters to be more aggressive in their attack on the Capitol. He's never presented the slightest evidence for this, and yet he continues to present this idea. Even as director of the FBI, he has said that there may have been such people and they may have very much egged on the crowd on January 6, sort of portraying the January 6 attack almost as an inside job.
GROSS: So since Trump was president on January 6 - I mean, he was about to leave the White House, but he was president then. If it was an inside job in the sense that the FBI sent people into militias to urge them to be more aggressive and even violent, why isn't that a Trump administration problem? The FBI director at this time was somebody appointed by President Trump.
FISHER: Yes. This - it's absolutely right. The January 6 attack took place at the very tail end of the first Trump administration. So if, as Patel theorizes, the FBI in 2020 and the first days of 2021 was using its own confidential sources and placing those sources within the militia groups that were plotting the January 6 attack, it's perfectly reasonable to ask, does that mean that the first Trump administration was in some regard responsible for the attack? This is an aspect of this conspiracy theory that Kash Patel somehow never gets around to talking about. He sees the FBI as kind of a rogue operation. And it - so it fits in with his overall theory of this deep state that is the real governing factor in the United States, and this deep state doing its own thing, seeding these sources into the January 6 attack groups without perhaps the knowledge of Trump and the Trump administration.
And, you know, the FBI did have some contacts who were, from time to time, inside some of the militia groups. So were they there for the purpose of encouraging those groups to take this more violent approach on January 6? No evidence has been presented along those lines, and yet it's been years now that he's been pushing this theory and saying that once he got inside, he would reveal the evidence. Well, nothing's been revealed.
GROSS: After Trump was indicted in 2023 for secretly storing classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Patel said, when you're president and you leave, you can take whatever you want. And when you take it, whether it's classified or not, it's now not.
FISHER: I believe that the president said it first, but Kash Patel quickly adopted this idea that everything that was at Mar-a-Lago was there legally simply because the president had taken it there. This is completely contrary to the law. In 1978, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act. And that prohibits former presidents from taking any official records - whether they were classified or not - from taking them with them when they left office.
Well, Trump brought a lot of those things down to Mar-a-Lago. And Patel has said several times, when he worked in the White House in the first Trump administration, that he watched the president declassify documents so that he could take them with him to Florida. So since Patel had said this in various public settings, he was then summoned to testify by prosecutors, to testify before a grand jury about, OK, what did you see? Which documents were they, and what did the president do when he was declassifying them? Well, he gets to the grand jury. And all of a sudden, Patel is taking the Fifth Amendment, saying that he's not going to answer any questions because he has this right against self-incrimination. So the prosecutor said, well, OK. We'll get you immunity. So they went and got him immunity from the court, and Patel appeared a second time. And this time, he answered their questions.
So flash-forward, and he's at his Senate confirmation hearing for becoming FBI director. And the senators say, OK. Tell us about this grand jury testimony where you talked about why and how the president made these documents OK to take to Mar-a-Lago. And again, Kash Patel said, no, can't do that, not allowed, because it was against the law. And as several senators noted, that is just false. You own your own words and you are allowed to divulge that testimony, which he did not do.
GROSS: I think we need to take another break here, so let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Marc Fisher, who profiles Kash Patel in the current issue of The New Yorker. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday morning with Marc Fisher, who profiles FBI Director Kash Patel in the current issue of The New Yorker, where Fisher is a contributor. The article is titled "Kash Patel's Acts Of Service."
Patel has fired a whole lot of FBI agents. I don't know the number. And he reassigned a lot of the remaining agents to work on catching people who are in the U.S. illegally. So what are some of the FBI missions that have been canceled or understaffed as a result of the firings and the reassignments, or units that have been completely shut down?
FISHER: It's really a thoroughgoing change that he's brought to the FBI. The FBI has about 13,000 agents, and about a quarter of them have been assigned to work on going out and catching undocumented immigrants. This has not generally been a major focus for the FBI. Hundreds more of agents have been sent on these missions, along with the National Guard, to do basic sort of crime patrols in cities like Washington, D.C., and Chicago. This is part of this emphasis on combating violent crime that President Trump began some months back.
So what's not being done? Well, for example, Patel disbanded the public corruption unit in the Washington Field Office. This is the group that investigates wrongdoing by public officials, including - this is the office that investigated Trump and various other Republicans for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. I was given one example after another by various agents in the FBI of cases, for example, of someone working on Chinese counterterrorism efforts in the United States. One such agent was pulled off a case to essentially do street patrol in the District of Columbia, doing DWI arrests. So it's a wholesale rejiggering of what agents are doing. It's resulting in a lot of people retiring early, retiring as soon as they're able to, and quite a number, as you said, who've been fired.
GROSS: Also, Patel has lowered the standards for getting hired into the FBI. New agents no longer need a college degree, and now new agents have to take a polygraph test that includes loyalty to the FBI director.
FISHER: Yeah. This is something that Patel has denied, but we've heard this from several agents who said they've been asked about their loyalty to Director Patel and to his own personal agenda. This is one of a number of ways in which a lot of FBI agents feel like the standards for being an agent have been lowered. For example, Patel has shortened the length of the FBI academy from 18 weeks to eight weeks of training, and he's no longer requiring all new agents to have a college degree. Many agents in the FBI have advanced degrees. And many of them have done specialized work in languages and so on to prepare themselves for the kind of international investigations that the bureau does so well. So it's really disappointing to a lot of the people who've devoted their lives to the bureau to see what they see as a watering down of those standards.
GROSS: Patel has managed to cash in financially on being director of the FBI. Can you describe some of the ways he's cashed in?
FISHER: Well, during his time between administrations - so between his time at the National Security Council and his time as head of the FBI - he spent those out years on a number of efforts to make a lot of money, and he did make a lot of money. Some of it was selling stuff very much in a Trump kind of model. He set up a website to sell his K$h-branded clothes that he had made, K and then dollar sign and then H. It was kind of a logo. He raised money for some of the January 6 defendants. He promoted dietary supplements that he claimed would undo the damage from the COVID-19 virus. He wrote three children's books called "Plot Against The King." The main character of those children's books was a guy named Kash the wizard, who was the hero, and he led a battle on behalf of King Donald to find the bad guys who were scheming to elect Hillary Queenton on not Election Day, but Choosing Day. And so he was highly involved in all of these efforts to make some money and push Trump's agenda. The No. 1 thing that made Patel richer during those years was the work that he did through a consulting group that he set up where his clients included the government of the country of Qatar. That's a relationship that continues to this day, even as he's the FBI director.
GROSS: Patel also had a charity called the Kash Foundation, which promised to make grants to those who have the courage to stand up to government wrongdoing. What did you learn about how the money raised was used?
FISHER: Well, the Kash Foundation raised $1.3 million one year, and they spent something like $700,000 in expenses, but they only gave away $200,000. So out of the $1.3 million in revenue, only $200,000 went out in grants, mostly in cash assistance to about 50 people who are not named. So the idea here was to help people who were supposedly standing up against the deep state, against the government, but only $200,000 went to those folks. More than that went to one of Patel's own friends, a business partner of his who runs an advertising firm that was hired to do some promotion of the charity's operations. So all told, we're talking about millions of dollars that Patel gained during those out years between administrations from his various business ventures and his representation of a Chinese company and the government of Qatar, all of these entities that did a lot of business with the United States government.
GROSS: And I should mention the Chinese company that he worked with is the company that owns, among other things, SHEIN, that fast fashion retailer. It's really popular in the U.S. because the prices are so cheap.
FISHER: Sure. And SHEIN's subsidiary, which Patel worked for, had a board that included investors who were accused of having ties to the Chinese military and the Chinese Communist Party. So there have been some real questions about the ethics of that organization. And yet, Patel, when he took over as FBI director, said that he saw no need to divest his holdings in the Chinese companies.
GROSS: So has he promised to recuse himself from any legal issues pertaining to companies that he has worked with and gotten paid by?
FISHER: To the contrary, in the case of his work for Qatar, Patel, after he took over the FBI, got a waiver from the U.S. government that allows him to continue to handle matters related to the government of Qatar. You know, the FBI deals with all sorts of terrorism issues around the world. And so if anything comes up regarding Qatar, he will be allowed to continue to do that work even though he took in some undisclosed amount for consulting services to Qatar in the years before he became FBI director. We don't know the amount of money, exactly, that he got from Qatar because he never registered as a foreign agent, which the advocacy group Public Citizens says was a violation of federal rules.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Marc Fisher, who profiles Kash Patel in the current issue of The New Yorker. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday morning with Marc Fisher, who profiles FBI director Kash Patel in the current issue of The New Yorker, where Fisher is a contributor. The article is titled "Kash Patel's Acts Of Service.
This is kind of like a strange fact. I'm not quite sure how to interpret it. One of the things that Patel proposed was to bring mixed martial arts fighters to help FBI agents with their conditioning. And he proposed this to the head of the UFC, the Ultimate Fighting Championship. You know, related to that is that Trump wants to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States by having a mixed martial arts fight on the White House lawn. So what does that say about Patel and the MMA? Is he a fan, or is this just out of loyalty to Trump, who's planning to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States by having an MMA fight?
FISHER: I'm willing to give Kash Patel the benefit of the doubt and believe that he's a genuine fan of UFC. He seems to really enjoy it when he goes to the bouts. He went with Mel Gibson to that Vegas fight. And so Kash Patel's true sports love is ice hockey. He plays ice hockey. He is a huge fan. He's used a government jet to fly to an Islanders game up in New York. So when it comes to the UFC, I think we have a happy coincidence where Trump's love for that sport and Patel's dovetail nicely. They both have a strong desire to appeal to a core part of the MAGA constituency, the hyper-masculine world of MMA. And so there is a political aspect to this. But in general, I think they both also just love that scene.
GROSS: What do FBI agents think of the idea of bringing in mixed martial arts fighters to help with FBI agents' conditioning?
FISHER: I can't quite capture for you just how humiliated and upset many FBI agents are by what they see as a belittling of their serious training, their serious academic background. This is an agency where a lot of the FBI agents, while you might see them in TV dramas as essentially street cops in suits, this is an agency where many of them are lawyers, many of them have advanced degrees. These are people deeply schooled in the technology necessary to combat cybercrime today. And so when they see that their own director is talking about making them have training sessions with MMA fighters, they see this as belittling and insulting. There are some ways in which many FBI agents like the fact that Patel has steered the agency back toward what they see as basic crime fighting. But the overwhelming sentiment, I think, is that he has more than shaken up the bureau. He has gutted it.
GROSS: Do you have any insights into the relationship between Trump and Patel now? You've said basically that Patel was hired not because of his experience as much as for his loyalty to Trump. So now that he's been in that position a while, has it affected the relationship between him and Trump and Trump's trust in Patel?
FISHER: I think what I've heard from people inside the bureau is that the president has been frustrated by some of Patel's missteps, such as his premature announcement that the Bureau had found and captured the assassin of Charlie Kirk, a move that Patel then had to reverse just minutes later. So there is a sense in the White House that Patel has made too many mistakes. On the other hand, the president clearly values Patel's loyalty, clearly values the energy with which Patel is putting the president's agenda into motion. So there's no indication that he's in trouble right now, but there are some real doubts about his overall capacity.
GROSS: Marc Fisher, thank you so much for talking with us.
FISHER: My pleasure.
GROSS: Marc Fisher's profile of Kash Patel is titled "Kash Patel's Acts Of Service." It's published in the current issue of The Atlantic. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, our guest will be dream scientist Michelle Carr. She runs a sleep lab where she studies people as they're dreaming, with a focus on nightmares and lucid dreaming. She'll talk about her new book, "Nightmare Obscura," and how she says we can change our recurring nightmares. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram, @nprfreshair.
FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren rensel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
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