Kash Patel Has Gotta Go

Imagine you were an undercover FBI agent in a Mexican warehouse with Russian gangsters last week when your phone buzzed with this headline: “Hackers Say They Have Data on All FBI Employees.” All FBI employees. Job applicants, too, reportedly. That actually was the headline last Tuesday at 404 Media, the reporter-owned independent news outlet that broke the astounding, not to mention alarming, story. The ShinyHunters hackers: 20-somethings with an anarchist streak and a taste for millions in bitcoin ransom loot. “The hack appears to have swept up home addresses, Social Security numbers, secretive job assignments and much more,” The New York Times reported after analyzing some of the records. “Many FBI employees first learned about the hack when news reports about it surfaced on Tuesday, according to current and former officials.” Imagine that: You’re on the street in a dangerous place and your phone lights up with that headline. And what did FBI management do? According to news accounts, they “instructed employees to remain vigilant at home and at work, report any unsolicited contacts or threats, avoid answering calls from unknown numbers and set up voice mail accounts with A.I.-generated voices.” Oh sure. Kind of a shelter-in-place advisory. Imagine how that went down with the FBI rank-and-file, but especially agents working on ultra-sensitive penetrations of, say, a violent drug gang, a Chinese spy ring or, for that matter, an organization of criminal hackers with tentacles in Russia. “Remain vigilant?” You’ve got to be joking. But here’s the punch line: “The next day, FBI. staff received an email reminding them that October is cybersecurity awareness month,” The Times said. History as Prelude It was only six weeks ago that The Atlantic magazine reminded us that the Trump administration has been shredding cyber defenses since the day it took office, starting with the Cyber Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security, apparently because its professional director, Christopher Krebs, refused to backstop Trump’s baseless, insidious claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. “During the DOGE fever of the first few months of Trump’s return, CISA’s budget was reduced and its staff cut by one-third,” wrote The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez. “The agency hasn’t had a permanent, Senate-confirmed director since Trump retook office. In April, the White House proposed deeper cuts to CISA’s budget …” Patel did his part, replacing the FBI’s assistant director for cyber operations, Brian Vorndran, who left the Bureau. Patel turned to Brett Leatherman, a veteran agent with over two decades at the bureau, who took over the cyber division in June 2025. It looked like a normal, solid succession, but a former FBI agent said the cyber division was struggling with the shock of the radical political transition—Patel was firing anyone associated with the Russia-Trump and Jan. 6 probes—and shifting mission priorities—“a disruption investigative teams are usually shielded from,” as the Information Security Media Group noted. When Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee accused Patel of not filling other senior cyber posts, he responded with an undocumented claim that cyber crime arrests had risen by “40 to 60 per cent” and refused to identify any of the replacements. Six months later, this past March, CNN reported that Patel fired a dozen agents and staff from a counterintelligence unit tasked with monitoring Iranian threats—days before Trump unleashed U.S. strikes on Iran. Rank incompetence in the service of misguided loyalties. All this, mind you, comes 11 years after China’s cybertheft of more than 20 million records from the Office of Personnel Management, which holds the personal data of all federal employees (outside the CIA and other intelligence agencies). It was an event “considered so catastrophic that officials and lawmakers vowed to never let something like it happen again,” as the Times put it last week. But it did happen again, and at the FBI, no less—our premier domestic security agency. Who’s to say whether Chinese, Russian, Iranian or even North Korean cyber warriors, supercharged with AI bots, haven’t been rooting around in those files for months? The FBI released a video Tuesday featuring Agent Leatherman looking fiercely into the camera and declaring: “We know how to find you”—peak, on-brand Trump TV. In a normal time, under a normal administration, Patel would have been instantly removed—or fallen on his sword—for this dreadful, possibly catastrophic dereliction of duty. But, seemingly protected by his ideological twin in the White House, Steven Miller, there seems no bottom to the shame Patel can bring to the FBI, whose initials, its best employees—and dewey-eyed boosters— still like to say, stand for “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.” That brand has surely frayed since early 2025. (National security historian Garrett M. Graff did a marvelous, albeit blood-boiling recounting today of Patel’s many shortcomings and missteps—the drinking, the absenteeism, the investigations grand-standing, the Las Vegas apartment, the FBI jet flights with the girlfriend, to the Olympics hockey game, etc, etc.—so I need not burden you with them again.) The bottom line is that Patel’s just gotta go. The cyber breach shows yet again he’s way out of his depth, at the very least. God forbid some hostile state, terrorist group or religious nuts mounts a mass drone and/or biological warfare attack on Washington, New York, L.A.—or Silicon Valley. How confident are you that Kash Patel’s FBI can defeat them? Not much, I’d guess. Part of dumb, dumber, and dumbest. The FBI's advice to staff reads like that of a local police precinct who informs you that unfortunately there is no law on the books just yet to protect you.