Kash Patel has been boosting the FBI’s crime stats for his own gain.
Despite Patel’s claims, the bureau has not arrested 54,000 “violent criminals,” according to FBI insiders who spoke with MS NOW. Instead, the enormous federal head count—which Patel himself has claimed represents a 90 percent increase—was inflated by inclusions from local and state law enforcement agencies.
By analyzing publicly available data from the Justice Department, MS NOW determined that the FBI had arrested fewer violent criminals than it did during the same time span in the Biden administration. Yet Patel, who currently helms one of the most prestigious intelligence agencies in the world, would apparently rather disseminate manipulated data if it supports the political aims of Donald Trump’s MAGA administration.
“Kash Patel is actively dismantling decades of statistical integrity just to feed a political narrative,” Christopher O’Leary, a former senior FBI official and MS NOW contributor, told the network.
“We are seeing a historic institution reduced to a metrics game, where the FBI is poaching credit for arrests made by other law enforcement agencies and departments. This artificial inflation of the stats is a deliberate smoke screen designed to mask internal chaos and the mass exodus of experienced talent by manufacturing an illusion of productivity that simply does not exist on the ground,” O’Leary said.
Patel’s brief tenure atop the FBI has been as unprecedented as it is scandalous. Over the last year, the podcaster turned agency chief has wantonly flown around the country with FBI jets on the taxpayer’s dime. His trips have included a jaunt to Las Vegas, a trip to Nashville, and at least one widely publicized instance in which he flew to Penn State to visit his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins.
Meanwhile, the bureau is down at least 1,500 special agents since Trump returned to office.
The FBI did not dispute that the bureau had issued fewer criminal referrals, but instead pointed to a nationwide decline in crime that, truthfully, has been ongoing since 2022.
“This FBI and our law enforcement partners delivered the largest year of violent crime reduction in American history, achieved the most significant drop in the national murder rate ever recorded since 1936,” the FBI told MS NOW in a statement.