When a leaked internal assessment calls the FBI a “rudderless ship” and describes its director as “in over his head,” it’s the kind of phrase that sticks.
That’s exactly what happened to FBI Director Kash Patel this week, after a 100-plus-page report from an alliance of current and former FBI employees began circulating in Washington and in the press.
But Patel is not taking it quietly.
He’s now pushing back aggressively through Megyn Kelly’s show, challenging some of the most humiliating anecdotes and arguing that the harsh portrait of his leadership simply doesn’t match the FBI’s results on the ground.
Meanwhile, commentators across the spectrum – from Fox News columnist Miranda Devine to The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur and Jordan Uhl – are treating the report as a Rorschach test for what they already believe about the Trump-era FBI.
A “Rudderless Ship” And An Angry Rank-And-File
On Fox News, Laura Ingraham framed the leaked document as a “scathing new report” that, according to the New York Post’s Miranda Devine, accuses the bureau of drifting aimlessly under Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino.
Devine told Ingraham the report was compiled by a group calling itself the National Alliance of FBI professionals – active-duty agents, retirees, and analysts who banded together back in 2023 because they were horrified by what they saw as political weaponization under former director Christopher Wray during the Biden administration.
In other words, Devine stressed, this isn’t some “deep state cabal” of anti-Trump liberals. These are people who publicly backed Trump’s plans for FBI reform just last year and endorsed Patel as the best option to shake up the bureau.
According to Devine, the alliance requested a six-month “report card” on Patel and Bongino’s first stretch in charge. Roughly 80% of the feedback, she said, came back negative.
The report’s core complaint, as Devine summarized it, is that Patel is inexperienced in traditional FBI work, Bongino is too focused on building his personal brand, and the organization is frozen by fear and confusion.
Critics inside the bureau, she added, accuse the new leadership of being thin-skinned about social media criticism and unwilling to listen to longtime FBI professionals who know how the systems actually work.
The Raid Jacket Story That Went Nuclear
One anecdote in the report has already become notorious – and is now at the center of Patel’s counterattack.
Devine told Ingraham that the document describes Patel’s behavior the day after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah. Sources claim that when Patel’s FBI jet landed in Provo, he refused to get off the plane until someone produced a medium-sized FBI raid jacket for him.
Agents, according to Devine’s summary of the report, scrambled around the Salt Lake City office to find one. A female agent’s jacket was brought to the plane, but Patel allegedly complained it didn’t have Velcro patches on the sleeves. SWAT personnel then had to peel patches off their own jackets and attach them to his before he finally emerged.
Devine said agents who witnessed it saw the moment as a symbol: a leader more interested in optics and looking “tactical” than in supporting the investigators already on the ground.
Progressive host Jordan Uhl on The Young Turks seized on the same story, calling it one of the “funniest” – and most embarrassing – details in the report. He and Cenk Uygur described Patel as a “clown” in the eyes of many agents, noting that some interviewees in the assessment explicitly used that kind of language to describe both Patel and Bongino.
For Patel’s critics, that jacket anecdote has quickly become shorthand for everything they think is wrong with his tenure.
TYT: A Political Witch Hunt That Paralyzed The Bureau
The Young Turks’ segment went much deeper than just mocking Patel’s fashion demands.
Uhl explained that the assessment, prepared for the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, draws on 24 confidential FBI sources who say the bureau under Patel is “paralyzed by fear,” with managers terrified of being fired if they take initiative without explicit orders.
Uygur told viewers the story illustrates what happens when an agency becomes a vehicle for political “witch hunts.” In his telling, when people think any misstep could be interpreted as going after Trump’s allies or donors, they stop doing anything at all.
TYT highlighted several claims from the report:
- That Patel lacks the deep institutional knowledge to oversee the FBI’s complex investigative and intelligence programs.
- That he is “paranoid and distrustful,” once ordering polygraph exams at Quantico after word leaked that staff had discussed his request for an FBI-issued firearm.
- That some foreign law-enforcement partners worry the Trump administration’s approach could damage long-term international cooperation.
Uygur argued that agents now fear pursuing cases that might brush up against Trump’s interests – worrying that a fraud case, a drug case, or even a white-collar investigation could suddenly become grounds for termination if the target has political connections.
Jordan Uhl added that this leak follows earlier rumors about Patel possibly being ousted, and that if he does fall, the likely replacement would be Bongino – another staunch Trump loyalist – which in their view would keep the “circus” going.
Coming from the left, TYT’s takeaway is blunt: this is what happens when you staff top law-enforcement jobs with people chosen for loyalty and vibes, not experience.
Megyn Kelly: Patel Says The Smears Are False – And The Numbers Prove It
On the other side of the media universe, Megyn Kelly devoted a long segment to Patel’s response, saying she had spoken to him directly and was authorized to put his comments on the record.
Kelly explained that the same alliance of retired and active FBI personnel produced a report calling the bureau “chronically underperforming” and riven by “toxic fear” and “deep-seated internal partisanship” under Patel. But she pointed out that many of their own complaints are explicitly partisan – like agents fuming about Trump’s January 6 pardons – and look more like political gripes than operational critiques.
On the infamous jacket story, Kelly said Patel flatly denies the narrative that he sat on the jet like a “high school girl” refusing to come out until his outfit looked cool.
According to Kelly’s recounting of Patel’s version, he was at dinner in New York when he learned about Kirk’s assassination, flew straight to Utah without proper gear, borrowed a jacket when he landed, and accepted a patch as a gesture of solidarity from a local special-operations agent – the way officers sometimes give each other challenge coins.
Patel told Kelly there was no dramatic standoff on the plane, no tantrum about Velcro, and no delay in getting to the scene.
Kelly also said Patel offered hard numbers to rebut the idea that the bureau is “rudderless.” By his count, she told viewers, the FBI has made nearly 30,000 arrests this year – roughly double the 2024 tally – including about 25,000 for violent crimes. She cited Patel’s claim that agents have taken down over 100 MS-13 members, arrested more than 1,700 child predators, identified 6,000 missing children, ramped up human-trafficking and domestic-terrorism arrests, seized nearly two metric tons of fentanyl, and captured four of the FBI’s top ten most wanted fugitives.
To Kelly, it “smacks of” a bureaucracy that doesn’t like Patel’s politics – or Trump’s – more than a serious proof that the organization has stopped functioning.
Lowry And Cooke See A Bureaucratic Revolt, Not A Smoking Gun
National Review’s Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cooke, appearing with Kelly, read the same report as something closer to an institutional temper tantrum.
Lowry said the jacket anecdote has all the hallmarks of a classic Trump-era “BS story” – the kind of private, second-hand tale that gets repeated in hostile circles until it hardens into supposed fact. Unless and until there’s hard evidence, he said, he takes Patel’s denial more seriously than anonymous hearsay.
At the same time, Lowry didn’t pretend Patel’s first six months have been flawless. He acknowledged, as Kelly did, that the FBI director looked shaky in some of his public handling of the Charlie Kirk investigation, making premature public statements about suspects and then correcting them.
Still, Lowry argued, none of that changes the reality that Patel is trying to execute Trump’s priorities inside a bureaucracy that has plenty of officials who loathe those priorities. In that context, he suggested, of course the report reads like a list of grievances from people who would prefer a very different director.
Cooke took an even more structural view. He reminded Kelly’s audience that under the Constitution, federal law-enforcement officials ultimately work for the president. Trump, he said, was duly elected and has every right to appoint an FBI director who shares his outlook.
If FBI employees cannot stomach working under Trump or Patel, Cooke argued, they have a simple option: resign. Staying inside the bureau while quietly undermining elected leadership, he warned, is far worse for democracy than a politically controversial appointment.
Both men portrayed the report’s demands – that Patel “embrace feedback,” make everyone feel “seen and heard,” and shift into full “receive mode” – as more appropriate for a corporate HR workshop than for an agency tasked with arresting violent criminals.
Can Patel Recover From A Report Like This?
Whether you find Miranda Devine’s reporting compelling, agree with Cenk Uygur that this is a clown show, or side with Megyn Kelly’s view that this is largely an internal revolt, everyone seems to agree on one thing: this leak is brutal.
Once terms like “rudderless ship,” “chronically underperforming,” and “in over his head” are attached to a director, they’re hard to shake, especially when amplified across cable news and social media.
That’s where the “unrecoverable” fear comes in. Some critics talk as if this is the point of no return for Patel’s credibility – that agents won’t follow someone they view as thin-skinned, image-obsessed, and paranoid, no matter how many arrests the bureau racks up.
But Patel and his defenders are clearly betting the opposite. They’re leaning on statistics, law-and-order rhetoric, and direct rebuttals to the most humiliating stories to argue that the work is getting done and that anonymous complainers inside the FBI don’t get to veto the president’s staffing decisions.
From the outside, the bigger worry isn’t just Kash Patel’s reputation. It’s what this fight says about an agency that already faces low public trust and intense political scrutiny.
If the FBI really is frozen by internal fear and factional infighting, as some of these sources claim, that’s dangerous for everyone – regardless of party.
If, on the other hand, the bureau is doing aggressive work on gangs, child predators, terrorism, and trafficking while parts of its own workforce wage media warfare against its director, that’s a different kind of problem: one where the people sworn to enforce the law are now also fighting a shadow civil war over who gets to define its mission.
Either way, the leaked report and Patel’s sharp response have made one thing clear.
The battle over who controls the FBI – and whose version of its story the country believes – is only getting started.
Mark grew up in the heart of Texas, where tornadoes and extreme weather were a part of life. His early experiences sparked a fascination with emergency preparedness and homesteading. A father of three, Mark is dedicated to teaching families how to be self-sufficient, with a focus on food storage, DIY projects, and energy independence. His writing empowers everyday people to take small steps toward greater self-reliance without feeling overwhelmed.
