Scribble

David Rind

00:00:00

This is One Thing, I'm David Rind, and this is why President Donald Trump's FBI director is flexing online and off.

Evan Perez

00:00:08

There's very much a bro aspect of the current FBI leadership.

David Rind

00:00:11

Stick with us.

David Rind

00:00:14

There was a moment last Wednesday, just hours after the conservative political activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in Utah, where it seemed like authorities had tracked down the gunman.

Jake Tapper

00:00:24

A major update on our breaking news, FBI Director Cash Patel has just posted on X or Twitter that the suspect in the shooting death of Charlie Kirk is now in custody...

David Rind

00:00:35

This was coming straight from the FBI director himself, so it had to be true, right? Well, at a press conference just minutes later, authorities in Utah basically said the exact opposite was true.

Utah Dept. Pubic Safety Commissioner

00:00:46

While the suspect is at large, we believe this was a targeted attack towards one individual.

David Rind

00:00:51

Patel walked back his post two hours later saying the person he was referring to was released after questioning. It was an embarrassing blunder that has some in the law enforcement community questioning whether he's the right man for the job. Remember, Patel has no law enforcement experience. He's a former government lawyer, podcaster, and above all else, a fierce defender of President Trump. So how do rank and file agents feel about the management of the country's premier Security Organization. What can this incident tell us about how the FBI will conduct future investigations? CNN senior justice correspondent Evan Perez is here with us. So Evan, FBI director Cash Patel has really been kind of front and center in this investigation into the killing of Charlie Kirk. And as we talk here on Monday afternoon, how would you say his presence is being received?

Evan Perez

00:01:42

It's been rough. He's had a very, very rough few days and it's showing in the way he has reacted, right? You see him on Fox News and even on Friday at that press conference where they announced officially that they had caught the alleged shooter.

Kash Patel

00:02:00

'Myself and Deputy Director Bongino arrived on the scene at approximately 5 30 p.m. On 9-eleven.

Evan Perez

00:02:04

You see how much he is going overboard to try to take credit for things personally. You know, at his direction, certain things were done.

Kash Patel

00:02:14

The governor led a press conference last night at approximately 8 PM, where at my direction the FBI released a never before seen video of the suspect.

Evan Perez

00:02:25

Earlier on a Fox News interview, he described his own personal presence in the investigation going to the field to look at the place where the gun was retrieved.

Kash Patel

00:02:36

And the firearm had a towel wrapped around it. It's important, I'll get back to that later. I even walked into the wooded area in the ravine so I knew from my investigative experience what I could bring to the table and what decisions I needed to make.

Evan Perez

00:02:48

You know, none of these things is normal. And I guess, you know, we can kind of look past that because nothing has been normal about the administration since the second inauguration of Donald Trump. But I think what's happening is extremely unusual because of the danger it poses to the prosecution of someone who is still innocent until proven guilty and, you now, deserves. A fair trial, and that is, I'm sure, going to be something that's going to be brought up by, certainly going to be something, that a judge is going to be very concerned about.

Kash Patel

00:03:22

The evidence and information will come out. I won't stylize the evidence. The attorney general is absolutely right. We can't do that. But I will say what was found in terms of information, a text message exchange, where he, the suspect, specifically stated that he had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and he was going to do that, and he had...

Evan Perez

00:03:37

You know, show us your work. Show us what these messages say. Tell us what it is that is in this evidence. And then let the public make their own decisions based on that is the way I would, know, certainly expect an FBI director to behave.

David Rind

00:03:54

You talk about the way Patel was listing out ways he was personally involved in this. And I was also really struck and to be honest, really caught off guard by the way he ended his statement at the press conference on Friday. To my friend Charlie Kirk. He addressed Kirk in really personal terms, like as a friend. Rest now, brother. We have the watch and I'll see you in Valhalla. Have you ever seen a law enforcement official, let alone the director at the FBI, talk about the victim of a crime in that way while the investigation is ongoing?

Evan Perez

00:04:29

'No, no, not at all. But I mean, look, they came from the same political tent. There's a small group of people who are trying to get Donald Trump elected. Cash Patel was an influencer on social media. He was a podcaster, wrote a children's book in which the president was the sort of the hero. And so this is where he's coming from. And Charlie Kirk was a personal friend of his, you know, I haven't heard. The term Valhalla in a very, very long time. I remember being a teenage boy and like, boys were very, you know, for a while and certainly when I was at that age, you know, we're obsessed with like, sort of like, Norse gods and all this other-

David Rind

00:05:11

Thor the superhero.

Evan Perez

00:05:12

Right, exactly. You know, but it was a very unusual piece of terminology, especially considering that we're talking about, you know, someone who was, we now see his importance, not only to the political movement, but also for Christians and Christians who are supporters of Donald Trump, right? It's not terminology that they would normally use.

David Rind

00:05:32

Is there a masculine element to some of this too, and from what we've seen from Patel?

Evan Perez

00:05:38

Yes, very much bro. I literally, that was the other thing I was thinking of. And again just again going back to my own childhood and when I was like you know when we were 14 year old boys, you know that's the kind of stuff that you talk about and like some of us grow out of that. But there's very much a bro aspect of the current FBI leadership.

Tik Tok

00:05:59

Trying to wrap my head around Kash Patel saying that he's going to partner with the UFC for his training.

Evan Perez

00:06:08

You know, they are big MMA fans. You know he goes to, you know, every championship game or baseball game or every sports match that he can go to.

Kash Patel

00:06:19

'If you want to chase down a bad guy and put him in handcuffs, you better be able to do a pull-up.

Evan Perez

00:06:24

He has spent a lot of time trying to infuse the FBI with sort of like a bit more masculine culture because one of the things that they're at war with is this concern about DEI and the idea that women and people who maybe got a leg up because of their gender or because of

Kash Patel

00:06:45

they're raised. You know another thing we're doing is we're changing the PFT, the physical fitness test at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for new agents and for current agents because it's wholly insufficient. I'm not asking you to be a special forces operator but I am asking you to be able to take down a dude running away from you in a hundred yard sprint or maybe twice your size and detain him.

Evan Perez

00:07:06

It's a very much a big focus of this administration and of this FBI leadership. So a lot of it is sort of like bro culture is what you're seeing there.

David Rind

00:07:20

Well, so you have some of that culture, and you have Patel, who is obviously very loyal to President Trump and works to kind of exude that in his public appearances. How is some of the stuff manifesting on the ground with the FBI, how it does the work, and the agents that are tasked with doing that?

Evan Perez

00:07:41

Well, you know, that's one of the aspects that I think has been problematic for Patel is that, you know, he came into power, took over the FBI, vowing to shut down the Hoover building, the J. Edgar Hoover building, turning into a museum. And one of his favorite sayings is to, you know, let good cops be cops, right? And part of that has been to decimate some of the ranks.

Brianna Keilar

00:08:08

'We're also following some breaking news out of the Department of Justice and reports of a coming purge. There are dozens of FBI agents who investigated the January 6th insurrection and other Trump-related cases. And they're expected to be fired today, according to sources who have been briefed on them.

Evan Perez

00:08:24

He's pushed out a lot of the expertise in the FBI. There's a lot people who have been pushed out because they touched on an investigation involving Donald Trump. You know, these are FBI agents who don't have a choice on which case they work, right? They get assigned a case and they have to go do it. If a judge signs an order for a search, they have go do that search. They don't a choice to do that. But Patel and the leadership has not really seen it that way. They have essentially, despite what he said at his confirmation, which was people aren't going to get punished for doing their jobs, they had been punishing people for doing their job. And part of it is because some of those people are getting a lot of hate on social media. So on conservative social media, other personalities go after specific people at the FBI, and so then those people get fired or get pushed out.

David Rind

00:09:21

We gotta take a quick break, but we will be right back. Stay right here. So have those firings and those changes actually impeded the FBI in its ability to carry out investigations? Because it seems like this would be a pretty fraught time for there to be questions about whether agents can actually do investigations and catch the bad guys quickly.

Evan Perez

00:09:49

Yeah, look, I mean, I've heard from inside the FBI that that was actually one of the concerns about this. The new SAC, the Special Agent in Charge in Utah, in Salt Lake City, he was replacing a woman who had been put in there who was known to be actually a very, very good agent. And so there were some missteps at the early part of this investigation. You know, one of the things that happened was the FBI held onto the gun for more than 24 hours. Instead of turning it over to the ATF, which handles a lot of that part of these investigations, it's routine for you to give the gun to the ATM. They run the systems to do tracing, for instance. You know I'm told that Dan Bongino, the Deputy FBI Director, told ATF officials, you know, what's the use of that? That's not gonna give us anything. And so, eventually, they were able to force them to turn over the gun, but it didn't arrive back here in the D.C. Area for it to go to the lab. That didn't happen for 24 hours. Again, in a case where you don't have a suspect for so long, right, they didn't know who they were looking for. Everything matters, and it matters for you to do it as quickly as possible. Look, in the end, they were lucky that... The father persuaded the son to essentially turn himself in.

David Rind

00:11:07

Right, there wasn't any dramatic arrest or raid, he turned himself in.

Evan Perez

00:11:11

Right, exactly. And so, when you hear the FBI director now boasting that we caught him and we did it faster than the Boston Marathon bombing, there's a totally different type of comparison. And it's very odd for an FBI director to be even trying to make that comparison. Every case is different.

David Rind

00:11:30

Well, so some of these missteps and the odd messaging, is it actually a sign that Patel could be on thin ice? Because we've even seen some loud conservative voices like Chris Ruffo, Eric Erickson, kind of write on social media about their concerns about the FBI. But is President Trump still on thin?

Evan Perez

00:11:48

Board with him? I think President Trump is a huge supporter of Cash Patel and I don't see him in any real danger for losing his job.

President Donald Trump

00:11:59

Take a look at what he did with respect to this horrible person that he just captured. He did it in two days. It took other similar cases, four days, five days, four years if you look at certain shooters.

Evan Perez

00:12:12

It is true that there is a lot of concern inside the FBI. There's also concern at the Justice Department, his bosses. The question is whether they can really do anything about it. You know, they've cautioned about some of the social media, some of some of posting on social media. But really, as long as Donald Trump is in favor of Patel doing this job, he's going to remain in that job. What is unusual, though, is an FBI director who is this much focused on his social media mentions. We know he's very concerned about that. And some of that emerges in a lawsuit we wrote about in the last few days from three former FBI agents who were fired, including the guy that Patel and the administration put to be acting FBI director at the beginning before Patel got confirmed. They raised some serious concerns about how much Patel is spending time essentially catering. To conservative influencers on social media and what they think about him.

David Rind

00:13:15

It's like one thing to be a professional poster and to love to put out stuff to your followers. There's a lot of people in the administration that do that, but they're alleging that he is actually looking at these replies and what folks are saying and then acting on that, firing people accordingly.

Evan Perez

00:13:31

'Right, and they have first-hand knowledge of this, because they were in leadership positions. And again, these are people who Patel himself elevated. Steve Jensen is the former Washington field office assistant director. And he... Was put in that position by Patel. Brian Driscoll is the former acting FBI director. This is, he was there for about 30 days during a time when they were basically making a list of five or 6,000 agents that they were gonna fire for simply doing their jobs, for doing the things that they were assigned to do in the Trump cases. And so, those people now have firsthand accounts and I think that's gonna be the most telling thing. We'll see where those cases go. But I think it's going to reveal a lot about the Cash Patel era of the FBI. You know, Cash Patel, having a person who doesn't have law enforcement, like, you know, wasn't a cop, it's almost like he was more worried about being seen to be in charge rather than actually, like, doing the job. We reported on his first week that one of the first things he did, walked into the FBI director's suite. He ordered them to do a renovation for the office, which was, you now, I want this carpet out of here, is what he said. For again an office that he said was going to be abandoned.

David Rind

00:14:54

Right, they were going to shut down the building, make it a museum.

Evan Perez

00:14:56

'Museum. And so instead they've spent they've spent a lot of money renovating this office. What you get a picture of is a man who's a bit thin-skinned, he is got a bit of a chip on his shoulder because he thinks everyone around him looks at him as an imposter, as someone who doesn't belong and so he's desperate to show that he does.

David Rind

00:15:17

Yeah, the FBI didn't comment on this lawsuit, but again, at his confirmation, he said he would not fire people for political reasons. And now you have a lot of folks saying, well, that is happening in real time. Evan Perez, thanks so much. Really appreciate it.

Kash Patel

00:15:34

I'm not going anywhere. If you want to criticize my 16 years of service, please bring it on.

David Rind

00:15:41

On Tuesday, Cash Patel appeared in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee for a regularly scheduled hearing. While Republicans seemed confident in his leadership, he got tough questions from Democrats about the Kirk investigation, the Jeffrey Epstein files, and allegations that he fired FBI agents at the direction of the White House.

Kash Patel

00:15:59

Anyone that has been terminated from the FBI, generally speaking, failed to meet the needs of the FBI and uphold their constitutional duties.

Sen. Cory Booker

00:16:09

'20% of FBI agents are doing low-level immigration enforcement instead of their mission-critical work.

David Rind

00:16:17

And as New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker listed off a series of criticisms, Patel pushed back and the hearing went off the rails.

Kash Patel

00:16:27

'Of false information does not bring this country together. If you want to work on bringing this country, it's my time, not yours. My God, my-

Sen. Cory Booker

00:16:35

My god, my god! I follow you on your social media posts that tear this country apart. You can try all you want to not take responsibility for what you have said. Sir, you are making a mockery of this committee. Sir, don't tell me my time is over.

David Rind

00:16:58

That's all for us today. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back on Sunday. In the meantime, leave us a rating and a review wherever you listen so other people can discover the show and join in on what we've got going on here. I'll talk to you later.

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