Kash Patel fires FBI officials linked to Trump documents case, reports say | FBI
At least 10 FBI employees linked to Donald Trump investigation It was reported that he was dismissed It follows revelations that the agency subpoenaed the personal records of current FBI director Kash Patel and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles in the years before Trump returned to office.
Expulsions reportedly CBS News And CNNIt was linked to a federal investigation led by former justice department special counsel Jack Smith into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after his first term.
During that investigation, Reuters reported on Wednesday, FBI subpoenas recordings of phone calls It was done by Patel and Wiles, who were both close to Trump but were ordinary citizens at the time.
The FBI has not yet responded to the Guardian’s requests for comment. But in a statement to Reuters, Patel rebuked the institution he now heads and repeated claims that the actions were evidence of continued government overreach by the Biden administration.
“It is outrageous and deeply concerning that previous FBI leadership secretly subpoenaed my own phone records, along with those of current White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, using flimsy pretexts and burying the entire process in forbidden case files designed to evade any surveillance,” Patel said.
In addition to having highly classified post-presidency documents, Trump was also under federal investigation for accusations that he interfered in the 2020 presidential election. Smith said he is confident the findings from their investigation would have emerged had the charges against Trump not been dropped after he won the presidency and returned to the White House.
Smith and his team filed indictments in 2023 accusing Trump of illegally withholding classified documents after his first term in office and conspiring to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election. Smith dropped both cases after Trump won the 2024 election, citing Justice Department policy against suing a sitting president.
A federal judge on Monday blocked further release of Smith’s report detailing the findings of their investigation.
It has long been clear that Patel was seen as a key part of the document investigation. A top adviser to Trump at the time, he was asked to testify before a federal grand jury in Washington in 2022 about the unauthorized storage of government documents and was granted limited immunity for his statements.
This isn’t the first public firing at the FBI under Patel’s tenure. Last September, three former top officials, each with decades of service, sued Patel and the federal government for wrongful termination after they said they were fired for investigating Trump.
In November, the bureau fired an official who had been there for 27 years after Patel became angry over media reports that he used government aircraft for his personal use.
Reuters contributed to this story
