The FBI director, Kash Patel, defended his decision to shut down a public corruption squad and fire its assigned agents after a report disclosed that it helped a former special counsel, Jack Smith, “spy” on several Republican senators and a congressman by analyzing their phone records, stressing it was a sign that “accountability is coming.”

“You’re darn right I fired those agents. You’re darn right I blew up CR-15, the public corruption squad that led the weaponization at the Washington Field Office. We’re just warming up,” Mr. Patel said during an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday night. 

On Monday, Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican of Iowa, released a redacted 2023 internal FBI document that confirmed the FBI’s CR-15 squad, the public corruption unit based out of the unit’s Washington Field Office, conducted  a preliminary analysis on “limited tolls records” tied to Senators Mike Kelly, Lindsey Graham, Tommy Tuberville, and Marsha Blackburn as part of Mr. Smith’s “Arctic Frost” operation against President Trump over his efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 election. 

A “limited tolls” analysis means the FBI pulled the phone records of the senators to see who they’d spoken to at a period on or around January 6, 2021. The FBI would not know what was said on the calls — that would have required a judge-approved wiretap before the phone calls took place.

“Based on the evidence to-date, Arctic Frost and related weaponization by federal law enforcement under Biden was arguably worse than Watergate,” Mr. Grassley, 92, said in a statement.

The document was situated in a “Prohibited Access” file system the FBI uses for sensitive investigations and high-profile cases, restricting access to these files within the bureau.

Speaking with Mr. Hannity on Tuesday night, Mr. Patel blamed prior FBI and Department of Justice leadership, accusing them of “weaponizing” investigations against Mr. Trump and his allies.

“They took this information where they subpoenaed eight sitting United States senators, put it in a lockbox, put that lockbox in a vault, and then put that vault in a cyber place where no one can see or search these files,” Mr. Patel told Fox News.

Mr. Smith filed four felony counts against Mr. Trump in U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., in 2023, accusing him of illegally trying to overturn the election. Mr. Smith suffered a major defeat last year when the Supreme Court ruled that the president is immune from prosecution for official acts. The charges against Mr. Trump were dismissed, at Mr. Smith’s request, after Mr. Trump won the 2024 presidential election.

Now the Trump administration is probing what it calls the weaponization of the Biden and Obama justice departments against Mr. Trump, his aides, and MAGA conservatives. 

On Fox on Tuesday evening, Mr. Patel argued that his FBI predecessors stored their files on the GOP senators’ calls in Prohibitive Access “when you want to hide it from the world.”

In June, a retired FBI agent, F.X. Regan, said the FBI’s general use of Prohibitive Access files was not an indication of something “inherently sinister.”

“The number of Prohibited Access cases is probably very small. Almost all are intelligence cases that will never see the inside of a courtroom. And they are Prohibited for a good reason — national security,” Mr. Regan said on X.

Others have argued that Mr. Grassley’s report was “not even news.”

MSNBC’s justice and intelligence correspondent, Ken Dilanian, told network host Nicolle Wallace that Mr. Grassley’s report, and the ensuing outrage it generated, were “an insidious triumph of right-wing propaganda.”

An author and former federal prosecutor, Jeffrey Toobin, told CNN, “Jack Smith cites these conversations in his report. So this is not like he was trying to keep this a secret. And remember what Smith was investigating.He was investigating Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the election through the use of fake electors in Congress.”  

Shortly after the report’s release, Mr. Patel announced on X he had dismantled the “corrupt CR-15 squad” and “fired those who acted unethically.” FBI leadership had already shut down that squad in May and reassigned its agents to other units as part of a reorganization of its Washington Field Office. It’s not clear how many personnel were terminated.

Earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Patel appeared on Fox News with the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, during their tour of the FBI’s Chicago field office. He defended the FBI’s increased involvement in illegal immigration enforcement.

“The environment here in Chicago needs a focused effort, not just on crushing violent crime, but also, removing the illegal aliens that are correlated to that violent crime,” Mr. Patel told Fox News.

An ex-FBI agent and a member of “The Suspendables,” Kyle Seraphin, who has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Patel’s, chided “FBI Director Valhalla ‘Pretend Patel’” for wearing a customized “Kash Patel, Director” jacket and an FBI Chicago SWAT baseball cap during an earlier interview with Fox News on Tuesday.

“I hope they all traded challenge coins,” Mr. Seraphin said on X, referring to recent pictures of Mr. Patel’s personalized medallion in the shape of the skull logo of the Punisher, a Marvel character and vigilante, complete with spiders in the eye sockets, two revolvers, and a “K$H” logo.

“Seriously… it’s a non-stop LARP with this guy,” Mr. Seraphin said on X.