Whatever They Think of Kash Patel, Ex-FBI Agents Agree: Change Is Needed

The FBI that Lewis Schiliro remembers, the one he has always believed in and devoted 25 years of his career to, investigates facts. It takes risks and pursues leads, unspoiled by political motivations or personal grievances.Mr. Schiliro hails from a generation of agents that helped propel the bureau away from J. Edgar Hoover’s Machiavellian tenure and into its modern age.By the time he retired in 2000 as the assistant director at the New York City office, the FBI had become a sophisticated investigative agency that found its footing in organized crime and terrorism cases. Mr. Schiliro pursued Sicilian heroin traffickers in the Pizza Connection case and oversaw major counterterrorism investigations, including the probe of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In his mind, it was the street agents in the bureau’s fifty-plus field offices, not the power-hungry bureaucrats working in the FBI’s headquarters at Washington D.C., who propelled the bureau to what he says was a “special time” in its 116-year history.But to many FBI veterans, the bureau has become unrecognizable. Controversial investigations of President Trump like “Russiagate” and the Mar-a-Lago classified documents affair have, in many former agents’ minds, put the FBI at the center of an embarrassing political spectacle. To them, these investigations are anathema to how the bureau should operate.Lewis Schiliro. FBI“The Bureau took on the five New York (crime) families, and for the most part, had a huge influence in it. We traveled to East Africa and did bombing cases,” said Schiliro. “(These were) hundreds of cases that were built on the blood, sweat and tears of the agents that went out on those cases.”He added: “The bureau exists in the people. It doesn’t exist in the director, the people in Washington, or all those a******s.”Now that Kash Patel, President Trump’s controversial nominee for FBI Director, could soon take the helm of the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency, change is on the horizon.A bigger question emerges: just how extreme, and potentially destructive, Mr. Patel’s agenda will be on the Bureau and its 37,000 employees?Former FBI Director James Comey speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in December 2018. AP/J. Scott Applewhite, fileA Bureau That’s Lost Its Way“There’s a myriad of things that the bureau has done in recent years that we would have never, ever have done,” says Edwin J. Sharp, former head of the bureau’s organized crime section in the 1970s who is now retired.Mr. Sharp pointed to James B. Comey’s time as FBI director when, he said, investigations were seemingly micromanaged by high-ranking officials who put politics above service. Mr. Comey notoriously inserted himself into the 2016 presidential campaign, and his subsequent firing by Trump helped lay the grounds for the highly politicized Russia investigation.Consequently, Mr. Schiliro says he fears that the bureau has lost the trust of the American public. His fears are not unfounded — recent polling shows that just 41 percent of Americans have trust in the FBI, down from 59 percent in 2014. He points to the FBI’s investigations in recent years of both President Trump and President Biden’s handling of classified documents as contributing to the erosion of public trust in what’s supposed to be America’s premier law enforcement agency.Lewis Schiliro during the African embassy bombings investigation. Lewis Schiliro“In the American public’s opinion, of course, they see a dual system where perhaps one (President) gets a search and the other one gets a tap on the shoulder,” says Mr. Schiliro, referring to the much-criticized FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago versus the kid glove treatment given to Mr. Biden.The Bureau, many of its former agents agree, is in desperate need of change.Retributive ReformIn his first appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, Mr. Patel said that, if confirmed as the ninth Director of the FBI, he would “remain focused on the FBI’s core mission … to investigate fully wherever there is a constitutional factual basis to do so.”Kash Patel, former chief of staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, speaks at a rally. AP/José Luis VillegasHis promise was far more restrained, and less retributive than his earlier calls for action against those within the Bureau and the “Executive Branch deep state” who’d sought to undermine, and later even imprison, Mr. Trump. Throughout the hearing, Mr. Patel, though scrappy and combative, distanced himself from some of the harsh rhetoric in his past, promising that, under his leadership, “all FBI employees will be protected from political retribution.”In his 2023 book “Government Gangsters,” Mr. Patel criticized “the rot at the core of the FBI” that he claimed was “an existential threat to our republican form of government.”One recently retired agent, who asked to remain nameless, strongly disagrees with Mssrs. Patel and Schiliro’s different characterizations of a Bureau in turmoil.“The post-9/11 FBI is stronger and will be in good hands with the newest generation of agents who are better trained and just as dedicated,” says the agent, pointing to drastic improvements in both the flow of information and the Bureau’s IT infrastructure.Lewis Schiliro with John P. O’Neill. Lewis Schiliro “Most, if not all of the critics are removed from the reality of the current FBI,” he adds.Lately, there seems to be infinitely more FBI critics than supporters, both within and outside the Bureau’s ranks.To restore trust, Mr. Schiliro argues that the Bureau needs to take control away from Washington and put it back into its 55 field offices.“When I knock on your door at 11 at night and I say, ‘I’m with the FBI, I need to ask you a question,’ you’ve got to trust me,” says Mr. Schiliro.In his op-ed on Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Patel wrote that he would restore the public’s confidence through “two foundational steps: let good cops be good cops” and “transparency is essential.”Letting “good cops” do their jobs means supporting agents in the field, not burdening them with excessive oversight, says Mr. Schiliro.Mr. Patel has pledged to bolster “the presence of field agents across the nation” and streamline “operations at headquarters.” Whether Mr. Patel, a former Trump aide with no previous experience in the Bureau, will stay true to his word, and whether he will be beholden to 37,000 and not to the President who picked him for FBI Director, remains to be seen.“The bottom line is everybody at the FBI works for the street agent who’s making cases,” says former Special Agent in Charge of the El Paso Field Office, Ed Guevara, who retired from the FBI in 2001. “That’s the whole purpose.”

Whatever They Think of Kash Patel, Ex-FBI Agents Agree: Change Is Needed

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