Before they took control of the F.B.I., the bureau’s two top leaders, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, were some of the agency’s most rabid critics, attacking it at every turn for years.
But now that they are running the agency, the two men have pulled a kind of bait-and-switch: In recent emails to thousands of F.B.I. employees, they have sought to use the bureau’s damaged reputation — a reputation that they themselves helped tear down — as a rationale for bringing reforms to the supposedly broken organization.
“Over the past few years, the F.B.I.’s reputation has been damaged in the eyes of our employers, the American people,” Mr. Patel wrote on Wednesday in one of the messages. “I know each of you, serving across this great nation, are tackling cases that will further the betterment of the communities in which you live and work.”
“Times of change can be uneasy, but they are necessary,” he went on. “Business as usual is no longer business as usual.”
Absent from Mr. Patel’s communications with his 38,000 employees was any mention of the persistent assaults that he himself has launched against the F.B.I. over the years.
Before he ascended to the post of F.B.I. director, Mr. Patel repeatedly distorted the facts about the bureau’s investigation of Russian meddling into President Trump’s 2016 campaign. He has also been a central purveyor of conspiracy theories, accusing federal agents of having helped instigate the attack by Mr. Trump’s supporters on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
This tactic of officials campaigning to restore trust in public institutions that they themselves helped to damage has been used before by Mr. Trump and his allies. After Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election, he and his supporters promoted widespread lies that the race was marred by fraud, only to use their own false statements as a basis for their efforts to overturn the vote count.
Mr. Patel’s email described what many F.B.I. agents believed they have been doing all along, even before he took control of the bureau: Investigating possible violations of federal laws. And they say that nothing has changed since Mr. Patel took the helm, though they are deeply worried about the current leadership and whether the bureau will tackle cases that could lead to a clash with the White House.
In offering agents extensive praise for the work that they were already doing, the email also seemed like a tacit acknowledgment that Mr. Patel was trying to do more to win the trust and loyalty of his skeptical subordinates.
Luke William Hunt, a professor at the University of Alabama and a former F.B.I. agent who testified Wednesday before a congressional subcommittee examining the bureau, said Mr. Bongino’s comments were a stretch of the imagination.
“‘Disregard everything I said,’” Mr. Hunt said. “‘I am now a straight shooter.’ That’s laughable. It would be foolish or naïve to believe a statement like that. You’re asking an F.B.I. agent, who looks at the evidence, to believe that everything that is on print or on video is not representative of who they are.”
It remains unclear, even 30 days after Mr. Patel arrived at the F.B.I. what sorts of changes he intends to carry out. He has moved senior executives into new jobs and current and former agents applauded some of those choices.
But some of those moves appear at odds with Mr. Patel’s past derision of the F.B.I.’s aggressive approach to Jan. 6. The new assistant director Mr. Patel named to run the Washington field office, Steven J. Jensen, was in charge of the bureau’s domestic terrorism operations section on that day, and he played a key role in responding to the attack on the Capitol.
Mr. Jensen was also responsible for establishing a system to monitor incidents of violence at school board meetings across the country as potential acts of domestic terrorism — one of the most serious complaints that Mr. Patel himself had about the F.B.I. under the Biden administration.In his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters,” Mr. Patel wrote that the Justice Department targeted parents who pushed back against “programs to teach their children vile and hateful race theory.” The department, Mr. Patel said, “justified its threatening campaign against parents in a memo that labeled these law-abiding citizens as ‘domestic terrorists’.”
Mr. Patel’s email reminisces about the F.B.I. that he “fell in love with” but now had lost its way. He riffs on special agents “who without fear or favor, pushed through whatever roadblocks to secure righteous investigations of those who had abused the public trust and treasure.”
The previous director, Christopher A. Wray, who stepped down before Mr. Trump could fire him, said exactly the same thing as Mr. Patel. During his seven years running the agency, he urged agents to conduct investigations the “right way, every time.”
“It means conducting investigations without fear or favor, and it means not pursuing investigations when the proper predication is not there,” Mr. Wray said in December when he announced he was leaving.
In his email, Mr. Patel laments that special agents “whose word was beyond reproach — whose cases, that as prosecutor, I knew had meticulously met and documented proof of the elements of the crimes.”
The assertion is notable given the criticism Mr. Patel has leveled at the bureau over its search of Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate after he left office. He suggested in his book there was no reason to do so and accused the judge who approved the search warrant of being biased. “The Mar-a-Lago raid makes Watergate look like the teacup ride at Disney World,” he wrote.
But F.B.I. agents and prosecutors obtained a court-approved search warrant because Mr. Trump repeatedly refused to comply with the government’s requests to return they documents that officials said were classified.
All along Trump allies of the F.B.I. have complained that the Jan. 6 defendants were denied due process in hundreds of court cases, casting them as political prisoners. In reality, they were allowed to fight their charges in the same way as all criminal defendants do but did not like the outcome.
Indeed, one of Mr. Patel’s favorite targets was the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation known as Crossfire Hurricane that scrutinized whether any Trump associates had conspired with Russia during the 2016 campaign.
Serious mistakes were made in that investigation, and agents were disciplined for botching applications to secretly obtain a surveillance warrant. But the Justice Department’s inspector general found that its agents had good reason to open Crossfire Hurricane.
A lengthy investigation by a special counsel appointed under Mr. Trump, John H. Durham, accused the F.B.I. of “confirmation bias.” Still, in his final report, Mr. Durham said that “as an initial matter, there is no question that the F.B.I. had an affirmative obligation to closely examine” the tip that prompted the investigation.
Mr. Durham charged no high-level F.B.I. or intelligence official with a crime and acknowledged in a footnote that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign also did nothing prosecutable.
Mr. Hunt acknowledged that the agency was “not a perfect institution” but emphasized the role conservative critics had played in undermining the bureau. “But all of those investigations that the right has wanted to make a big deal about are based on proper predictions — by that I mean there were specific and articulable facts that justified investigating those matters.”
