FBI’s Top Leaders Said to Be Expecting Demotions From Kash Patel

Up to six top FBI executives have been told to expect reassignments if Kash Patel is confirmed as director, part of a wider overhaul at an agency President Donald Trump has derided as partisan, said four people familiar with the process.

The six executive assistant directors, who work alongside the director on the seventh floor of the FBI’s headquarters, have been informed that potentially all of them would be removed by Patel, whose nomination will be considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday.

An FBI spokesperson declined to comment, and a spokeswoman for Patel didn’t immediately provide a response.

The moves would leave Patel, a Trump loyalist who’s never worked at the FBI, without veteran senior managers with experience overseeing the US response to a variety of domestic and international threats.

It’s not clear if all six executive assistant directors would be transferred or if Patel wants to reassign just some of them, said the individuals, who spoke on condition of anonymity to divulge private conversations. At a minimum, Patel intends to oust top national security executive Robert Wells.

If enacted as planned, the shakeup would eliminate a team of officials handling active terrorist, cyber, and other threats. Unlike the reassignments of senior Justice Department officials this past week, the FBI leaders in talks for removal aren’t being singled out for their involvement in investigations of Trump, the people said.

Rather, the reassignments—which would likely lead to resignations—would mark an opening salvo in Patel’s wider plans to shrink the FBI’s Washington headquarters.

“I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state,” Patel said on the Shawn Ryan Show podcast after Trump’s reelection.

The executive assistant directors anticipating their departures from the seventh-floor leadership team are in charge of six branches: national security; criminal; intelligence; science and technology; information and technology; and human resources.

Two other senior executives on that floor—acting Director Brian Driscoll and acting Deputy Director Robert Kissane—are expected to remain on Patel’s leadership team, two of the people said. Both are FBI veterans who were installed on Jan. 20 following Trump’s swearing in.

The planned shakeups would further alarm a Bureau that’s been concerned about Patel’s impact on national security and FBI independence. Although some agency veterans have shared Patel’s criticism of a bloated bureaucracy in Washington, the sudden removals of its uppermost managers would be an additional blow to morale, the individuals said.

“People are stunned and upset,” said one former FBI official, citing Wells’ potential departure in particular. “Bobby is known across the FBI as the best of the best” and “moving him sends a terrible message to the workforce: if you make sacrifices for the FBI” then “the FBI and DOJ still might not take care of you.”

Before the exit of former Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Director Paul Abbate, Wells was in line to receive the appointment of deputy director, two people said. He’s been at the Bureau for 22 years and oversaw the FBI’s investigation into the attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania last July.