Inside the Leaked FBI Report That Calls Kash Patel’s Bureau a “Rudderless Ship”

A 115-page internal assessment sent to Congress describes an FBI adrift under Kash Patel, where image management beats actual law enforcement.

The picture that emerges from a newly leaked internal FBI report is not subtle. Agents describe the Bureau under Director Kash Patel as “a rudderless ship” and “all f–ked up,” a place where morale is collapsing, investigations are politicized, and leadership is more interested in personal branding than basic competence.

This is not coming from Trump’s critics on cable news. It is coming from Patel’s own agents, speaking under protection of anonymity in a 115-page assessment prepared for the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, then obtained by the New York Post and confirmed by other outlets.

At the center of the report is a single, alarming question: what happens when the country’s top law enforcement agency is handed to a political loyalist who treats the job like a stage set?

A Bureau “All F–ked Up”

According to reporting on the document, the internal assessment gathers interviews and statements from two dozen current and former FBI agents. Their language is blunt. They say the FBI under Patel is “in over his head,” “all f–ked up,” and lacking the basic steadiness the position demands.

One agent, who is quoted as calling Patel “personable and likable,” still concludes that he “created a culture of mistrust and uncertainty among the ranks,” describing a leadership team that purged seasoned officials without a clear plan for what came next.

The report describes a department destabilized from the top. Within months of taking over, Patel removed the widely respected acting FBI director Brian Driscoll and dismissed senior special agent Walter Giardina shortly after Giardina’s wife died of cancer. Agents portray these moves as political loyalty tests that gutted institutional memory at the exact moment the Bureau was dealing with overlapping crises, including domestic extremism cases and high-profile political violence.

What replaces experience in a structure like that is not reform. It is vacuum. And that is exactly what the internal report suggests has taken hold.

Cosplay Leadership in a Murder Investigation

The most humiliating anecdote in the report describes Patel’s behavior after the assassination of pro-Trump commentator Charlie Kirk, a killing that shook the far right and triggered intense law enforcement scrutiny.

According to the leaked assessment, Patel flew into Provo on an FBI jet after the shooting and then refused to get off the plane until staff found him an FBI raid jacket in his size. Agents who were actively working the murder case were ordered to stop what they were doing and search for a jacket that fit, eventually locating a women’s medium to satisfy the director’s demands. Only then, the report says, did Patel step onto the tarmac, at which point he complained about the sleeves and the Velcro patches.

The episode reads like satire. It is also deadly serious. In the middle of a high-stakes assassination investigation, the top official in the Bureau allegedly treated the crime scene like a photo opportunity. Agents quoted in the report connect that behavior to something larger: a director more focused on image, public relations, and social media than on case work and internal discipline.

The same section says Patel and his deputy, former Secret Service agent and conservative media figure Dan Bongino, are viewed inside the Bureau as “arrogant” and “obsessed with social media,” with a pattern of taking public credit for work done by field offices and partner agencies.

When that criticism comes from the rank and file in an anonymous workplace survey, you can dismiss it as grumbling. When it appears in a lengthy internal assessment prepared for congressional oversight and then leaked, you are looking at a full-blown confidence crisis.

How Trump’s Loyalty Politics Landed Here

Kash Patel did not appear out of nowhere. He rose through Trump-world as a reliable attack dog on investigations that touched the former president, most visibly while working to undermine the Russia probe and later as a public critic of the intelligence community’s handling of classified records and January 6 investigations.

When Trump returned to the White House, promoting a loyalist with that profile to the FBI’s top job sent a clear signal. Oversight would be filtered through political grievance. Investigations that threatened Trump and his allies would be treated with suspicion. Internal scrutiny of law enforcement power would likely give way to internal policing of ideological conformity.

The leaked report does not claim that every decision inside the Bureau is now political. It does something more specific and, in some ways, more damning. Agents describe an organization that has been hollowed out by turnover, confused by erratic directives, and increasingly driven by public relations instincts rather than investigative discipline.

That kind of breakdown is not abstract. It has consequences for everything from counterintelligence operations to hate-crime investigations to the handling of politically explosive cases like the Charlie Kirk assassination.

When leadership burns internal credibility, every controversial decision looks like bias, even when it is not. That is how you get an FBI described from within as “rudderless” at the exact moment it is at the center of multiple national crises.

A Conservative Paper Sounds the Alarm

One of the most striking parts of this story is where it appears. The internal assessment was first reported by the New York Post’s Miranda Devine, a columnist who has spent years defending Trump and attacking the pre-Patel FBI as part of a supposed anti-Trump “deep state.”

When someone in that camp publishes a detailed internal indictment of the Trump-aligned leadership now running the Bureau, it tells you something has snapped. Devine’s column quotes extensively from the report and describes a pattern of mismanagement, morale collapse, and distractions that echo what other outlets, including Mediaite and Yahoo News, have now confirmed.

Right-leaning commentators have already seized on the story to argue that Trump’s team is preparing to scapegoat Patel and Bongino, suggesting that when even a Murdoch paper is printing language like “rudderless ship” about the FBI, it often signals that a purge is coming.

Whether that is true or not, the fact remains: a conservative media ecosystem that once portrayed the FBI as an anti-Trump enemy is now airing a devastating review of the Bureau under Trump’s own appointee. That is not a partisan attack. That is a warning flare.

Why This Matters Beyond Inside Baseball

It would be easy for people outside Washington to treat this as internal drama at an agency that already spends too much time in the headlines. That would be a mistake.

The FBI director oversees cases that touch almost every arena of American life. Domestic extremism. Cyberattacks. Organized crime. Public corruption. Violent threats against election workers and public officials. When that office is described by its own agents as incoherent, unstable, and driven by self-promotion, the risk does not stay inside the Hoover Building. It spills outward.

There is another layer here. The report arrives in a political environment where Trump and his allies are promising to weaponize the Justice Department and FBI against perceived enemies, from political opponents to journalists. A director who is perceived as a loyalist rather than an independent steward gives those threats teeth. If people inside the Bureau already believe the place is “all f–ked up,” they are less likely to resist orders that cross ethical and legal lines.

And for the public, every new scandal deepens the cynicism that justice is just another brand. That is how you get a country where half of the voters think the FBI is out to get them, and the other half thinks the FBI is working as a personal security detail for the president.

The Question Now Facing Congress

Members of Congress on both Judiciary Committees now have this report and the responsibility that comes with it. The choices in front of them are simple to describe and hard to execute.

They can treat this as a partisan weapon and use it only when it hurts the other side. That is the default setting in Washington. Or they can do what the document actually demands and treat it as a serious internal alarm about the health of one of the most powerful institutions in the country. That would mean real oversight hearings, testimony from the authors and signatories, and pressure not just on Patel but on the White House that put him there.

The agents who spoke up did not risk their careers to feed a one-day news cycle. They created a record. They documented specific incidents, personnel decisions, and cultural failures. They described what it feels like to work inside an FBI where investigations collide with social media strategy and where the director treats an assassination scene like wardrobe prep.

If Congress does nothing with that, it is not just Patel’s leadership that is on trial. It is the entire system that pretends to police him.

References

Devine, M. (2025, November 30). Damning report labels FBI “rudderless ship” under Kash Patel. New York Post. Retrieved from

Griffing, A. (2025, December 1). Kash Patel gets absolutely smoked in shocking report for GOP-led committees: “All f–ked up.” Mediaite. Retrieved from

Yahoo News Staff. (2025, December 1). Kash Patel blasted in leaked internal FBI report. Yahoo News. Retrieved from

Goodman, J. (2025, December 1). Report labels Kash Patel’s FBI a “rudderless ship.” Joe. My. God. Retrieved from

Contreras, M. [@mayatcontreras]. (2025, December 1). The Patel-led FBI is described in the 115-page report as a “rudderless ship” and “all f–ked up.” X (formerly Twitter).

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