Patel aims to protect civil liberties, reform the FBI to prevent serial weaponized spying

Director Kash Patel says his team is working on implementing new civil liberties protections at the FBI and touted his effort to refocus the bureau after confirmation that the investigative agency collected expansive phone data on Republican senators, House members, staff, and White House officials. 

He said his team has, or is currently working on, implementing new civil liberties protections at the FBI and touted his effort to refocus the bureau on its core mission. 

“We’ve ended that regime,” Patel told Just the News in a wide-ranging interview with the Just the News, No Noise TV show which aired on Wednesday. 

30 million lines of telephone data

Earlier this month, Just the News reported that the FBI collected call data on Republican senators and one House member as part of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6 Capitol riot. 

Just the News also reported on Tuesday that congressional investigators had collected 30 million lines of phone data mapping contacts between conservatives and the Trump White House in the name of investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol breach. The data was later offered to the bureau on the eve of the 2024 election. 

Patel: “It is law enforcement first"

“We've already implemented changes. We've already informed Congress we won't be grabbing their cell phone records or their staff or cell phone records for just a sense of weaponization,” Patel said. 

He told Just the News a big part of preventing these abuses in the future is refocusing the agency on its core mission, to enforce the law and investigate crimes. 

“So the good news about this FBI, it is mission focused,” Patel said. “It is law enforcement first, and it doesn't matter if you're red or blue or in between, or where you live, we are going to come in and root out not just criminality, but corruption in every single town in this country.”

Internal documents unearthed by Patel’s FBI and turned over to Congress showed that Special Counsel Smith obtained the phone records from eight senators and one House member in President Trump’s orbit. 

Grassley: “worse than Watergate”

The record, which was from 2023, indicated that investigators at the bureau had “conducted preliminary toll analysis on limited toll records” tied to phone calls related to GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham, Bill Hagerty, Josh Hawley, Dan Sullivan, Tommy Tuberville, Ron Johnson, Cynthia Lummis, Marsha Blackburn, and GOP Rep. Mike Kelly.

The senator who obtained the records, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley, said the data provided details about “when and to whom a call is made, as well as the duration and general location data of the call" although not the contents of the calls themselves, Just the News reported. 

Grassley called the abuse “worse than Watergate.” The bureau’s Arctic Frost investigation was originated by now-former FBI assistant special agent in charge Timothy Thibault of the Washington Field Office. As Grassley and his colleague, Sen. Ron Johnson, revealed in records released in January, Thibault “authored the initial language for what ultimately became Jack Smith’s federal case against Trump regarding the 2020 presidential election.” 

Thibault retired from the bureau in 2022 after his anti-Trump social media postings were revealed.

The senators also revealed in March that the FBI’s Arctic Frost investigation “acquired the government cell phones of President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence, among other government officials.”

Declassification a priority

Patel said the sweep of the officials’ phone records, which were part of an investigation codenamed Arctic Frost, which dove into making a case that Trump and his associates conspired to overturn the 2020 election results. It is only the latest example of repeated long-time exercises of abuse of power through weaponization. 

The pattern, he indicated, dates back to the documented abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was weaponized against Trump and his campaign in 2015 and 2016 for an imagined election collusion with Russia. 

Patel has made getting to the bottom of those abuses a key part of his tenure as FBI director. At the behest of President Donald Trump, Patel already declassified a host of documents tied to the bureau's deeply flawed and politically-motivated Trump-Russia inquiry known as "Crossfire Hurricane" back in April.

In July, the court which oversees FISA and approves warrants quietly approved a Justice Department request to review information tied to the FISA warrants that targeted former Trump campaign associate Carter Page as part of the bureau’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Russia collusion allegations. 

“We're never going to be participating in any of that and some of the reforms we've implemented on FISA and so many other corrupt institutions that were weaponized by the likes of [former FBI Director] Comey and [FBI agent Peter] Strzok and [Lisa] Page and so many others. We've ended that regime,” Patel said.