With Rare Candor, FBI Employees Sound Alarms about Kash Patel’s Leadership

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KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2026

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s been nearly a year since Kash Patel took the helm of the FBI, a period New York Times reporter Emily Bazelon says has been “marred by vendettas, mismanagement and meltdowns.” The New York Times spoke to 45 current and former FBI officials, who describe a traditionally independent agency now captured and weaponized by the White House. The officials say the FBI’s new emphasis on immigration, over counterterrorism and cybersecurity, is making America less safe. We’ll talk to a former Los Angeles field officer and to Bazelon, whose new piece is “A Year Inside Kash Patel’s F.B.I.” Guests: Emily Bazelon, staff writer, The New York Times Magazine; Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law, Yale Law School; co-host, Slate's “Political Gabfest” Jill Fields, former supervisory intelligence analyst for violent crime in the Los Angeles field office, FBI Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:40.1	Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.
0:49.3	As New York Times Magazine reporter Emily Bazelon points out in her investigation of the FBI after one year of Cash Patel's leadership,
0:57.8	quote, the FBI is a rule-bound institution that prohibits its active employees from speaking to the press without authorization.
1:05.5	Forty-five people who currently work at the Bureau or who left during President Trump's second term spoke to us anyway,
1:09.3	a sign of the extreme alarm reverberating through the agency.
1:13.1	Among those who left was Jill Fields,
1:20.0	former supervisory intelligence analyst for violent crime in Los Angeles's field office. And Jill joins us now. Welcome to Forum, Jill. Yes, hi. Apologies, problems with the microphone. Thank you so
1:26.5	much for having me today. Well, we really appreciate
1:29.2	you being on with us. Tell me, what kind of work did you do at the FBI? So I actually had a varied
1:36.9	career with the FBI. I started out working in the counterterrorism mission, working mainly international terrorism terrorism but in the United States.
1:48.9	So the homegrown violent extremists that we were seeing a lot of the problems with
1:52.7	in the late teens. And I was the FBI's liaison officer to CIA to their counterterrorism mission center for two years
2:04.5	right before the drawdown in Afghanistan.
2:08.0	And then when I moved back to Los Angeles, I was hired as a supervisory intelligence analyst,
2:13.8	and I shifted over to the violent crimes program.
2:16.8	So you were looking at your fugitive programs
2:20.7	and also your transnational organized crime program. So your cartels and your big organized crime
	...

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