FBI Director Kash Patel throws temper tantrum after news reports of his private jet use

So just how bad is Kash Patel's leadership at the FBI? It is so bad that with his latest chaotic firings, the FBI Agents Association, which represents 14,000 agents, including more than 90% of all active FBI agents, has issued a blistering public rebuke, calling Kash Patel's actions, quote, erratic and arbitrary retribution. As a part of the ongoing purge at the FBI, several agents who worked on investigations related to Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election results were fired by Kash Patel earlier this week, then reinstated after pushback from none other than acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, only to be fired again by Kash Patel the next morning. After that nonsensical and arbitrary whiplash, an FBI Agents Association spokesperson telling Axios that the firings, quote, highlight the chaos that occurs when longstanding policies and processes are ignored. An agent simply being assigned to an investigation and conducting it appropriately within the law should never be grounds for termination. Quote, FBI agents deal in facts, and we urge Director Patel to do the same. When leadership abandons due process, it doesn't just erode trust. It makes the American public less safe. FBI agents must be free to focus on protecting the American people, not fear losing their jobs over third party social media posts. Joining our coverage, former assistant special agent in charge at the FBI, MSNBC national security and intelligence analyst Michael Feinberg. He's also a fellow at Lawfare, former top official at the Department of Justice and MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissman is also back with us. Michael, this is, in substance, a lot of the things we've heard from you in your first post in Lawfare and on your appearances on this show. But just tell me the significance of it coming from the association that represents 90 percent of the active duty agents. This statement is actually quite extraordinary, and it's for reasons that may not at first be obvious to the general public. FBI agents, for a variety of reasons and a variety of statutes, do not have access to a lot of the mechanisms other federal employees have to protect their rights and their livelihood. FBI agents cannot unionize. Most of them do not have access to the Merit Systems Protection Board. There are different whistleblower procedures for FBI employees than there are for general government employees. As a result, the only means that FBI agents have to protect their own interests is through the FBI Agents Association. Now, because of that, the FBI Agents Association recognizes and always has that it is only as valuable as it is able to influence and regularly meet with the director or the deputy director of the organization. So they have always bent over backwards to never directly criticize the director or directly antagonize him. The fact that they are willing to draw this line in the sand and come out with language as strong as that statement does really shows that things are much more dire for the workforce than we even imagined. And can you just give me your analysis based on what they say and what you know about whether there is a tipping point dynamic, whether it is firing the agent who had knowledge of the use of the private jet, or whether it is the cumulative hollowing out of the FBI that inspired this very rare rebuke for all the reasons you described as being rare? I think the FBI workforce really got amped up to a state of panic when then acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove requested and then demanded the names of every single agent who worked on a January 6th investigation. As you know, FBI agents do not get to choose what cases they work on. They're assigned to them. So the notion that a line agent would be punished simply for doing his or her job was really a shock to the system. And what we've seen since then is things get worse. Agents and executives are getting fired left and right for random and political reasons. Everybody knows that agents have been fired because they worked on investigations into Donald Trump and his associates. What they might not realize is that other agents have been erroneously fired because the administration read on Twitter that Agent Smith or Agent Jones also worked on that case, even though that's not true. So, in addition to assigned agents who investigated Trump being fired, agents who've just gotten in the crosshairs of random posters on Twitter are in the same boat. There is a random element that is terrifying. Andrew Heisman, it would be traumatic, to use Russ Vogt's word, for any workforce. It feels like it is catastrophic for the one in charge of law enforcement, for every American. And I want to show you how small ball obsessed they are. These are Kash Patel's public statements about the use of a private jet. I'm not the defund everything guy. I'm just saying Chris Ray doesn't need a government funded G5 jet to go to vacation. Maybe we ground that plane. 15,000 every time it takes off. We're not the guys running around on private jets. And somebody maybe in Congress should ask for how many flights on a private jet Director Comey took, or my predecessor, Director Ray took, and how many personal trips they took. And this is reporting in Bloomberg, quote, FBI oust leader as Patel fumes over attention to agency jet use, which he very publicly there thrust into the news himself, quote, the FBI forced out a senior official overseeing aviation shortly after Director Kash Patel grew outraged about revelations of his publicly available jet log indicating he'd flown to see his musician girlfriend perform. That's according to three people familiar with the situation. Stephen Palmer, a 27 year veteran of the FBI, became the third head of the critical incident response group, which includes FBI pilots to be fired or removed in Kash Patel short regime, adding to a year filled with retribution terminations. It's getting harder and harder to pull out and not flatten what is a drumbeat of purges and firings from the FBI and the Department of Justice. But this single example of hypocrisy of a government official doing the thing he went on TV and attacked other government officials of doing and then the retribution he carried out because flight logs became public that are publicly available. Nobody leaked them. What do you make of both this incident and the rebuke from the Agents Association? Well, let's just start with the rebuke, because that's the more serious issue. I think people need to just step back and say, when you have a director of the FBI, you want their loyalty to be to the safety of the American people. You want them to be thinking about having the best agents, analysts and staff at the FBI possible. And that is just simply not what we are seeing. There still has not been an after action after the what appeared by all accounts to be the clown show of how the FBI handled the Charlie Kirk assassination, when you would normally expect the FBI to be showing itself at its absolute best. And the reports of what Kash Patel were doing were truly outrageous. And for me, having been trained by Robert Mueller, I was trained in, if you make mistakes, you own up, you have reports, you do a whole after action of what happened, how are we going to deal with this better? And this is just the absolute contrary result, which is firing people for political reasons. And then the plane, there's a whole protocol for how that's supposed to be dealt with, with the General Counsel signing off on that. And it appears that none of that is happening for this to come out this way, for Kash Patel to be handling it in this fashion.