Influential retired FBI leader says agents back Kash Patel as next director: ‘He's the right fix’

As Democrats try to stymie President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for FBI Director, an influential retired bureau supervisor says a large number of agents support Kash Patel for the job because of his national security experience and his vision to replace the law enforcement agency’s leadership who allowed politics to usurp crime fighting.

“This guy is completely and 100% qualified to run that organization. He's what's needed today. He's the right fix,” retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent Jeff Danik told Just the News in a wide-ranging interview Monday.

While Democrats and news media critics have suggested that Patel was selected to be a loyalist seeking revenge on Trump foes, Danik noted Patel's extensive career experience, which includes stints as a federal public defender, federal prosecutor, counterterrorism director at the National Security Council, senior counsel to the House Intelligence Committee and chief of staff to both the Defense Secretary and the Director of National Intelligence.

“He has the correct balance, in my view, having been there for almost 30 years,” Danik said of Patel. “He has the correct balance of prosecutor, which is what we do. We feed the prosecution tube. Defense attorney, so the other side of that coin. Intelligence, the intelligence agencies, which is a key element to the FBI's either success or failure.

"And then also, I think this is personal, that he's been a victim himself of the system,” Danik said. “And the combination of those things uniquely qualifies him beyond his, you know, substantial accomplishments.”

Those accomplishments, Just the News confirmed, include two major government awards for Patel’s work on national security during the Obama administration.

The recognitions included a 2017 Assistant Attorney General’s award of excellence for Patel’s prosecution of 12 Al-Shabab terrorists who killed 72 and injured dozens more with suicide bombings targeting sports fans watching a 2010 FIFA World Cup soccer match at two locations in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. They also include a Central Intelligence Agency Award for Human Intelligence Gathering for his work combating terrorism in East Africa.

Patel mentioned both awards in a lawsuit he filed against a news media organization back in 2019 and they were confirmed by government officials who spoke to Just the News. 

Cleaning house

Danik’s full-throated endorsement of Patel is significant, since he is a popular figure in the FBI retiree community as an accomplished bureau supervisor in the Miami area known to help and counsel agents currently on the job.

“I talk to agents all the time. I'm constantly involved with helping them, counseling them through tough times, or helping on the job or just after retirement,” Danik said during an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “And there's a large group that are highly, highly supportive of him, of the President-elect, and are willing to help with whatever jobs or tasks are involved in getting behind the scenes."

“When somebody new comes into into an organization, even if they're somewhat familiar with it, there's a lot of complexity involved with these federal bureaucracies. They have really established lots of different little machine gunner nests that need to be known about before you go in,” he added.

You can listed to the full podcast here.

Danik was explicitly supportive of Patel’s oft-stated strategy of “cleaning house” in the upper echelons of the FBI, saying that is where cases involving Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and others have been politicized to the detriment of the nation. 

“The top tier of the FBI has an outsized control over the entire organization, and always has,” Danik said. “And these are about 250 people. So it's this small group of high-ranking bureaucrats that keep access to their club very closed to only certain groups of individuals who are proven to them to be acceptable to them in the club. And it's when these investigations get parked at those levels, is where you can see things go off the rail."

He added that frontline agents often chafe at the interference from headquarters or supervisors. “By and far, the average day to day agent is doing really heroic work, sometimes in a desperate environment that these SES (Senior Executive Service) level agents hoist upon them,” he said.

Democratic record of attacking press freedom

Democrats and their allies in the media have launched a concerted effort to derail Patel’s nomination, among other things taking excerpts of his appearances on conservative podcasts to suggest he will weaponize the FBI against Trump foes and even media reporters.

“You have the makings of, you know, a not-so-slow-motion authoritarian takeover of the United States government,” The Atlantic magazine writer Tom Nichols told MSNBC. Former Assistant FBI Director Frank Figliuzzi even penned an op-ed Monday on MSNBC calling Patel “wholly unqualified” and that “his record shows no devotion to the Constitution, but blind allegiance to Trump.”

Ironically, the Biden and Obama administrations each made efforts to unmask reporters’ sources.

In 2022, the DOJ’s chief watchdog confirmed that the Biden DOJ had issued a grand jury subpoena to confirm phone number of Stephanie Kirchgaessner, The Guardian newspaper’s investigations correspondent. The administration later created new rules to prevent future rummaging through reporters’ phone records.

Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder also approved a subpoena for records from Fox News reporter James Rosen a decade earlier, creating a First Amendment stir. Although not a journalist in the traditional sense, Julian Assange was the target of a grand jury investigation throughout the Obama administration. 

Restore integrity

The Trump transition team signaled Monday it plans to keep the focus on the facts of Patel’s record and Democrats treatment of journalisms rather than the innuendo of pundits.

“Kash Patel is going to deliver on President Trump’s mandate to restore integrity to the FBI and return the agency to its core mission of protecting America. Kash is committed to safeguarding Americans’ First Amendment rights unlike Joe Biden who weaponized the DOJ to target journalists,” Trump transition spokesman Alex Pfeiffer said.

In the meantime, there is one major impediment before Congress can consider Patel to be the next FBI Director: the current holder of the job Christopher Wray needs to either resign or be fired. He has more than two years left on his 10-year term.

Meanwhile, FBI whistleblower Steve Friend, who testified before Congress about alleged weaponization of the bureau for political purposes, also endorsed Patel’s nomination on Monday. Friend received financial help from Patel’s foundation when the FBI stopped paying him. 

“This is not a non partisan organization. We need a paradigm shift. I think Kash Patel is the man to do it,” Friend told the Just the News, No Noise television show.

Friend urged Patel, if confirmed to run the FBI, to end a bonus pay system that rewards supervisors with large payments for hitting certain case quotas, saying the program was perverting agents' commitment to follow the law and evidence so they can earn more money.

"If you meet that metric, then that individual is going to get $30,000 to $50,000," he said. "And the problem philosophically with that is that it turns law enforcement on its head, because the sheriff gets elected in a county to bring the crime down. If he doesn't do that, he loses his job.

But now the FBI is reversing it. They're incentivized to bring the numbers up, because they can then go to Congress and say, look, look at all the good work that we're doing," he explained.

Mike Davis, a former Senate Judiciary Committee lawyer who shepherded nominations for years, vowed Monday to use his nonprofit group the Article III Project to push senators to vote for Patel's confirmation. He also called on Wray to step aside voluntarily and not force Trump to fire him.

“Not only will there be a political humiliation, there will be a legal humiliation because the Supreme Court of the United States will definitely hold that the President of the United States has the constitutional power under Article II to fire the FBI director,” Davis told the Just the News, No Noise TV show.