Trump Considering Firing Kash Patel, Report Says

President Donald Trump is weighing whether or not to fire Kash Patel as the FBI director in the “coming months,’ reported MS NOW on Tuesday. The report cited “three people with knowledge of the situation who requested anonymity in order to speak freely.”

White House Spokeswoman Abigail Jackson released a statement to MS NOW in response to their report, saying, “President Trump has assembled the most talented and impressive Administration in history, and they are doing an excellent job carrying out the President’s agenda. FBI Director Patel is a critical member of the President’s team, and he is working tirelessly to restore integrity to the FBI.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later posted on social media that Trump “laughed” when he heard the report and called it “fake news.”

MS NOW anchor Katy Tur spoke to one of the report’s authors, justice and intelligence correspondent Ken Dilanian, soon after it broke.

“MS NOW has just learned that FBI Director Kash Patel may be out of a job in the coming months. Three people with knowledge of the situation say President Trump and his top aides have grown tired of Patel and the unflattering headlines he’s been generating recently, including using a government jet to visit his girlfriend and enlisting a SWAT team as her security detail,” Tur began before asking, “Ken, give me more?”

“Well, Katy, I should say, first of all, all the qualifiers apply here. With Donald Trump and personnel decisions, you never actually know exactly what’s going on. But we are being told that Kash Patel, the FBI director, is on increasingly thin ice, and the president is considering replacing him by the end of the year with Andrew Bailey, the former attorney general of Missouri, who is acting now as co-deputy FBI director along with Dan Bongino,” Dilanian replied, adding:

And it’s for all the reasons that you just said, and others: the use of taxpayer resources, the flying his girlfriend around on the FBI jet, but also the premature tweets, including related to the Charlie Kirk assassination and other investigations—that terrorist attack in Michigan where Patel got out in front of the investigation and tweeted about the arrests before the rest of the government was ready for that to happen.

So Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, the Justice Department, have been annoyed with Patel for a long time, although they’ve publicly denied it when others have reported it. And now it’s increasingly clear that the White House is as well. Now, our reporting this may actually enhance his job security, right? So it’s hard to know exactly what’s going to happen. But that is the reporting at this hour, Katy.

Watch the clip above via MS NOW.

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