FBI Director Kash Patel laid out his most detailed public account yet of what he calls a years-long conspiracy by the bureau to deceive a secret surveillance court, obtain illegal warrants, and spy on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, a scheme Patel says extended well beyond the election and targeted him personally.
Patel made the accusations on the latest episode of "Hang Out with Sean Hannity," walking through a timeline that stretches from the 2016 race through Trump's first term and into the years that followed. His central charge: that a political operation manufactured false intelligence overseas, laundered it through the FBI, and used it to secure Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants from a court that never should have approved them.
The claims are not new in outline. Trump has long accused Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama of orchestrating surveillance against his campaign, accusations both have denied. But Patel, now the sitting director of the FBI, is making these charges from inside the building where the alleged misconduct originated. And he says the full scope of what happened is still being uncovered.
Speaking to Fox News, Patel described a scheme in which a political party hired a foreign intelligence asset to fabricate information, then funneled it to the FBI, which packaged it into applications for the FISA court.
"It took me two years of my life to prove the following: that a political party in the United States of America in the 21st century would go overseas and hire some bogus intelligence asset to manufacture fraudulent, fake, unverified information, funnel that to not just the intelligence community, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
He continued, saying those lies were then weaponized in a secret courtroom.
"And then take those packaged lies that they had paid for with campaign finance funds and go into a secret surveillance court and illegally spy on your opponent to be the president of the United States."
Patel said some of the FISA warrants were signed by former FBI Director James Comey. He stated that the FISA court itself later rescinded the warrants in 2018, after a federal investigation into the alleged surveillance was completed. In Patel's telling, the court's own review confirmed the applications were fatally flawed.
"The FISA court themselves came back and said these warrants were illegal. The FBI did not provide evidence of exculpatory evidence and innocence and that the FBI essentially lied in those applications and all the information was unverified."
That is a remarkable statement from a sitting FBI director, not an outside critic, not a congressional gadfly, but the man now running the agency he accuses of institutional dishonesty. Patel served as chief investigator and primary author of the 2018 "Nunes Memo," which alleged FBI bias in the Trump-Russia investigation. He later joined the National Security Council in 2019, becoming deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism during Trump's first term.
His path from congressional investigator to FBI director gives him a vantage point few others have held. It also makes his claims carry a different weight, and invites a different level of scrutiny, than when they came from the outside.
The FBI director did not limit his accusations to the surveillance of Trump. He said the illegal spying extended to him and to members of Congress.
"I was illegally spied on by the likes of Rod Rosenstein and Chris Wray and 10 other staffers on the Hill and people who were elected to serve this country in the halls of Congress."
Rosenstein served as deputy attorney general; Wray succeeded Comey as FBI director. Patel's claim that sitting officials used surveillance tools against congressional staff and elected members, if substantiated, would represent one of the most serious abuses of federal law enforcement power in modern history.
Patel has himself been a target of federal investigators in recent years. Subpoenas revealed that special counsel Jack Smith covertly pursued Patel's phone records over a two-year span, a fact that underscores how deeply intertwined Patel has been with the legal and investigative battles surrounding Trump.
Patel said the misconduct did not stop when Trump left office in 2021. He described a four-year period during which, he alleges, the FBI continued to build on the same institutional framework of abuse.
"I knew in the four years that we were out of office, that they continued to regenerate that institution of weaponization."
When he returned to the FBI as its director, Patel said he realized the earlier investigations had only scratched the surface.
"So when I walked in the door, I said, 'We only got a bit of it. We only got maybe half of it.'"
He referenced discovering the FBI's so-called "burn bag" room, a space he described as containing sensitive documents tied to the "Russiagate" investigation. The details of what those documents contain have not been made public.
Patel's remarks arrive as scrutiny over the federal government's surveillance powers intensifies. Congress recently renewed Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for just 45 days, a notably short extension that reflects deep bipartisan unease. Section 702 permits authorized U.S. officials to collect phone calls and text messages of foreign targets, but that collection can also sweep up Americans' communications in the process.
Trump has long opposed Section 702, and Patel's public framing of the FISA court as a tool that was manipulated to target a presidential campaign only sharpens the political argument against the provision's broad authority.
Since taking the helm at the FBI, Patel has moved aggressively to reshape the bureau. He has outlined sweeping restructuring plans, including the redeployment of 1,000 agents and $300 million in budget cuts. He has also moved to unseal FBI files related to Rep. Eric Swalwell's ties to a suspected Chinese spy, another politically charged disclosure that fits the pattern of an FBI director willing to use transparency as a weapon against what he views as institutional rot.
Patel summed up the scope of the alleged conspiracy with characteristic bluntness.
"I don't think that's ever happened before... Hollywood couldn't come up with this."
Even as he presses these accusations, Patel is waging his own legal battles. He filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic and reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick over a story alleging excessive drinking and erratic behavior. Patel's suit, filed in federal district court in Washington, argues the magazine acted with "actual malice" by publishing despite denials from Patel, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the White House. The lawsuit stated that the publication "cannot evade responsibility for their malicious lies by hiding behind sham sources," as the Washington Times reported.
The Atlantic has pushed back. A representative for the magazine said it "stand[s] by our reporting on Kash Patel" and would "vigorously defend The Atlantic and our journalists against this meritless lawsuit," as the New York Post detailed.
The White House, meanwhile, has backed Patel publicly. AP News reported that the White House told The Atlantic that Patel remains "a critical player on President Donald Trump's law and order team," and that Trump's team is "pleased by Patel's willingness" to go after "the president's rivals."
That framing, the FBI director as an active combatant against the president's adversaries, will alarm Patel's critics. But for those who have watched the FBI's conduct since 2016, the real alarm came years ago, when a secret court approved surveillance warrants built on unverified information and nobody in the building raised a hand to stop it.
The broader implications for Trump and his allies continue to unfold as Patel promises further disclosures. Open questions remain: Which specific warrant applications are at issue? What documents were found in the FBI's "burn bag" room? And will any of the officials Patel has named face formal accountability?
Patel has not said precisely what additional evidence he plans to release. But his public posture, naming names, citing the FISA court's own findings, and describing a pattern of institutional misconduct that he says persisted across administrations, signals that more confrontation is coming.
The facts he has laid out publicly are serious enough on their own terms. A surveillance court rescinded warrants it had approved. The FBI's own applications were found to contain unverified information. And the man now running the bureau says the lies were deliberate.
Whether that leads to prosecutions, further institutional reform, or simply more political warfare will depend on what the documents show. But the core question Patel has raised is not a partisan one. It is whether the most powerful domestic law enforcement agency in the country lied to a court to spy on Americans, and whether anyone will ever be held to account for it.
When the FBI can deceive a secret court and walk away clean, every American, left, right, or indifferent, has a problem. The only people who benefit from that arrangement are the ones holding the rubber stamp.
