A former special agent who claims he received financial backing from a foundation associated with Kash Patel, the man nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as the FBI’s next director, has called for the agency to shut down its Intelligence Branch, which plays a strategic role in domestic violent extremism investigations.
Steve Friend, an ex-agent who was suspended in 2022 after complaining about the agency’s use of a SWAT team to arrest a Jan. 6 offender, made the comment on Monday during an interview with podcaster Carl Jackson. He also called on Patel to “get rid of” the agency’s Integrated Program Management system which he claimed “perversely incentivizes the FBI to go after people” to inflate case numbers.
“And that’s also tied to the intelligence collection apparatus because there’s a quota for the number of intelligence products that they have to create,” Friend continued. “So, if you eliminate the Intelligence Branch, if you eliminate the quota system, that takes a huge chunk away.”
Patel has indicated that he is also considering changes to the Intelligence Branch, although he has not called for its elimination.
“And the biggest problem the FBI has had has come out of its intel shop,” he told podcaster Shawn Ryan earlier this year. “I’d break that component out of it.”
Patel did not directly respond to a request to explain his comment about the FBI’s intelligence functions or to say whether he agrees with Friend, but Alex Pfeifer, a spokesperson for Trump transition, told Raw Story that Patel is committed to maintaining the agency’s mission of combating terrorism.
“Kash Patel will restore integrity to the FBI and protect Americans from terrorism as the agency’s director,” Pfeiffer said. “Kash Patel has a lengthy career fighting terrorism stretching from working as a terrorism prosecutor for the Obama Justice Department to serving as the chief of staff at the Department of Defense."
Patel’s financial support was recounted by Friend when he spoke under oath to the Republican members of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in early 2023.
He repeated the claim in an interview on Wednesday with pro-Trump podcaster Benny Johnson that he received a call from an unfamiliar phone number during Thanksgiving two years ago and that it was Patel.
“Hey, this is Kash Patel, and I have a foundation that supports whistleblowers,” Patel said, according to Friend. “I would like to give you — because you’re unpaid, indefinitely suspended forever by the FBI — $5,000. My foundation is going to give you that donation to get you through Christmas.”
Patel also arranged for Friend to take a job as a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a conservative nonprofit headed by Russell Vought, whom Trump recently named to lead the Office of Management and Budget during the incoming administration, Friend said.
Vought announced Friend’s position in an X post in January 2023, saying that he would “help uncover the full extent of the FBI’s weaponization against the American public” and predicting that he would “play a huge role in maximizing the potential” of the Weaponization subcommittee.
Friend’s criticism of the FBI — voiced in testimony before the Weaponization subcommittee, on podcasts, and in policy papers for the Center for Renewing America — has consistently homed in on the FBI’s intelligence function and supposed exaggeration of the domestic violent extremism threat.
“The Integrated Program Management system incentivizes the use of inappropriate investigatory processes and tools to achieve arbitrary statistical accomplishments,” Friend testified to Congress in May 2023. “Mission creep within the National Security Branch has refocused counterterrorism from legitimate foreign actors to political opponents within our borders.
“Your own intelligence analysis capability increasingly dictates operations,” he added, “turning the FBI into an intelligence agency with law enforcement capability.”
In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, The Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, Patel made a similar argument.
A chapter titled “Made-Up Domestic Terrorism” includes this statement: “To pump up public support for their attacks on conservative Americans, the FBI leadership has been reportedly pushing agents to artificially inflate data about domestic terrorism to make the problem seem much worse than it is.”
A footnote reveals that the claim is sourced from a story in the Tennessee Star online news outlet, which is in turn based on a letter from Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), then the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, to FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Citing unnamed “whistleblowers,” Jordan’s letter — sent in July 2022, prior to the Republicans retaking control of the House — asserts in language strikingly similar to what Friend would later use to assail the agency “that FBI officials are pressuring agents to reclassify cases as ‘domestic violent extremism’ even if the cases do not meet the criteria for such a classification.”
Staff for the Democratic members of the Weaponization subcommittee who interviewed Friend and Garret O’Boyle — another former FBI agent who reportedly received a $5,000 donation from Patel's foundation — contend the two men could not provide any evidence to substantiate Jordan’s claim.
“While both Friend and O’Boyle testified they had concerns about the reclassification of cases to ‘pad’ DVE numbers, and O’Boyle suggested that such case numbers might play a role in FBI budgeting decisions, both also admitted that they were not involved in decision-making regarding performance metric or manner in which resources were allocated, including whether case numbers played a role in such allocations,” the Democratic minority wrote in a report released in March 2023.
The Democratic members, led by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI), also expressed concern that their Republican counterparts were downplaying the threat of extremism.
“Committee Democrats find it both disingenuous and alarming that Committee Republicans are suggesting that domestic violent extremism does not present an increasing threat, particularly since data from nonpartisan DVE trackers provides evidence to the contrary.”
The Democrats cited research by the Center for Strategic and International Studies that recorded 1,040 terrorist attacks and plots in the United States from 1994 through 2021, while tracking “a shift in motivation for domestic terrorism away from the kind of extremism inspired by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda and towards white nationalism and anti-government sentiments.”
Racially motivated mass shootings have spanned the first Trump and Biden administrations — including attacks in El Paso, Texas, in 2019 and Buffalo, N.Y. in 2022, with death tolls of 23 and 10, respectively. Raw Story has tracked at least a dozen terror plots disrupted by the FBI since 2019, including plans to carry out mass shootings, ambush law enforcement or attack the power grid that were motivated by hatred of people of color, Jews and LGBTQ+ people.
Friend has expanded on the criticism that he leveled against the FBI’s intelligence capabilities during his congressional testimony in his writings and comments for podcasts over the past two years. While claiming that the FBI’s abuse of intelligence led to the investigation and prosecution of Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn — a central preoccupation of the president-elect and his allies — Friend has acknowledged that the agency’s intelligence functions are also integral to its investigation of domestic violent extremists.
In a policy paper published by the Center for Renewing America in December 2023, Friend wrote that “the FBI established the National Security Branch, the original home of the Intelligence Branch division, in September 2005, as part of its mission to detect, deter, and disrupt national security threats in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.” The paper goes on to argue that “to justify its outsized budget and power, the FBI has increased its focus on ‘homegrown violent extremists.’ Over time, Friend wrote that “the FBI’s counterterrorism mission shifted from homegrown violent extremism to ‘domestic violent extremists.’”
Friend admitted during his testimony before Congress that he has put out a tweet advocating to “defund, disband, dismantle and abolish the FBI.”
Celebrating Patel’s appointment to lead the FBI on a podcast he co-hosts with O’Boyle on Tuesday, Friend indicated he might be willing to change position.
“I’d prefer disillusion, but if we can make the renovation look more like a demolition, then I guess we’ll take what we can,” he said.
Both Friend and O’Boyle hinted that they were contemplating whether they might be summoned to return to the FBI to serve under Patel.
The Trump transition team did not respond to a question about whether Patel is considering bringing Friend back to the FBI.
During the podcast, Friend said he would only agree to return to the FBI on condition that he receive a preemptive pardon.
“I want everything pardoned for what I’m going to do,” Friend said. “Because I’m going to hurt lots of feelings. And I’m sure that they’ve demonstrated — the communist has — that they will contrive whatever I say or do as a conspiracy against rights, and put me in prison if they ever re-attain power.”
Friend framed preemptive pardons as a hedge against future accountability measures that he claimed could lead to a “civil war” between MAGA forces and a Democratic opposition he describes as “communist” and “terrorists.” He said he was glad that President Joe Biden issued a pardon to his son, Hunter Biden, because now it gives Trump “cover” to do the same thing for his henchmen.
“They’ve done it to their side,” Friend said. “You do it for yours. And if you’re unwilling to do that, then you’re just going to continue to see this asymmetrical civil war spiral out of control. It’s cold right now. But it’s not very long until it goes hot.
