EXCLUSIVE: Kash Patel: The FBI’s War on Scam Centers Around the World

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW]In this exclusive interview with FBI Director Kash Patel, we dive into the FBI’s campaign to take down scam centers around the world, from Burma to the United Arab Emirates.

Last year, the FBI launched Operation Blackout, a 16-month campaign that dismantled four of the world’s largest scam centers.

Working with international partners—notably including China’s Ministry of Public Security—the FBI seized over $15 billion, arrested more than 300 individuals, and freed thousands of trafficked victims who had been forced to work at these scam compounds.

The amount of money Americans have reported losing to fraud has increased over threefold from 2020 to 2025, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission. And nearly half of that in 2025 went to romance cryptocurrency scams—known as pig-butchering scams.

Scammers use texts to build trust before luring victims into fake investments that drain their life savings. Then they move and launder the money through crypto wallets.

So what can people do to avoid being scammed? Will the FBI be returning all the seized money? And why has the FBI chosen to work with China on tackling these scam compounds? How can the Chinese regime be trusted to work in good faith?

In this wide-ranging interview, we also discuss the FBI’s fight to catch spies, investigate transnational repression, cut bureaucratic red tape, and prevent the next terrorist attack.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Director Kash Patel, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Director Kash Patel:

Jan, thanks so much for coming to the FBI headquarters and visiting our intelligence-sharing spaces here.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, I understand this was one of the major command centers during FIFA, [Federation Internationale de Football Association] during the World Cup, which I saw you saying there were no major incidents. It was a massive operation. So, this was the hub. Just tell me about this space. Tell me about that before we start.

Director Patel:

No, absolutely. Look, the American public should be proud of what the Trump administration accomplished during FIFA. To put it in perspective, we basically had 78 Super Bowls in 39 days across 11 different venues in the United States of America. We had 6.5, excuse me, 6.8 million people visit and attend the games during that time span. On top of that, we had all the teams at different base camp locations where they lived for the duration of their time at the World Cup. We had all the fan zones. We had all the pop-up zones across the country. 

So, it was really the largest sporting event the world has ever seen. It was double FIFA’s prior World Cup record. So, what law enforcement had to do was meet the demands of the modern time. And the Bureau had to upgrade its spaces and our capabilities. Our Director of Strategic Information Center [DSEC] is a part of it.  

But this specific space was used during the World Cup to share classified intelligence with our classified interagency partners along the IC [United States Intelligence Community] and also our Five Eyes partners to make sure we were getting threat reporting in from overseas. And what we were getting, we were sharing back out with them. And it all happened right here, staffed by people from across the IC in this room.

Mr. Jekielek:

You managed to thwart along the way. And you’re open to talking about any of this?

Director Patel:

Yes, absolutely. So, one of the biggest threats we had to prepare for at the FBI was drone mitigation and counter-UAS [unmanned aerial systems]. And the government, the federal government, did not have a capability to work with our state and local partners because nothing we do at the FBI, especially with the World Cup, could happen without our state and local partner law enforcement relationships. And they just don’t have the capabilities on counter-UAS. 

So, what we did, we set up the first ever counter-UAS at our Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. And we trained state and locals over two-week periods and cycled them through from around the country until we ran into the World Cup. And we utilized that experience. And the FBI had what we call ground intercept teams [GIT] at every venue in the country to deploy the capabilities that we have, the tech that we have, along with our state and local partners. 

And we interdicted with our partners at DHS [U.S. Department of Homeland Security] and the state and locals, some 740 drone interdictions flying over venue spaces, either improperly or illegally, to make sure they didn’t pose a threat. And especially if they’re violating the law, then we worked with our DOJ partners on that matter.

Mr. Jekielek:

Wow. Well, let’s dive into scam centers. You’ve just come back from a big trip overseas, Operation Blackout. So, four kinds of key components to this. I mean, I’m actually interested in every single one, but let’s start with this, you know, largest seizure of Bitcoin, 127,000 Bitcoin seized at Operation Zephyr Exodus. And by the way, who comes up with the names?

Director Patel:

Much more creative people than I. If it were left to me, that would be pretty boring. But the president and the vice president stood up their amazing task force, the Anti-Fraud Task Force. And that’s for all the things related to healthcare, Medicaid, Medicare, and the programs that are stood up and use our taxpayer dollars to assist those. What we’re doing, we can talk about that later. The scam compound fraud is a slightly different variation, but no less egregious and illicit. Basically, we wanted a twofold approach: proactive through Operation Level Up and also investigatively on top of it through Operation Blackout. 

So, Operation Blackout is our umbrella enterprise investigation where we went to the source of the scam center compounds because they’re not stood up here in America. And when I say compounds, these are actually villages stood up with forced labor and trafficked workers who are not allowed to leave and live there 24/7 in the cross-border regions of Cambodia, Burma, and Thailand. 

And so, over the last 14 months, thanks to President Trump, we had the incredible ability to have these relationships with law enforcement and world leaders in those regions of the world that we didn’t have before. And so, we started engaging them and we said, look, this is also affecting their citizens as well as ours to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars when you encompass the whole thing; Cambodia, Thailand, and Indonesia. And we worked with their law enforcement capabilities and their military capabilities to conduct four operations, three in Southeast Asia and one in the Middle East in Dubai. 

And we had officers from all the agencies go in and basically scuttle these scam compounds. We freed thousands of trafficked workers. And in one of those operations that you named, Zephyr Exodus, we actually saw somewhere around 15 billion, give or take, in crypto from one of the largest scams. Which means we got that money back. And we’re now working with our DOJ partners to redistribute it back to the people that it was stolen from. But how they do it is they call you. They participate in these things called romance schemes. They call you and pretend to be.

Mr. Jekielek:

Pig butchering scams is another.

Director Patel:

Pig butchering is a perfect word. And, you know, what that basically means is they fatten you up until you’re as big as you can possibly be for the take. And then they go in for it and steal your lifestyle savings, steal your pensions, steal your kids’ college tuition funds. And they do that with online phishing and vishing and email operations, telephone calls, as I was saying. And so you have to annihilate the entire compound. And so we did that with our partners. 

And I think what we’re most proud of in that endeavor is our partnership with the private sector. These scam compounds are literally in the middle of the jungle. It’s not like you can just drive over there, and they’re in disputed territories in the cross-border region. So it complicates things a little bit when it comes to diplomatic relations. 

But since it was affecting all of those nation’s citizens, they were great partners of ours. And we worked with the private sector to shut off their communications and internet capabilities. We shut down 8,000 terminals, which these scam compounds utilize to connect with the rest of the world, depriving them of the very oxygen they need to operate. 

And so in the Middle East, we did something similar. We had 300-plus arrests, freed a few thousand more trafficked workers, and seized illicit ill-gotten gains through their scam compound operations. So they’re happening all over the world. They’re concentrated in Southeast Asia and other pockets like this location in the Middle East. But thanks to our engagements under the Trump administration, we were able to call the Dubai Police, the Royal Thai Air Force, the Royal Thai Police, the Cambodian Police, the Indonesian Services, and even work with partners at MPS [Ministry of Public Security] in China to have those officers on the ground because a lot of the criminal syndicates that run these enterprises are pretty much straight-up gangs that have found a way to make lots of money stealing from Americans and also stealing from other nationals from other countries. 

So they were willing participants and great partners for the first time ever. We did joint operational raids in all of these areas. And then we actually got the Royal Thai Air Force to go in there and literally blow up some of these compounds because that’s the ultimate win. If you just take them out, they’re going to send more people back in there. But if you completely rubble and raze, exactly. Then they can’t go back there. And that’s what we did.

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, a big piece of this obviously is negotiation, communication. I’m just imagining, kind of, you know, given what I’ve been learning being in DC the last few years, you know, the sort of jurisdictional questions just in America, never mind trying to do it with as many countries as you did.

Director Patel:

Yes, and they were great partners. All the ones I mentioned were. We actually had the FBI host the first-ever Scam Center Summit in Bangkok, Thailand, as part of our trip, where we had dozens of law enforcement agencies and, I think, two or three hundred law enforcement partners show up because that’s how committed they were to fighting this epidemic of crime. And we also rolled out Operation Level Up. That’s our proactive piece. 

What we ask the American public and the rest of the world, through our partners, is the second somebody emails you, the second somebody calls you, and it sounds a little off, tell us. We have our Internet Crime Center [IC3] where people go and just report what’s happening to them.Through that operation alone, we were able to prevent 10,000 Americans from being scammed for $560 million. 

We literally had folks from across the country writing back to the FBI saying, you saved our life savings. You saved our kids’ college tuition. And some of them were actually considering killing themselves because it’s such an embarrassing thing to be a victim of this atrocity, of this crime. And so when we collect that information from them, we’re able to proactively stop it before it even starts. And we’re able to map it back to the networks that we established in these cross-border regions to say, this is where it’s coming from. So, if we target this one compound specifically, we’re going to annihilate a huge infrastructure that is doing this to millions of people around the world. 

So, the FBI is leading Operation Blackout. It’s going to continue. Our press to go to the region was specifically one task: to complete the mission and annihilate the compounds wherever they are. And I think you’re going to see even bigger results by the end of the summer.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, just a couple of comments on this. Recently, I interviewed the director of a film called Scam Slave: From Hell to Home. And it was actually, you know, through some diplomatic work, one guy managed to get out with a few others from a specific African country because of diplomatic work. But these are, this is slave labor. People are lured in from all over the world. So, you releasing, you know, thousands in each one of these operations is welcome by many people. I would like to see that part published. Publicity around that because this is you countering some serious human trafficking, and not just in America, but in a broader way. But the effect of it is helping Americans. It’s a win for the world, right?

Director Patel:

As you said, my priority at the FBI is to safeguard Americans and prevent criminality from hitting American shores and working with our partners. We do it internationally. But when a country gets to receive thousands of people back that were in forced labor, that’s a win for the world. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Have they all returned to their countries now?

Director Patel:

In each of the ones we have raided in these compounds, they have been returned.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, just one comment on Sand Dollar. You’ve described it as the largest FBI-led scam center takedown in history. How so?

Director Patel:

It was a coordinated operation. This is the one I was talking about in the Middle East. So we actually brought in FBI, Dubai police, and MPS officers from China because all three of our countries were being affected by this scam compound. And this was the largest U.S. dollar-based, non-crypto, dollar-based scam compound that was in operation at the time. 

And the scam compound syndicate got smart. They said, look, they’re onto us in Southeast Asia. Let’s move to a different location where we think we have safe haven. And they don’t in the UAE [United Arab Emirates]. And we alerted our friends at the Dubai National Police, and they said, let’s do this operation together. And we took the whole thing down.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s fascinating that you’ve been able to work with the MPS, right? Because you’re also on record, I think, in congressional testimony talking about the fact that the Chinese regime actually kind of enables these things in effect, when they’re not affecting Chinese in particular. And so, tell me a little bit about that work.

Director Patel:

Once we dig into this work, law enforcement has a unique role, unlike some of the other agencies that all of our governments around the world have in terms of intel and whatnot. So, law enforcement, and thanks to President Trump’s engagement with President Xi, you know, we created a lane. He created a lane for us to engage directly, even with those that traditionally America wouldn’t engage with. And we did that. 

And I’ve been to Beijing twice now in this seat. And no FBI director had gone there in, I think, over 11 years. And what we said was look, the criminal syndicates, the gangs, the national gangs, whether they’re out of Southeast Asia, whether they’re out of China, whether they’re out of the Middle East, those are criminal syndicate enterprises that we can collectively annihilate because they’re fleecing your citizens too. And they were more than willing to assist us in these operations and send their officers. 

I said, look, you have to have an actual foot in the game here. We don’t just need intel sharing. We need your folks on the ground working with us to show the world that we are actually doing this. And that’s what we did in Southeast Asia, and that’s what we did in the Middle East. So, where we can have law enforcement success and annihilate these compounds and save Americans—most importantly for me, but also the rest of the citizens of the world—from this illicit criminal syndicate, is somebody I’m going to engage with all the time.

Mr. Jekielek:

You posted something talking about working on fentanyl, working on scam centers, and so forth. And Senator Rick Scott responded and said, this is how communist China works. They’ll do just enough to keep you interested, but they never keep their word. That’s been our experience in our reporting as well. How do you deal with that?

Director Patel:

So the senator is a great friend and partner and a tremendous advocate of law enforcement. And, you know, we have different roles. The FBI has a different role than the CIA, NSA, and the Department of War. Our specific role is to combat crime that’s impacting Americans wherever it’s sourced. And so, for the first time in history, the FBI and the MPS are running four separate joint operations together: on countering fentanyl, on countering the cyber element that we’re talking about here, including scam compounds, and on countering violent crimes against children, which is something everyone wants to do. And we’re also working on our most wanted fugitives. And so that’s our lane. 

And that’s the lane that the White House has supported the role of the FBI through President Trump’s engagement. Engage where you can. And that’s what I told my counterparts in China. I said, we’re not going to agree on everything. But on these things, in my role as the FBI director, this is common ground for us to agree on. And on the fentanyl specifically, look, last year we saw a 20 percent reduction in opioid deaths in America.That’s a huge reduction. And that’s not by accident. 

When I went there 10 months ago, I said, look, the fentanyl precursors are a big problem. They are being sold to the Mexican drug cartels who are making and manufacturing this drug at a lethal and addictive level because of these rare compounds and components that are only sourced from certain areas of the world. I said, you guys, you folks in China, need to list them, essentially making them an illegal item to ship overseas. And they did that. They went out and listed 17 of them. And this summer, they’re going to list, I think, 24 more. 

But to generally talk about its impact, besides the reduction in opioid deaths in America, we look at the intel reporting from the drug traffickers, the DTOs [drug trafficking organization] down south, right? And without getting all the classified information, what we do see generally is the following. They’re complaining that they can’t get the fentanyl precursors they need to make the fentanyl the way they used to make it, addictive as they want it to be. And they’re complaining that the lethality is not at the rate they would want it to be when they manufacture it. 

Those three indicators show a massive shift in the drug trade when it comes to fentanyl. And that’s a direct result of us working with MPS to get the fentanyl precursor shut off. There’s more work to do. There’s always more work to do, Jan. We’re not saying this is a win in totality, but that’s a lot of progress and that’s a lot of American lives saved. And that’s my priority.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, it also tells me that you have some real leverage. This is happening, you know, the way you’re describing.

Director Patel:

Well, I think any leverage we have, honestly, is due to the president’s leadership and engagement. You know, he went there and met with President Xi. He had the Busan Summit. And that opened a lot of doors for us. And we’re receiving audiences like I did when I was just there a couple of weeks ago with individuals that would never meet with law enforcement. And we’re telling them and we’re having open and frank conversations.

We’re saying this is our priority as the American law enforcement agencies. This is our priority at the FBI: fentanyl, violent crimes against children, cyber initiatives, and the fugitives, right? The people that are doing the most harm and seeking safe haven around the world. And on each one of those four, we’re getting actual deliverables for the American people.

Mr. Jekielek:

So I want to give you a kind of a real-world example and just to comment a little more, digging into this a little more so people can sort of imagine what this might look like. A U.S. home buyer was recently defrauded while purchasing a house. She believes she was wiring her closing funds to her title company, but cyber criminals had compromised the title company’s communications and redirected her to a fraudulent bank account. She lost nearly $140,000 in a single day. 

And she later learned that the scam was linked to the Nigerian Black Axe, a violent organized criminal network. Investigators said the proceeds were moved through countries such as Russia and China. The FBI told her that the money ultimately ended up in China, and she has recovered only a tiny portion of it thus far. She feels she has no hope. Okay. So, how does the FBI work to get some of this money back when the money has ended?

Director Patel:

Like the seizures that we’re talking about, we work with our partners at the Department of Justice to bring prosecutions on all these cases everywhere we can. And through the court process, we’re able to deliver the funds back to these individuals once the proceedings are concluded. I wish it would move faster. But at the same time, we have a responsibility to those that we charge that they have their constitutional rights. We’re not going to shortchange them on that. 

I know that there’s frustration in doing that vs. giving American citizens back their hard-earned dollars and their life savings faster. So we’re trying to do that. But we’re also taking the fight to places like Nigeria and Africa. And that’s the thing about proactively going in there. So there are fewer of these individual victims who are already on the victimization end vs. getting in ahead of time and saying, you’re going to be a victim, but now we’re going to cut it off ahead of time. 

Then we go to these countries and say, look, we’ve seized this money or we’ve frozen these assets, and we work with our partners at Treasury and we sanction individuals. If these companies and entities don’t want to participate in the return of these funds that were stolen from American citizens, thankfully, the Trump administration has put on an interagency-wide approach to this fraud and said, look, it’s not just an FBI initiative. 

We have, whether they’re OFAC [U.S. Treasury Office of Foreign Assets] sanctions or Treasury sanctions. And a lot of these individuals, as you highlighted, use certain streams to move the money. And if we’re able to sanction and shut off those pipelines, then we cripple their ability to move those ill-gotten gains, seize them, and return them back to these individuals. Our hope is to make everyone whole. And, you know, we’re working towards that goal. 

But this was an initiative that we kicked off over the last 16, 17 months here at the FBI. It really hadn’t been undertaken before. Because it wasn’t a priority. And to me, that made no sense. And it didn’t to the administration either. So we made fighting fraud, whether it was in the scam compound arena or whether it was in the healthcare, Medicaid, Medicare compound, Medicare fraud arena, and are going after it on both sides.

Mr. Jekielek:

Have you been able to get any money back that ended up in places like Russia or China? China being a favorite kind of location with a lot of these, for example, with the fentanyl precursors. They’re laundering the money being paid and so forth. Whereas, and also here, it seems the Nigerians have been using that as a haven.

Director Patel:

Where we have success is that these criminal syndicates need to, at the end of the day, get their money out from somewhere. They’re not just sending it to a nation and saying, thanks, we’ll see it in 50 years. So when I say we’re attacking the criminal syndicate network, we’re attacking the leadership that’s taking all this money, arresting and taking down those individuals, and seizing it. 

Step one, they set up the compound, the scam compound system, with text messaging, phone calls, and emails to target people and pig butcher them. Step two, they illegally steal their money, their life savings. Then they have to move the money, step three, right? But step four is they have to launder the money back into a usable format for them. And so what we’re doing on the back end is catching where they’re sending the money back to. A lot of it is crypto wallets. 

So they’re transferring the cash, the U.S. dollar, into these crypto wallets that they don’t think we have access to. Thanks to our cyber capabilities and our initiatives at the FBI, we’re seizing those crypto wallets. And then we’re getting individuals like this their money back through the seizure of the wallets because the money’s not sitting in a bank account. The criminal syndicate has to use it to enrich themselves, buy fancy things, and also continue the criminal conduct, the criminal enterprise that they’ve embarked upon.

Mr. Jekielek:

What is your advice to people that might be watching? Some people are just afraid to use their credit card online ever, right?

Director Patel:

It’s a couple of things. It is never too early to call 1-800-CALL-FBI or go to our IC3.gov website, our Internet Crime Center, where anyone can literally just shoot us a note and say, I got this text. I got this email. I got this phone call. Something seems a little off. Our IC3 has received more complaints in the last 16 months than it did in the entirety of the four years preceding it.

Mr. Jekielek:

And you can handle that.

Director Patel:

Thanks to this, yes. Thanks to the rebuilding of this infrastructure here at the Bureau, which didn’t have the ability because no one had to focus on it, we are now able to use AI and triage this data as it’s coming in. And then what we do is we cut leads to our field offices based on where the victim is in the U.S. We combine it with our enterprise investigation that we talked about, Operation Blackout and Operation Level Up and we tie it right back into that. Then we say, okay, Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so were fleeced of $100,000. We found it. Now we can get it back to them.

But the thing that Americans can do is call us often and early because every single one of these is not a one-off. It’s tied to a criminal network overseas somewhere. And once we have more and more information, we’re able to do more of these compound raids and seizures and dismantlements. And that’s the ultimate win.

So my advice and my ask to the American public is like, on any high-profile case, we need your assistance. We need you to come forward. And we know that, you know, when you’re victimized in this fashion, it can be embarrassing for sure. But when you come forward, you’re probably saving a handful of other people who would be victimized from being victimized. And it’s our best chance of getting you your money back.

Mr. Jekielek:

Because you have a chance to get your money back, and you’re providing valuable intelligence.

Director Patel:

Yes. So it’s extremely important. And now our work shows, not me saying it, but our work shows in Operation Blackout, in our attack on the scam compound centers, that this is working, and we are seizing. You know, what do we say? Something like almost $16 billion worth of currency, crypto from around the world. And once we, the FBI, have it, then we can use our legal system to get it back to the citizens.

Mr. Jekielek:

I want to switch gears a little bit here. One of the big things that we’ve been talking about at The Epoch Times recently is the president announcing that there was Chinese involvement in the 2020 election. There was interest. There was, for example, the one thing that was in the papers that were published was that, you know, all of the voter data from, I think, 220 million Americans was gathered. We have seen, of course, the things that John Solomon got declassified and so forth. But what else can you tell us?

Director Patel:

I think the president was right to go to the nation and the world and put forth this information. But it was only possible because the president directed us to declassify and divulge this information to the American public and the world. And so you saw that and how we unveiled that or how the president unveiled it, and rightfully so. And our part is smaller in this, ours being the FBI. 

We work with our partners at DHS and ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] who have the technical capabilities. And also their remit is more on the sort of what happened overseas on these election infrastructure systems. And what we do is we work with them. We share our information. We made a lot of our information public through President Trump’s speech the other week. And then we’ll take referrals from them on matters that rise to the level of criminality, and continue to work with those who are leading out on it.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, are you looking to get more information from people around this?

Director Patel:

We’re always working with our partners to say if you, DHS, and ODNI, have the institutional knowledge and also the specific capabilities to go out and get this information. Our role at the FBI is to share what we have, which we did. And our role at the FBI is to examine any conduct that could rise to the level of criminality. Whether it’s election issues or whether it’s homicides or gangs or scam compounds, it’s the same thing. They’ll get a tip, they’ll get information, and they’ll cut us a lead and say, hey, we think this is something that might be criminal. Then we take it and work with our DOJ partners and our prosecutors to go to court and bring charges when we can.

Mr. Jekielek:

If someone were going to call the 1-800 number, right, then you would route that to DHS.

Director Patel:

We would take their information and we would ask, what does this relate to? Does it relate to infrastructure and a malign influence operation? Do we need to bring in the IC community, which we would do? And then, if there’s something for us to advance on the law enforcement front, that’s our specific role, which is a smaller piece of that.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, I want to talk a little bit about espionage. And, you know, I think you said there were 114 arrests of spies. You actually had like 62 removals of Chinese spies. You highlighted that a lot more than I’ve ever been aware of in one period of time.

Director Patel:

It is. I mean, the numbers, you know, we don’t always talk about stats, but behind the stats is the work that we’re putting in. And the twofold mission of the FBI is to defend the homeland and crush violent crime. And on the defending the homeland piece, our adversaries are always looking to steal our secrets, to co-opt our citizens and have them steal our secrets and send them back to places like Russia, China, DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea], and Iran, just to name a few. We prioritized our counter-espionage division to go after and cripple these adversarial attacks on our citizens and the theft of our classified information. 

The FBI, since I’ve been in the seat, has seen a 55 percent increase in espionage arrests alone, 55 per cent from the last 60 months that I’ve been in compared to the prior two years of the Biden administration. That’s a massive uptick, but that just shows you that we are laser-focused, pursuant to the president’s directive, to stop espionage activities, no matter who the source is, who the actor is, whatever form it comes in, whether it’s a direct adversarial attack through their intelligence officers or whether they go out and try to make friends with folks in U.S. government service, at the Intel community, at the DOW, wherever it is. And we are arresting people nearly every week on espionage matters.

Mr. Jekielek:

And so, you know, there’s an example: a former Navy sailor was sentenced this year to over 16 years in prison for passing sensitive information about the USS Essex to the CCP in Beijing. But here you’re talking about 62 removals. So that’s like, how does that work exactly?

Director Patel:

So we do a number of things. Our first line of defense is to disrupt, stop it from happening, stop the areas and avenues our adversaries are utilizing to execute this espionage activity on Americans. Our second is, of course, to prosecute every single one of them where we can. And then we do a couple of things. So when we find the intelligence officers, the IOs that are perpetrating this conduct, if they’re on American soil, we’re kicking them out.

Mr. Jekielek:

And that’s where these would be people who are on diplomatic visas or something? Yes.

Director Patel:

Who are seeking cover falsely by saying they’re a diplomat from, you know, wherever, and they’re actually conducting intelligence operations illegally. And then some of these individuals that don’t meet the criminal threshold, the people they co-opted and aren’t American citizens, we’ll expel them too. So it’s a combination.

Mr. Jekielek:

Fascinating. So there are also 13 internet domains allegedly used by Chinese-backed actors you recently seized. They were targeting Americans who had security clearances specifically. So particularly problematic, I imagine.

Director Patel:

Yes. So we have a number of operations that focus just on that. We’ve learned through the tradecraft that is deployed by our adversaries that they are utilizing certain infrastructure and certain systems. And our big win through our cyber operations and things like Operation Gecko is to seize the domains and the infrastructure and shut them down because they built, they spent, the adversary spent time building up this methodology of espionage that they thought we would never detect. Once we detect it, it’s great to identify the people that are involved. 

But the places in which it’s being conducted, whether it’s on the dark web or through other mechanisms, we at the FBI are just shutting them down and basically turning off the energy, the power to that way of conducting espionage activities so they can no longer do it. And so that instance is just one small example of where we’ve been successful. The adversary thought we wouldn’t detect them, but thanks to our interagency partners, we did. And then we have the remit in the U.S. to go after it.

Mr. Jekielek:

What about LinkedIn? Because this is one place where there’s, as you well know, a sort of a hotspot for talent recruitment.

Director Patel:

Yes. Look, we have to balance civil liberties and constitutional rights with proactively defending America, which is my primary job. And so what we do is we work with our private sector partners, and they work with us to identify. I’ll give you an example reverting back to the scam compounds. Google and Meta have been two of our best partners because these adversaries are using these platforms to find victims, to perpetrate their frauds and their schemes, and steal American dollars.

They’re proactively providing us information when they see it so that we can put that into our enterprise investigation and shut it down. It’s the exact same for espionage activities. And whether it’s LinkedIn or X or what have you, we’re asking them to be more proactive because they have a different set of authorities as a private sector company than we do.

In terms of providing us information, we have to, of course, and rightfully so, meet the requirements to get search warrants based upon probable cause and going to a judge and presenting with our prosecutors. But the critical component of all this, I think, has been President Trump’s success in bringing private sector to law enforcement and saying, we want to work together. We want your companies to grow. But at the same time, I haven’t met a single CEO that’s told me they’re going to allow this criminal conduct to continue because it only hurts them. 

And so we’re trying to also do an education campaign, where we go out to the American public and say, look, are you on LinkedIn? Are you on Facebook? Are you on whatever platform in Google? You know, there’s a decent chance that an adversary is looking to co-opt you as a spy or conduct espionage activities, but there’s a decent chance that they’re looking to defraud you or steal your money or just steal your data, which is just as bad. And so these companies have been very forward-leaning on that. 

But the American public, again, I go back to it, they’re our best partners. Every time they go on these platforms, we ask them to send us through IC3 any information that they think is odd or off. And then we have a way to act pursuant to our authorities and engage the private sector and say, hey, did you know about this in this chat group or this site? And then shut them down.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, I wanted to comment on one thing that I don’t think we’ve talked about before, but in your FBI Philadelphia field office, you guys started up a task group right when you became director to counter transnational repression, or what’s commonly called TNR, which I think, you know, I believe that’s the first time I’m aware of. It’s something that we track quite a bit and report on quite a bit because of our Chinese language arm, right? There’s a lot of that going on. So, and you kind of updated us back in March of 2026. We were tracking that. Tell me a bit about the work of that field office.

Director Patel:

Our Philadelphia field office has been tremendous in the TNR fight. It’s a legitimate criminal enterprise. By legitimate, I mean that the adversary is deploying that to repress nationals from their mainland here in the United States of America. And that crosses a legal threshold at a certain point and becomes illegal activity. And so we felt that it wasn’t just one-off, it wasn’t just happening here or there, but certain investigations are placed in certain field offices because they have the expertise and knowledge on it. 

But that doesn’t mean it’s just encompassing the Eastern Pennsylvania area of responsibility. They’re doing it across America. And we’ve been able to shut down a lot of these networks that are infiltrating America through public spaces, the internet, social media platforms, and also trace back who’s doing it.

Then most importantly, we want an end state to this. We want a disruption, a dismantlement, or a prosecution.Of these actors are actually disparate actors. They’re not necessarily sitting in the nation you think they would be sitting in. And so when we can’t legally get to them or we can’t get enough evidence to meet the threshold for prosecution, we work with our partners, again, at places like the Treasury and elsewhere, to shut off their access to the international banking system, which they need to conduct their criminal activity. And when you do that, it’s as effective as putting handcuffs on them, essentially, because they can’t do it anymore. 

Ultimately, for me, the prize is actually putting handcuffs on them, but if we can’t do that, then we work with our interagency partners and Secretary Bessant and his team and the State Department as well. Secretary Rubio, fantastic partner for us on all of this work because it requires diplomatic relations. It requires engagements with our embassies around the world. And it requires the State Department to deploy their authorities and designating and listing people and companies and entities on their sanctions list, which is equally as powerful as Treasury sanctions.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, it’s interesting because this is, of course, it goes on people that are foreign nationals that happen to be residents here, but it’s also on Americans, whether it’s Chinese Americans, or I suppose a really extreme form of transnational repression is Iran’s assassination attempt on the president. I hadn’t even thought of that until this moment, but that is actually very much a form of transnational repression.

Director Patel:

It always is. And so we’re coming down on all of it.

Mr. Jekielek:

You say about 640 planned terrorist attacks were foiled last year. That’s the number that I’m seeing.

Director Patel:

715. I hate to correct it, okay?

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, can you give me an example of one with a little bit of detail?

Director Patel:

I’ll give you an example of four. In December of last year, the FBI shut down four terrorist attacks in 30 days in Southern California, in Texas, in Florida, and in New York from ISIS-affiliated organizations, other terrorist-affiliated organizations. And on top of that, we did the Pumpkin Day takedown, which was separate and apart from that, hubbed out of Michigan, but also kind of sprawled through a couple other jurisdictions to include New Jersey and other places. And what these individuals were looking to do were the equivalent of a cyber zero-day attack, but this was an actual overt criminal attack to go out and attack places of worship, attack schools, attack places of business, and just attack Americans wherever they could. 

So cyber is the tool of the day, right? As our technologies advance, we have to keep up with the adversarial threat, which we’re doing. And we have to deploy that lawfully to surveil, monitor, and detect. So we work with our prosecutors to get search warrants up, to get surveillance warrants up, to get monitoring warrants up. And what we were able to do is before these individuals who wanted to disrupt America’s holidays last year, literally, and kill dozens, if not hundreds, of people and cause a mass casualty event. We went in and took them all down. 

These are four unrelated operations, but related in the sense that they wanted to do the same end state, which is to kill Americans and we arrested them all. And we stopped them cold. And that’s a pretty monumental achievement, especially during the holidays. But it’s because we were resourced and backed by the White House and the administration to get these sorts of achievements accomplished for the American people. 

And so when you look at 715 or, you know, the terror attacks that we’ve stopped just inside the U.S., that shows me two things. One, the adversary is continuously looking to attack us on American soil, utilizing illegals, American citizens, and foreign nationals. And so we want to go out at the right time to dismantle the entire, entire criminal enterprise, not just a couple of them. 

And so it’s a balance. Of course, we also have to make sure. We have the evidence we need in a presentable fashion that’s lawfully collected to not just disrupt and stop the attacks, but then to prosecute them. And all the individuals I just started, they’re all on their way to federal prison for a very long time.

Mr. Jekielek:

And tell me a little bit more about DSIG [Digital Security and Investigations Group] and what exactly it is.

Director Patel:

So the FBI is the lead law enforcement agency and coordination center for everything from supporting state and locals to incidents like you saw in Idaho this past week to responding to critical incidents, mass casualty events. And just crime in general. When I got here, the time from a critical incident or an event occurring in the field to getting leadership information, not just here, but to the White House and interagency, was up to three hours. And we had our team come in here and rebuild that. We said that doesn’t meet the modern day threat dynamic. And now we’re down to less than 60 seconds. We are delivering in real time.

Mr. Jekielek:

Wait, tell me again what went from three hours to 60 seconds?

Director Patel:

Our ability to share information as it comes in. There’s a shooting in Texas, there’s a bank robbery in Ohio, there’s a mass casualty event out in California, or there’s a wildfire or what have you. And the leadership, not just me, but most importantly, the White House and the president needs real-time leadership, at least when it’s in my remit of law enforcement, to say, this is the information we have. 

And what it does is accelerate our ability to deploy our assets. Things like our hostage rescue teams, which we didn’t even get to talk about, and we’ll do it at another time, but they’re deploying at a rate that we’ve never deployed before. And rescuing hostages across the country. We’re allowed to do that because we’re able to get them the information they need to launch in their fixed wing aircraft and go across the country. Same with our evidence response decks. 

We have the expertise in collecting evidence, which we work with our state and local partners. We can’t do that if it takes three hours to get us the information that something happened and what the need is. Now we’re down to inside 60 seconds, and we’re launching those folks on standby in 30 minutes or less. And that’s what the American people expect of this FBI, and that’s what this place has done for launch.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, I was thinking about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the first one, right? And how quickly you guys were already offering some information at the White House within, I don’t know, was it an hour?

Director Patel:

Yes. That was 3,000 people. I was there, and you were there. Thankfully, brave members of law enforcement stopped the threat before it took someone’s life. But we did the same thing, got the information to our leadership within minutes, deployed our mobile command centers on scene, had our HRT [hostage rescue team] and SWAT operators and tactical operators on scene, had our evidence response team, which I literally met on the floor where the incident occurred, collecting information, taking DNA, taking photographs, transporting the perp, and conducting lawful interviews and getting real-time information.

But at the same time, working with the White House, as you saw, we literally went to the podium with the Attorney General and the President and provided transparency and information because it was of such public importance.And that’s what this place was built to do, to support law enforcement and to rebuild trust here.

Mr. Jekielek:

As we were preparing for this, I got an email that you sent out to everyone, a very long email. I think you said in the email it’s the longest email you’ve ever sent, kind of cataloging, I mean, it took a while to read it, all the sort of what you would call enterprise changes here at the FBI, one of them being the development of this DSIG. Can you just give me a few examples of the things that you think are the most, the things that the American people should know about?

Director Patel:

Yes, absolutely. Look, at the end of the day, when we came into this administration, you know, and I had worked in government for 16 years before that as a prosecutor in the intel community and also at the White House, you know, we saw a lot of flaws with how law enforcement was rolling out and how it was weaponized. We said, okay, we’re going to restore the credibility and trust with the American public of the FBI. That’s what I can help control. 

We just listened to changes that were on the books to be made for 10, 15, 20 years. And why they weren’t made before, you’ll have to ask prior leadership. But we didn’t have time to waste. So we did a couple of simple things. But most importantly, we listened to the field. 

I pushed out 1,500 FBI employees from Washington, D.C. permanently to the field. Almost a third of our workforce before I got in the seat was housed within 50 miles of the Washington, D.C. radius—just illogical at every level to me. Field operations are conducted in the field by field agents, driven by intelligence cultivated and collected in the field. So we sent 1,500 people out. That was one of the changes. 

The other thing was that the administrative bureaucracy at this agency was completely out of control. Nobody bothered to actually fix the problem. They just bothered. They just said, we’ll put a band-aid on it. And after you put on 50 or 60 band-aids on the same issue, it becomes an epidemic. And so whether it’s things that nobody sees, like the rebuild of our entire IT infrastructure system. Everybody thinks the FBI is running around like the CSI program on TV, and we just weren’t. We didn’t have it because the toolkit that California agents had was different than the folks in Maine vs. those in Texas, and that shouldn’t be the way it is. 

So we rebuilt that entire infrastructure with our private sector partners. We reduced the DIOG, the Domestic Investigative Operations Guide, basically the field guidebook to how and what you can do. It used to be a huge book looking like this—I’m not kidding. If you ever want to try to lift a copy, I’ll let you try. 

We shredded it by 40 per cent based upon changes that the field had been asking for for years and years and years. And we empowered our SACs to own their AORs [area of responsibility], respectively, and say, you drive ops, you drive field operations, you tell headquarters what you need resource-wise and admin-wise, and we’ll get it to you. But we are not going to direct the traffic in Washington state and in Idaho and in New Jersey because it’s different everywhere you go. The skill set is different, especially in tribal law enforcement areas. And so we did things like that. 

We also said yes to AI. When I got here, there were two AI test-use cases in the Bureau’s history. We just surpassed our 125th in 16 months. We’re using AI on the admin side. We’re using AI to take care of our workforce, make their tenure at the Bureau as good as it can be, and also take care of them on the way out when they retire in the fashion they should be. We did little things like allow agents to keep their service revolvers at the end of their tenure here. To just be seized and melted down, which made no sense to me. 

And we took AI in and put it on all three of our enclaves, our unclassified and classified spaces, because data that’s collected at the rate we’re collecting it is useless if you can’t triage it. And we’re not replacing the human component to it. But to keep up with the adversary and the amount we’re collecting, we’re ingesting AI from various private sector partners who have been fantastic because they built the best AI infrastructure and AI models. And large language models and things like that, we are now utilizing them in law enforcement and rolling them out across the country so agents in the field can immediately get to work. 

I’ll give you an example: our rapid DNA deployment, okay, didn’t exist. Our state and local partners, who are our best partners outside of the American public, our state and locals, the officers, the sheriffs, the constables, and state troopers around the country are the FBI’s best partners. The relationships have literally never been better, and that’s because of our investment in them and things they’re asking for. We talked about the counter-UAS mission, but on DNA, we didn’t have the capability to deploy out to the field. 

And if we did a takedown like we did in West Virginia a month or two ago of 35 gang and drug dealers, we tested their DNA on-site and got an answer on our Combined DNA Index System [CODIS] about criminal history and background checks and things like that instantaneously. And we were able to charge people we couldn’t charge. We were able to execute search warrants we wouldn’t have been able to execute, and that is now being deployed throughout the field.

Mr. Jekielek:

I didn’t realize you could do it that quickly now.

Director Patel:

You can if you put time and effort into it, and nobody had. So we did. And the last best example I have is going back to our state and local partnerships, our task force officers. The thing the FBI does best, and the thing I tell our partners, like I just did yesterday in Wisconsin and the week before in Florida and South Carolina and elsewhere, is our joint operations are what gets it done. And we do it through our Joint Task Forces like Safe Streets and Operation Not Forgotten and things like that. But we need local and state officers to come in. 

Our task force officer onboarding pipeline was 14 months, meaning if you applied, they would have an answer in 14 months. By that time, they were looking for their next promotion, and rightly so. So we eliminated a 750-person TFO [task force officer] backlog. Now we’re at zero. And we changed the administrative bureaucracy to say, you have a maximum of 60 days from application, you being us, the Bureau, to acceptance. We’ll do all the background checks. We’ll get you in. 

Usually, we get you in now in about 30 days. And the mechanics that slowed it down were also these things called cross-deputizations. For whatever reason, we allowed another agency outside of the Bureau to do our deputizations, which took another, you know, three, four, five months. Our SACs [special agents in charge] in the field now do their own deputizations. 

And the last thing is our National Academy. It’s the best program the FBI has for state and local partners. A lot of people don’t know about it. But four times a year, we take law enforcement from around the country and around the world, and have them sit in a 10-week program with the FBI at Quantico. It used to be 250 slots four times a year. We went to 300. We just got rid of the administrative bureaucracy. 

And same thing for our pipelines for our new agents, for our intel analysts that want to come in. They were waiting three, four, five months just to get an interview after their application hit. I said, why are we waiting? We are going to be able to, we, the bureau, can weed out people that don’t meet our standards, that don’t meet our fitness requirements if you want to be an agent, that don’t meet our technical requirements if you want to be in forensics, accounting, lab, evidence response teams, or SABTs [special agent bomb technician]. And so now, for the first time ever, well, one, we’re seeing the largest applications to be employed at the FBI in the FBI’s history. And our numbers are finally back up.

Mr. Jekielek:

I saw a sign as I was wandering through the building getting to this room: Special agents interested in being a special agent. I saw a sign.

Director Patel:

And it’s not just special agents. They’re 11,000 strong of our 36,000-person workforce. We need it all. We need resident accountants, we need support staff, we need intel analysts, we need evidence response technicians, we need scientists, we need doctors, we need all of that expertise to make this place run. We need people who are experts in human resources to make this place run. So we just eliminated and shredded that bureaucracy that had been layered onto this place for far too long. 

And also, if you don’t meet the standards here, I’m not going to shy away from that. This is a privilege to work at the FBI. Criticize it, you won’t work here anymore. I won’t tolerate it because it will lead to, and has in the past, a degradation of the trust that the American people have in the Bureau. And so we’re going to continue on that as well. If you do your job and you live up to our high standards, this is going to be a great place to work for you.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Director Kash Patel, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Director Patel:

Thanks so much, Jan. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming to D.C.

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.