Many of President Donald Trump’s cabinet members and agency leaders eked out Senate confirmations including FBI director Kash Patel (51-49).
The one Republican who voted against Patel, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), said at the time: “There is a compelling need for an FBI Director who is decidedly apolitical. While Mr. Patel has had 16 years of dedicated public service, his time over the past four years has been characterized by high profile and aggressive political activity.”
Patel remains among those in Trump’s orbit who still haven’t won over the MAGA faithful entirely.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican MAGA adherent who recently lavished praised on most of the leaders of Trump’s administration on Next Up with Mark Halperin, was less effusive in his Patel assessment, saying the FBI Director was “growing” into his new position.
Fellow conservative political commentator and populist Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist during the first Trump administration, is also voicing his disappointment with Patel and the FBI.
On his War Room podcast, Bannon said: “Kash, I love the fact we picked up some Chinese graduate student and yes, they’re bringing some fungus into the country and that’s terrible, but don’t run around beating your chest. That’s nothing.”
[Note: The FBI and US Customs and Border Protection this week charged two Chinese nationals, who have been accused of smuggling a fungus (a biological pathogen) into the U.S., which they planned to study at a University of Michigan laboratory where one of them worked.]
BANNON: Where are the indictments? Where’s the grand jury? Give me a congressional hearing. Instead, they pat us on the head. @FBIDirectorKash, I love the fact we picked up some Chinese grad student. And yes, they’re bringing some fungus into the country. That’s terrible. But… pic.twitter.com/pN9SRGgJRv
— Grace Chong, MBI (@gc22gc) June 4, 2025
But Bannon’s grievances overwhelmed his tepid praise for the FBI Director’s performance: “Where in the hell is taking apart the FBI? Where in the hell is taking apart the CIA? Where in the hell is taking apart DNI? Where are the mass layoffs? Where’s the cut in the budget? Last time I looked, all these budgets increased. In fact, they’re throwing a billion dollars into a new FBI headquarters.”
In May, Patel announced his plan to move the agency out of the 50-year-old J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, D.C. (which he deemed “unsafe for our workforce“) and to disperse 1,500 agents to field offices across the country.
President Trump, who has called the FBI’s Hoover Building “one of the ugliest buildings in the city,” hinted in March that his administration was “going to build another big FBI building right where it is, which would have been the right place, because the FBI and the DOJ have to be near each other.”