- Summary
- Trump says Kash Patel is doing ‘great job’
- MS NOW reported that Trump weighed Patel’s ouster as FBI director
- White House denied the report
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE, Nov 25 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump offered support to FBI Director Kash Patel on Tuesday, after news outlet MS NOW reported that Trump was considering ousting Patel from his current role.
“He is doing a great job I think,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One when asked about the report.
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The White House earlier denied that Trump was considering removing Patel.
MS NOW, citing three unidentified people with knowledge of the situation, said in an online report that Trump and his top aides had grown increasingly frustrated by the unflattering headlines Patel has generated.
They have confided to allies that Trump is weighing removing Patel and considering Andrew Bailey, the FBI’s co-deputy director, as his replacement, according to MS NOW, formerly MSNBC.
FBI directors by law are appointed to 10-year terms as a means of insulating the bureau from politics, and are subject to confirmation by the Senate.
Patel, a Trump loyalist who during the president’s first term advised both the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense, has previously called for stripping the FBI of its intelligence-gathering role and purging its ranks of any employee who refuses to support Trump’s agenda.
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on X that the MS NOW story was “completely made up.” She posted a photo of Trump and Patel that she said was taken in the Oval Office on Tuesday.
Leavitt said Trump and Patel were in a meeting when the report was published, and the president reacted to it by laughing and saying, “What? That’s totally false. Come on Kash, let’s take a picture to show them you’re doing a great job!”
MS NOW said it stood behind its reporting.
More than 200 people have been fired from the Justice Department, of which the FBI is a part, since Trump took office for his second term in January. Of those, dozens worked on criminal cases related to Trump or his allies.
Reporting by Jeff Mason, Kanishka Singh and Andrea Shalal in Washington and Kanjyik Ghosh in Barcelona; Writing by Kanishka Singh and Ismail Shakil; Editing by Leslie Adler and Cynthia Osterman
Jeff Mason is a White House Correspondent for Reuters. He has covered the presidencies of Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden and the presidential campaigns of Biden, Trump, Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. He served as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association in 2016-2017, leading the press corps in advocating for press freedom in the early days of the Trump administration. His and the WHCA’s work was recognized with Deutsche Welle’s “Freedom of Speech Award.” Jeff has asked pointed questions of domestic and foreign leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. He is a winner of the WHCA’s “Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure” award and co-winner of the Association for Business Journalists’ “Breaking News” award. Jeff began his career in Frankfurt, Germany as a business reporter before being posted to Brussels, Belgium, where he covered the European Union. Jeff appears regularly on television and radio and teaches political journalism at Georgetown University. He is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and a former Fulbright scholar.
Kanishka Singh is a breaking news reporter for Reuters in Washington DC, who primarily covers US politics and national affairs in his current role. His past breaking news coverage has spanned across a range of topics like the Black Lives Matter movement; the US elections; the 2021 Capitol riots and their follow up probes; the Brexit deal; US-China trade tensions; the NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan; the COVID-19 pandemic; and a 2019 Supreme Court verdict on a religious dispute site in his native India.
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