FBI Director Kash Patel denied a report claiming he wanted to overhaul the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
On Saturday, a CNN report citing three anonymous sources alleged that Patel, the acting director of ATF, had outlined plans to transfer up to 1,000 ATF agents to the FBI, “cutting ATF’s agents by more than a third.”
However, Patel denounced the story as “fake news” in an internal memo to ATF staff, according to Fox News.
“I want to address a report from this weekend speculating about the intentions of FBI leadership with personnel decisions at the ATF,” Patel wrote. “This weekend, CNN reported news of a plan on the part of our leadership to ‘cut as many as one third’ of ATF agents and reallocate 1,000 agents over to the FBI. The report even suggested our leadership team altered course after reading a news report, and ultimately backed off certain aspects of changes. This ‘report’ is entirely false.”
Patel’s comment referenced a line from the outlet’s report: “After publication of this story and resulting pushback including from Republican allies, FBI officials began to back off aspects of their plan, according to a US official familiar with the matter.”
The FBI director’s statement continued to express outrage against the media outlet for spreading what he called a “disinformation campaign.”
“The fake news will NEVER be responsible for operational command authority over the ATF, we are,” he wrote in the memo. “The brave men and women of the ATF who courageously dedicate themselves to protecting the American public will not have their security jeopardized by the media’s disinformation campaigns. When we make decisions, they will be final, regardless of the input of CNN or any other news organization.”
The FBI declined a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
A senior spokesman for ATF told the Washington Examiner that CNN’s report did not “accurately reflect” the details of the FBI’s plan “to surge FBI and [ATF] resources to address violent crime, gang activity, transnational organized crime, firearms trafficking, and narcotics trafficking along the southern border and in other regions of the country most severely impacted by violent crime.”
“As part of a joint effort, the ATF will temporarily assign approximately 150 agents from existing field offices to other ATF field offices, where they will continue serving as ATF agents to support the surge initiative,” spokesman Johnny Michael said. “It is important to clarify that this is a temporary reassignment of resources to bolster public safety and combat criminal organizations more effectively. Additionally, ATF routinely initiates surge operations in cities across the country facing significant increases in violent crime.”
Republican-led efforts to overhaul ATF have been ongoing, most recently by Reps. Eric Burlison (R-MO) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO).
ATF is “just duplicative,” Burlison told the Washington Examiner in January. “They overlap a lot of our other agencies [such as] the FBI. That’s really under their scope. You have the U.S. Marshals Service. There’s a lot of agencies that provide the same level of service.”
“There’s a lot of things that are being done by the ATF that are not about keeping people safe. It’s just about making everyone who wants to own a firearm make our lives miserable,” he added.
DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION LAYOFFS COULD BE A PREVIEW OF BIGGER THINGS TO COME
The latest rumors of deep workforce cuts at ATF come as the Trump administration has focused on slashing the bureaucracy to cut fraud, waste, and abuse.
Agency heads across Washington, D.C., have cut large numbers at their departments, including over 1,300 workers from the Department of Education earlier this month, as the Trump administration seeks to eliminate the bureaucracy.
