U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he boards Air Force One en route to Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, to attend a world leaders' summit on ending the Gaza war, amid a U.S.-brokered prisoner-hostage swap. (REUTERS)
President Donald Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel, has repeatedly been accused of firing agents who do not explicitly show partisan loyalty to Trump’s Republican Party. Now those alleged partisan terminations have reached a celebrated agent — one who worked on a case concerning endangered lawmakers nearly a decade ago.
Deputy Assistant Director Emily Morales was fired by Patel, as reported by MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian on Tuesday, allegedly because she did not arrive at a pro-Republican conclusion about the 2017 congressional baseball shooting by James Hodgkinson.
“It was unclear whether the letter cited her role in the 2017 assessment, but the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a personnel matter, said her removal was widely perceived inside the bureau as the latest in a series of firings of nonpartisan FBI agents who did their jobs in a way that drew disfavor from President Donald Trump or Republicans,” Dilanian reported.
Dilanian pointed out that in 2021, the FBI aroused the anger of House Republicans when it concluded Hodgkinson was “motivated by a desire to commit an attack on Members of Congress. … This conduct is something that we would today characterize as a domestic terrorism event.” Christopher Wray, who was FBI director at the time, deduced that Hodgkinson’s behavior did not meet the FBI’s definition of domestic terrorism as it existed in 2017.
“The FBI case file makes clear this case was a premeditated assassination attempt on Republican congressmen by a radical, left-wing political extremist, who was seeking to affect the conduct of our government,” the FBI concluded at the time.
Tonya Ugoretz, another former FBI employee who claims she was fired several months ago for pulling an FBI report that falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election was meddled with by the Chinese government, denounced the firing of Morales.
“Tactical reports give an understanding of information as it’s known at the time. Anyone with crisis response experience knows that information can change, and usually does,” Ugoretz said.
She added, “The FBI’s actions are choking the capabilities that help it stop criminals, spies, hackers, and terrorists before they act. I don’t know if they’re doing it intentionally or out of ignorance, and I don’t know which is worse.”
Steve Schmidt, who served as an adviser to President George W. Bush, has argued that in addition to his partisanship, Patel’s reported drinking problem has impaired his ability to effectively do his job.
“He's angry — so angry and affronted,” Schmidt said on his Substack, describing his fear of being fired by Trump due to the president’s well-known contempt for alcoholism. “He recognizes that it's all slipping away. What the performance at the hearing validated was this, from ‘The Atlantic’ story that kicked it all off [to] when he was locked out of his computer and he melted down and he panicked. You got a sense yesterday of what a Kash Patel meltdown looks like.”
Schmidt added that because Patel is widely viewed as an incompetent FBI director, 2,800 FBI agents left last year since he took over (four times the normal attrition rate). The former Bush adviser expressed alarm that Patel’s potential drinking problem is endangering America’s national security.
“This was the premier law enforcement agency,” Schmidt said. “The respect for it is crumbling faster than the morale inside of it is, which is saying something. Kash Patel is unfit. He is untrustworthy. Kash Patel is a buffoon. And yesterday, he was the latest buffoon unmasked at a congressional hearing.”