US President Donald Trump reacts during a Columbus Day celebration in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., US, October 9, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci
On Wednesday, it was revealed that under the leadership of President Donald Trump, the FBI has embraced a novel solution to making it appear as if its violent crime arrests are up: “juice the stats.” This is according to a new report by MS NOW, which found that the crime numbers touted by FBI Director Kash Patel are padded with arrests made by state and local law enforcement rather than the bureau.
“With fewer agents and a strained budget, the FBI under its director, Kash Patel, has brought thousands fewer criminal cases than previous administrations,” reports MS NOW, citing a review of Justice Department data. “The findings rebut Patel’s repeated claims that he has led a crackdown on violent crime. Patel has boasted that the FBI has arrested 54,000 violent criminals, which he describes as a 90 percent increase in arrests from the same period in the Biden administration. What he doesn’t mention is that his count is inflated by including arrests that state and local police forces and other federal agencies have made when an FBI employee is present.” And as the FBI itself acknowledged, many were not FBI cases.
In fact, data shows that the FBI has referred 15 percent fewer criminal cases for federal prosecution during Trump’s second term than during the same period in the Biden administration. And, while the FBI does not break down its criminal referrals into types of cases, the data also shows that the DOJ prosecuted 15 percent fewer cases of violent crimes during the first 16 months of the Trump administration than during the same period of the Biden administration. According to MS NOW, “There were nearly 3,800 fewer people charged federally with violent crimes during the first part of the second Trump administration than during the comparable Biden period — the opposite of what Patel says. That figure includes cases referred from all federal agencies, not just the FBI.” The report is based on public DOJ data obtained and shared by Justice Connection, a group of former DOJ and FBI employees who have accused the administration of weaponizing the department to pursue Trump’s political ends.
The drop in criminal cases has corresponded with a “huge” increase in focus on immigration crimes per Patel’s demand. According to MS NOW, “Since the 9/11 attacks, the FBI’s priority mission has been stopping terrorism. The bureau is also devoted to hunting foreign spies, ferreting out political corruption and white collar fraud, and disrupting complex criminal schemes and organized crime.” The shift to emphasizing immigration enforcement along with the juiced stats represents a major change in the FBI’s function and transparency.
“Kash Patel is actively dismantling decades of statistical integrity just to feed a political narrative,” said Christopher O’Leary, a former senior FBI official and MS NOW contributor. “We are seeing a historic institution reduced to a metrics game, where the FBI is poaching credit for arrests made by other law enforcement agencies and departments. This artificial inflation of the stats is a deliberate smoke screen designed to mask internal chaos and the mass exodus of experienced talent by manufacturing an illusion of productivity that simply does not exist on the ground.”
In a statement to MS NOW, the FBI did not dispute the data showing a reduction in criminal referrals, but it pointed to the declining rate of violent crime. But as MS NOW explains, “That decline has been a nationwide trend for several years after crime briefly spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2022. It’s been steadily declining ever since.” And while Patel has claimed a 90 percent increase in “violent crime arrests” by the FBI, this ignores crucial context: “that Patel is taking credit for the work of other agencies.”
“By Patel newly including state and local arrests, as well as arrests by other federal agencies, his FBI progress report radically changes the way the FBI counts its cases to include work the FBI did not do,” MS NOW elaborates. “The FBI has not previously counted other agency arrests as part of its caseload, according to internal DOJ data and the accounts of current and former officials. There is no way to say how many of the local police arrests — which Patel now claims credit for — would have been made regardless of the FBI’s presence.” The FBI asserts that the numbers have always been tallied that way, but that is false, multiple former FBI officials told MS NOW. Former FBI agent Daniel Brunner said the FBI previously always resisted counting state and local arrests as FBI achievements. “It’s never been done,” he said. “And when agents attempted to do it, it was always pushed back on at the local division. Headquarters did not want false numbers, they wanted the truth from the field.”