In the wake of several mass shootings, FBI director calls for bureau’s intelligence operation to ‘evolve’

By Evan Perez, Holmes Lybrand, CNN

(CNN) — In a memo to FBI employees, Director Kash Patel announced that some officials would be returning to the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, to reexamine the agency’s intelligence work, marking a stark shift for Patel, who has previously celebrated cutting the number of agents in the nation’s capital.

“To stay at the forefront of the intelligence community, some updates to the FBI’s Intelligence Program are needed,” Patel announced Tuesday in the memo sent to bureau employees and reviewed by CNN. While the current intelligence structures of the FBI were “broadly here to stay,” he said, “changes must be made to ensure they evolve to meet our operational needs.”

Months before he was selected to lead the top law enforcement agency in the US, Patel lamented on a podcast that the “biggest problem the FBI has had, has come out of its intel shops.”

“I’d break that component out of it. I’d shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state,” Patel said in a September 2024 interview on the “Shawn Ryan Show.”

Patel added that he would “take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops. Go be cops.”

In Tuesday’s memo, however, Patel told his employees that he has asked “some strong leaders to come back to headquarters” to help conduct “an in-depth internal study.”

“This study will identify gaps and opportunities to improve intelligence support to the field. We will still need HQ components to run the program and guide the national threat picture, but consistent with my priority to enhance the field, my focus will be to decentralize as much as possible and push resources out,” Patel added.

The announcement comes on the heels of several apparent lone wolf attacks in the US, including the recent assassination of Patel’s friend, right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk, and several mass shootings at churches and schools.

“Thanks for all you do to keep the mission first. And remember, it all starts and ends with intelligence,” Patel concluded the memo.

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