FBI Director Kash Patel laid out his most detailed public account yet of what he calls a deliberate campaign of deception by the bureau, accusing the FBI of lying in surveillance warrant applications to spy on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and, later, on Patel himself and other government officials.
Patel made the accusations during an appearance on the latest episode of "Hang Out with Sean Hannity," as Fox News reported. His remarks traced a timeline that stretches from the 2016 election through Trump's first term, the four years out of power, and into the present, a saga Patel said he spent years investigating and that he believes is still not fully exposed.
The charges are not new in outline. But the man making them now runs the FBI. And the evidence he says his team has recently uncovered, including hidden rooms full of classified documents tied to the Russia probe, suggests the reckoning he promised during his confirmation may only be getting started.
Patel described spending two years as a congressional investigator proving that a political party funded the collection of fabricated intelligence overseas, then used it to obtain warrants from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.
"It took me two years of my life to prove the following: that a political party in the United States of America in the 21st century would go overseas and hire some bogus intelligence asset to manufacture fraudulent, fake, unverified information, funnel that to not just the intelligence community, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
He continued, saying the FBI then packaged those materials and brought them before a FISA judge.
"And then take those packaged lies that they had paid for with campaign finance funds and go into a secret surveillance court and illegally spy on your opponent to be the president of the United States."
Patel served as a chief investigator and primary author of the 2018 "Nunes Memo," which alleged FBI bias in the Trump-Russia interference investigation. He later joined the National Security Council in 2019 and became deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism during Trump's first term.
The FISA court itself, Patel said, ultimately agreed that the warrants should never have been issued. He stated the court rescinded them in 2018 after a federal investigation into the alleged spying was completed.
"The FISA court themselves came back and said these warrants were illegal. The FBI did not provide evidence of exculpatory evidence and innocence and that the FBI essentially lied in those applications and all the information was unverified."
Some of those warrant applications were signed by former FBI Director James Comey, a figure who has remained at the center of the controversy. Patel appeared alongside acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at a Justice Department press conference in Washington on April 28, 2026, following reports of a second indictment of Comey.
The FBI director did not limit his accusations to the surveillance of Trump. He said he personally was subjected to illegal spying by senior officials within the government he served.
"I was illegally spied on by the likes of Rod Rosenstein and Chris Wray and 10 other staffers on the Hill and people who were elected to serve this country in the halls of Congress."
Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general, and Wray, the former FBI director, have not publicly responded to Patel's latest remarks. But the claim fits a pattern Patel has described before, that the apparatus of federal law enforcement was turned against the very people trying to hold it accountable.
That pattern extended into the Biden years, Patel suggested. Reporting has shown the Biden-era FBI swept up two years of Patel's calls, texts, and financial records under the Jack Smith probe, a fact that lends weight to his claim that he was a repeated target of government surveillance.
Patel told Hannity that the misconduct did not stop when Trump left office in 2021.
"They were actually continuing the weaponization that Donald Trump and I had exposed during Trump One. I knew in the four years that we were out of office, that they continued to regenerate that institution of weaponization."
Perhaps the most striking element of Patel's recent public statements involves what he says his team found after he took over the bureau. He described discovering a room at FBI headquarters filled with sensitive documents related to the Russia investigation, materials that had apparently been set aside in "burn bags," the government term for containers of classified documents marked for destruction.
As Breitbart reported, Patel said the FBI discovered burn bags and a room full of hidden Trump-Russia probe files at bureau headquarters. Among the key finds was the classified annex to former special counsel John Durham's final report, a document whose contents have never been made public.
Durham's 2023 final report concluded that the FBI relied on uncorroborated intelligence and lacked sufficient basis to open a full Trump-Russia investigation. The classified annex, now reportedly in Patel's hands, could add further detail to that conclusion.
Patel posted about the discovery directly, saying he had proved in 2017 and 2018 that the Steele Dossier "was fictitious intelligence, weaponized by corrupt FBI officials to deceive a federal judge and unlawfully spy on then presidential candidate Trump's campaign." He said the newly uncovered materials are being declassified for possible public release.
The existence of a hidden burn bag room at FBI headquarters that was missing from official blueprints raises its own set of questions. Who ordered those documents preserved, or destroyed? How long had the room existed? And what else might be in it?
Patel's remarks come against the backdrop of renewed scrutiny of the surveillance tools the FBI used. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits authorized U.S. officials to collect phone calls and text messages of foreign targets, but in doing so can also capture Americans' communications. Congress recently renewed Section 702 for 45 days, keeping the debate alive.
President Trump has long opposed Section 702 in its current form. The FISA warrant abuse Patel described is precisely the kind of scenario that critics of the surveillance authority have warned about for years: a secret court, one-sided applications, no adversarial process, and a government willing to submit unverified material to get the result it wanted.
That the FISA court itself later rescinded the warrants, acknowledging, in Patel's telling, that the FBI had withheld exculpatory evidence and submitted unverified information, is a fact that should trouble anyone who believes in constitutional limits on government power, regardless of party.
Trump has accused Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama of being ringleaders in the alleged spying conspiracy against his campaign. Both have denied the allegation. But the institutional record, the rescinded warrants, the Durham report's findings, and now the burn bag discovery, keeps building in one direction.
Patel himself seemed aware of the scale of what he is describing. He told Hannity he walked into the FBI director's office knowing the job was only half done.
"So when I walked in the door, I said, 'We only got a bit of it. We only got maybe half of it.'"
He added, with a note of dark humor: "I don't think that's ever happened before... Hollywood couldn't come up with this."
Patel's tenure as FBI director has itself been a source of controversy and even personal danger. Iran-linked hackers breached his personal email account and published private photos online, a reminder that the people who want accountability at the FBI face pressure from more than just Washington insiders.
The open questions remain significant. Which specific FISA warrant applications are at issue? Which additional officials were surveilled? What does the Durham classified annex contain? And will the declassified burn bag materials match the gravity of Patel's public claims?
Patel has promised more is coming. He has the job, the access, and, if the burn bag discovery is any indication, the documents. Whether the political will exists to follow the evidence wherever it leads is another matter.
For years, Trump and his allies said the FBI was weaponized against a presidential campaign. The Durham report said the investigation lacked sufficient basis. The FISA court pulled the warrants. And now the FBI's own director says he found a hidden room full of the receipts. At some point, the people who dismissed all of this as a conspiracy theory owe the country an explanation for why the evidence keeps piling up on the other side.
