FBI Director Kash Patel has been accused of “padding the stats” to inflate his arrest accolades at the bureau.
Law enforcement sources told MS Now that Patel’s boasts that he has nearly doubled arrests—something he touted during his tumultuous testimony before senators this week—are only possible because he changed how arrests are counted.
Insiders say the FBI now includes in its tally the thousands of arrests of migrants that occurred when bureau agents accompanied DHS officers in joint operations in Minnesota and other target areas. Such arrests were previously not counted by the bureau as its own, according to MS Now.
“They are absolutely padding the stats and claiming arrests they would not have claimed [previously],” a current FBI official told MS Now. “So comparing 2025 to 2024 is not apples to apples.”
Another FBI insider said Patel’s “bogus” arrest numbers are a frequent complaint among agents.
“Kash is definitely engineering things to pad his stats,” the former FBI official told the network.
The FBI did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment about the allegations. Spokesman Ben Williamson told MS Now, “The contentions here seeking to discredit law enforcement are false and just the latest attempt to detract from this FBI’s and this administration’s year of the most prolific reduction in crime in United States history.”
Another point of pride for Patel has been that the FBI has arrested many on the bureau’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. He testified Tuesday, “We’ve arrested eight of the top 10 Most Wanted fugitives in the world in 14 months.”
That number has also been singled out as an alleged result of sneaky manipulations behind the scenes.
MS Now reports that the “FBI has accelerated the pace of arrests” on the top 10 Most Wanted list in part by making several “last-minute adds” to it. Of the eight most-wanted fugitive arrests that Patel touted to lawmakers, only two were on the most-wanted list when President Donald Trump took office in January 2025.
Further, the network reports that two of the most-wanted arrests were elevated to the list less than 24 hours before they were ultimately apprehended.
The most extreme example was the case of alleged double murderer Samuel Ramirez Jr. He was apprehended in Culiacán, Mexico, in March, just an hour and 13 minutes after he was elevated to the Most Wanted list, MS Now reports.
Williamson also took issue with questions being raised about changes to the FBI’s most-wanted list.
“If the media would like to make light of or discredit capturing some of the most violent and dangerous criminals in the world, then that is certainly a choice,” he told MS Now.
On X, Williamson shared a graphic that claimed there has been a 20 percent reduction of violent crime in Trump’s second term and that violent crime arrests are up 184 percent.
“Thank you to MSNOW for featuring Director Patel holding up our graphic in the article header,” he said. “Here it is so people can see for themselves the historic reductions in crime across the board under this administration.”
While Patel touted his arrest figures in front of lawmakers, the most viral exchange in his Tuesday testimony was regarding his drinking habits.
Patel said under oath that he “unequivocally and categorically” refuted the allegations of excessive drinking made in a bombshell article in The Atlantic and agreed to take an “audit” test to prove the claims weren’t true. On Wednesday, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen released his own alcohol assessment and challenged Patel to do the same.
“Yesterday, @FBIDirectorKash told me he’d take the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test if I did," he wrote on X. “Well, here’s mine. Given all the lies he told yesterday, I imagine he’ll fudge the numbers here, but let’s see yours, Director Patel.”
Patel did not immediately respond to Van Hollen.
