President Donald Trump offered support to FBI Director Kash Patel on Tuesday, after news outlet MS NOW reported that Trump was considering ousting Patel from his current role.
“He is doing a great job, I think,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One when asked about the report.
The White House earlier denied that Trump was considering removing Patel.
MS NOW, citing three unidentified people with knowledge of the situation, said in an online report that Trump and his top aides had grown increasingly frustrated by the unflattering headlines Patel has generated.
They have confided to allies that Trump is weighing removing Patel and considering Andrew Bailey, the FBI’s co-deputy director, as his replacement, according to MS NOW, formerly MSNBC.
FBI directors, by law, are appointed to 10-year terms as a means of insulating the bureau from politics, and are subject to confirmation by the Senate.
Patel, a Trump loyalist who during the president’s first term advised both the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defence, has previously called for stripping the FBI of its intelligence-gathering role and purging its ranks of any employee who refuses to support Trump’s agenda.
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on X that the MS NOW story was “completely made up.” She posted a photo of Trump and Patel that she said was taken in the Oval Office on Tuesday.
Leavitt said Trump and Patel were in a meeting when the report was published, and the president reacted to it by laughing and saying, “What? That’s totally false. Come on, Kash, let’s take a picture to show them you’re doing a great job!”
MS NOW said it stood behind its reporting.
More than 200 people have been fired from the Justice Department, of which the FBI is a part, since Trump took office for his second term in January. Of those, dozens worked on criminal cases related to Trump or his allies.
(with inputs from Reuters)
