Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel discusses violent crime and National Guard authorizations, among other topics, during a wide-ranging interview held last week at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., for “The Armstrong Williams Show.”
This is part one of three. Part two will appear Tuesday in print and online at baltimoresun.com, where you can also find a video of the entire interview.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Set the table for Operation Summer Heat.
This is news. We kept it quiet for the summer. Operation Summer Heat was a 3-month surge by the FBI with our state and local partners. We started at the end of June and just wrapped up at the end of September. What we did was follow one goal, crushing violent crime — one of this administration’s key priorities. We went into every single field office, we have 55 field offices scattered across the country.
Why is full collaboration with state and local partners essential?
Because no single federal agency, or the federal government, can secure the entire nation without our state and local law enforcement partners. You have to recognize the roughly 1 million state and local officers across our 50 states doing the job. They have the best relationships in the community and the ground-level intelligence. They also have assets and resources that, when synced with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, make the most dynamic police force on God’s green earth.
That’s the beauty of moving agents out of D.C., as you and I have discussed. When you take a thousand folks out of D.C. and put them into the field, they support Operation Summer Heat on a permanent basis with state and local law enforcement. With fewer people in D.C. for the FBI and more intel analysts, more federal agents, and more support staff in the field, that’s what it takes to build these cases. You can’t just walk into a city and say, “Ok, there are 150 law enforcement officers here, let’s go arrest people.” You have to build a ground game of intelligence that takes months. That’s what we did in Memphis, Chicago, and New Orleans. And that’s why, at President [Donald] Trump’s direction, we went in quietly months ago into these cities to set Phase 0/1. Now we’re going in with the Guard to complete that project. That’s the beauty of operations like Summer Heat.
When you say “the Guard,” do you mean the National Guard? What’s their role?
We absolutely have used them. Under President Trump’s leadership, we needed the National Guard in Washington, D.C. You and I both know, we live here, Washington, D.C. was a hotbed of criminal activity. We’ve had so much drug crime here. Rightfully, President Trump sent us in quietly months ago to set the stage. But to complete the mission, the president was right, we needed the National Guard to set a stable perimeter.
That is the critical piece the Guard brings to this fight. We don’t need them being law enforcement officers, and they’re not. I want to make that crystal clear. What they allow law enforcement to do, the FBI, the interagency, state and local authorities, is work safely within the city street corners: operate and conduct investigations, bust into houses, take bad guys off the streets, seize firearms. And they don’t have to worry that the next house over has another gang activity in it that might attack them because we didn’t know about it. That’s the beauty of having the National Guard. And they’re going to be setting up these perimeters in all these other cities, thanks to the president.
Walk us through the Summer Heat results.
Summer Heat was all 55 field offices across America. And while we can’t give you all of every single field office’s stats, look at some of these: In three months, Summer Heat had 8,700 arrests. In three months, Summer Heat had 2,281 firearms seized, permanently off our streets. Fentanyl: 421 kilograms seized. By the way, that’s enough to kill over 50 million Americans — 50 million on the low end, conservative estimate — lethal doses from that seizure. Cocaine: 45,000 kgs. seized. We conducted operations that led to 2,000 indictments and 1,400 convictions. And the bulk of that work came from our violent crime and gang forces. Operation Summer Heat [also] found and located almost 1,000 child victims and returned them to safety, victims of sexual trafficking, victims of home abuse, victims of rape and violent crimes against children. All of it is shocking.
Where does Operation Viper fit into this?
That’s a great question. To execute Operation Summer Heat successfully across the board, we had to surge into certain cities that had [problems with] violent crime, for instance, Memphis, New Orleans, and elsewhere. What they needed was specialized FBI resources. They needed our teams to come in with our specialized investigative tools that allow us to map out the infrastructure that the enemy is operating in, to locate them, and to work with state and local law enforcement officers to say, “Now we’ve got search warrants to kick down these doors because we know where the bad guys are.”
Operation Viper was a critical component to supplement Operation Summer Heat. This is what the FBI is good at doing when you let good cops be cops. And I didn’t mention it: These are record-breaking results for any seven-month period ever at the FBI. At a bare minimum, all these arrests, convictions, and seizures are up 20% to 40% from the same time last year.
Put the firearms and drug seizures in community context.
We seized, permanently, an entire hotel in Anchorage, Alaska, that was the epicenter of gang and criminal activity for narco-trafficking. And we took it. And the same thing on a fraud scheme down in New Orleans, in southeastern USA, we seized multiple entities in a health care fraud scheme, seized permanently off the streets, off the market. So the critical element we need for Summer Heat to sustain itself is sustainment. We have to leave a footprint in the cities of security, and that’s what we’re doing with Summer Heat. By taking all this off the streets and seizing the assets that were hotbeds of criminal activities, the criminals know they can’t go in there because the second they step in, they’re getting arrested and added to these statistics.
How do you expand this nationwide?
We’re already there. The FBI is in every major city, and Summer Heat shows the highest record numbers of arrests. These are only the cities with the top numbers: New York – 471, L.A. – 441, Boston – 404, those are just the top eight. We have stats for every single city. We have 345 resident agencies throughout America. And what we’ve done is partner with the Department of Justice and our attorney general and deputy attorney general to bring prosecutions, because that’s what you need. You need indictments. These indictments are across the country, in every single state, as I mentioned, Alaska, which people might forget about. We’re everywhere, and we’re staying. And that’s the beauty of the redeployment of our resources at the FBI from Washington, D.C.
When I first got here on the job, I found out a third of our workforce worked in the NCR, the National Capital Region. One-third of our 37,000 personnel worked for us there, and I said that’s unacceptable because a third of the crime doesn’t happen in Washington, D.C. in the NCR. So we pushed them out. That’s why Americans know and are seeing the FBI out there in full force, because they’re literally out there in numbers they’ve never been before.
Baltimore specifically: if local leaders don’t want the Guard, how do you still reduce crime?
The political leadership in Baltimore needs to recognize what the president did here. He asked us to go in quietly months ago because of the criminal rise in places like Baltimore. We don’t see politics in crime, but we are going to leverage the full authorities under this presidency to go in there and do what we did in Baltimore: 224 violent [crime] arrests in three months. That’s not in seven months, that’s in three months.
Emphasize what you mean by “violent arrests.”
Violent. These aren’t misdemeanors or Mickey Mouse operations. Guns, narco-trafficking; people who do harm to our children, who entrap them, enslave them, traffic them. This is the worst of the worst: murderers and gangs. That’s why I highlighted the violent crime and gang statistic: 6,500 of these arrests were just violent crime and gang-related alone.
And so when people come back at us and say, “We don’t want the National Guard,” just look at what happened here in Washington, D.C. The National Guard came in and set up safe perimeters and zones and allowed the public to see what the Guard was doing, which was simply setting up perimeters. And that’s what we can do in places like Baltimore if they want to work with us and get the job done. Who doesn’t want a safer town for their child to go to the park? Who doesn’t want a town with more guns removed from the streets? Who doesn’t want a town with more fentanyl seized so your kid doesn’t overdose at the park? It doesn’t make any sense to me for anyone to argue against it.
Critics say Summer Heat retasked the FBI to street crime at the expense of counterintelligence and domestic terrorism. Was this a surge or a pivot?
It was a recognition of the explosion of violent crime while staying on mission to defend the homeland. As you walk around this building, you’ll see the top two priorities of this Bureau: defend the homeland and crush violent crime. We can do both at the same time, and that’s what we’re doing. For those who don’t understand the numbers or want to attack politically, let me put these numbers in front of you. Counterintelligence arrests year-to-date, a seven-month period since I took over, against the PRC, Iran, and the Russians, are up 60%, 85% and 35%, respectively. That doesn’t happen if you come off the counterintelligence mission. And those facts speak for themselves. Just to put an umbrella over it. This year alone, the FBI has had 24,000 arrests of violent offenders, 24,000 violent arrests year to date. From last year, that is a 125% increase. So if we’re not doing our job and we’re not finding the bad guys, then we must be making up a lot of numbers.
What’s the winter version of Operation Summer Heat?
Maybe we’ll call it Frostbite. But that’s the key, we have to sustain for the American people. We have to show the longevity of the program. And the way we do that is by highlighting what the FBI has done outside of Summer Heat. While all of this is going on, the FBI has arrested four of its Top 10 Most Wanted fugitives in the world, four in seven months. To put that in perspective, the prior administration got four in four years. That includes Cindy Singh in the state of Texas, who [was accused of murdering] her mentally disabled 6-year-old son and fled to India. No one wanted to look for her. We found her in two months, thanks to the Indian government and our interagency partners. On top of all that, we got the Abbey Gate bomber in two weeks. The Biden administration couldn’t look for him for four years; we got him in two weeks. He’s sitting in a jail right now. We removed the red tape, and we get after the mission, as the president has instructed us. Protecting the homeland is the priority of this administration and the people.
Armstrong Williams (https://ift.tt/yq5d9gu; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist, host of “The Armstrong Williams Show” and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.
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