Former staff who worked with FBI Director Kash Patel have shared their concern over his alarming obsession with social media.
A new episode of The New York Times’ podcast The Daily, “Inside Kash Patel’s FBI,” featured FBI employees calling out Patel’s love of posting online, including once in “Rambo” cosplay.
Former FBI senior executive and intelligence analyst John Sullivan, who retired in April 2025 after 17 years of service, revealed how Patel made “a big push for optics” at the bureau.
That included a social media video Patel posted in March last year filmed at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, a base for officer training and combat development.
He noted that in the video, Patel, who is in army camouflage fatigues, wearing sunglasses and an FBI cap, was “cosplaying as Rambo, being around explosions and people rappelling from helicopters.”
Sullivan said Patel was taking “resources and time and money and energy” to film his social media videos to make himself look “tough.”
“To many people, those videos, myself included, looked completely childish,” Sullivan said. “The director, the leader of the FBI, is representing the organization in a juvenile manner. And the work that we do and did was supremely serious.”
Another source told The Daily that Patel attended a secret intelligence conference in the U.K. last year that involved visiting Windsor Castle and eventually getting a group photograph with King Charles.
The photograph included not only Patel, but other people working with the intelligence services whose identities must remain secret. The Daily reporter Rachel Posner claimed the photo was sent to all the participants in the conference as “a kind of keepsake” with the instructions that it could not be shared for security reasons.
“But Kash Patel is apparently determined to put this photo out on his social media,” Posner said from her reporting on the FBI director.
“And so it creates this minor international incident where the British are saying ‘Please don’t post that photo. You really can’t’. And his team is kind of pushing back—‘No, we want to put it out’."
While the royal photo did not get released, Posner added, “It’s just an example of the kind of thing that everyone started to have to deal with when Patel was so focused on optics and social media.”
The episode also included FBI sources who said agents were being told to “take pictures for social media while they were out doing raids and making arrests” during Patel’s reign. The agents said they felt it “compromised operational security and their safety” and highlighted how Patel was putting “the optics over the mission.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the FBI for comment.
FBI spokesman Ben Williamson told The Daily their reporting was “a regurgitation of fake narratives, conjecture and speculation from anonymous sources who are disconnected from reality.”
Speaking to The Daily, Sullivan recalled a senior leader’s conference where President Donald Trump “had seen video footage or pictures of the raids that were being conducted around the United States, and was angry that he did not see the well-known FBI flak jackets with the yellow ‘FBI’ on the back.”
Soon after he left the FBI last year, Sullivan appeared on Brian Tyler Cohen’s podcast and claimed Patel and his former deputy Dan Bongino were “really doing everything possible to make us less safe and please Donald Trump.”
