By Sadie Gurman and Aruna Viswanatha
WASHINGTON—FBI officials from regional field offices gathered on a video call this week to hear from their new director, Kash Patel, who rattled off so many changes that employees couldn’t tell if he was serious about all of them.
He was planning to reorganize the Federal Bureau of Investigation with a regional command structure, raise fitness requirements for special agents and arrange a partnership between the FBI and the UFC cage-fighting league run by a close friend of President Trump’s, people familiar with the meeting said.
He said he didn’t like meetings, that the weekly videoconference might turn into monthly one and at one point stepped out to take another phone call, the people said.
Patel, a prosecutor-turned-political operative, has promised radical change at the agency, including plans to shift part of the focus from national-security work and foreign threats toward fighting violent crime across the U.S. and other Trump priorities.
His first week at the bureau has laid bare the extent to which his tenure could upend the tradition-bound agency and transform its culture, according to interviews with a dozen current and former FBI officials.
Soon after arriving, Patel cleared out all civil-service staff in the leadership suites and replaced them with political associates; ordered 1,500 employees relocated out of Washington without money in place to pay for the move; and broke a promise he made to agents to appoint a deputy from their ranks.
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