FBI Director Kash Patel told Sean Hannity that the bureau lied in surveillance court applications to obtain warrants used to illegally spy on Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign, and that the abuse did not stop there.
Patel, appearing on Tuesday's episode of Hang Out with Sean Hannity, laid out a detailed account of what he described as a years-long pattern of FBI misconduct rooted in fraudulent FISA applications, concealed exculpatory evidence, and a surveillance apparatus that he said was turned against a presidential candidate, a sitting president, congressional staffers, and eventually Patel himself.
The remarks landed shortly after Congress approved a 45-day renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a provision that has drawn growing scrutiny over the federal government's use of its surveillance powers. Patel used the moment to press the case that the very tools Congress just extended were the same ones his predecessors weaponized against their political opponents.
Patel told Hannity he spent two years of his life proving how the surveillance abuse unfolded. As Breitbart News reported, the FBI director described a scheme in which a political party went overseas, hired what he called a "bogus intelligence asset," and used manufactured information to obtain secret court orders.
"It took me two years of my life to prove the following: that a political party in the United States of America, in the 21st century, would go overseas and hire some bogus intelligence asset to manufacture fraudulent, fake, unverified information, funnel that to, not just the intelligence community, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then take those packaged lies that they had paid for with campaign finance funds and go into a secret surveillance court, and illegally spy on your opponent to be the next President of the United States."
That is a sitting FBI director describing his own agency's recent history as a fraud on a secret court. The weight of the accusation is hard to overstate.
Patel said the FISA court itself confirmed the warrants were tainted. He told Hannity the court found that the FBI failed to provide exculpatory evidence and "essentially lied" in its applications.
"The FISA court themselves came back and said these warrants were illegal, that the FBI did not provide evidence of exculpatory evidence and innocence, and that the FBI essentially lied in those applications."
The claims track with what Patel first brought to public attention years ago. Fox News linked Patel's remarks to his central role in producing the 2018 Nunes Memo, which alleged FBI bias and misconduct in the Trump-Russia investigation and accused the bureau of relying on the unverified Steele dossier to justify its surveillance applications.
Patel made clear he views the 2016 campaign surveillance as only the beginning. He called it "step one" and told Hannity he knew the misconduct continued during the four years he and Trump were out of office.
The FBI director said he himself was illegally surveilled, naming former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein and former FBI director Chris Wray as responsible parties. The conduct Patel described extended well beyond one target.
"I was illegally spied on by the likes of Rod Rosenstein and Chris Wray."
He said the surveillance also swept up "ten other staffers on the Hill, and people who were elected to serve this country in the halls of Congress." Patel did not name those individuals, but the implication is stark: the nation's top law enforcement agency, under prior leadership, allegedly monitored members of Congress and their staff.
The FBI's conduct under Wray has drawn fresh attention in recent months. Patel himself previously said the bureau was sidelined for four days in the Nancy Guthrie disappearance case, raising separate questions about how the agency operates and who controls its priorities.
Patel told Hannity the abuses he uncovered were not the product of rogue agents acting alone. He described an institutional arrogance, officials so confident in their own authority that they documented their own misconduct.
"I knew walking in the door the following: These individuals, these purported leaders of law enforcement and government are so arrogant that they write the stuff down themselves to memorialize how great they are. That's how we caught them in RussiaGate. It wasn't my documents. It was their emails. It was their FISA application. It was their bogus Steele dossier. It was their unverified reporting that was documented in FBI holdings that we put out and that you covered."
That line, "It wasn't my documents. It was their emails", captures the core of Patel's argument. He is saying the evidence of FBI misconduct came from the bureau's own files, not from outside accusers.
Patel said he believed additional evidence of surveillance abuse remained hidden when he took office. He told Hannity he acted immediately.
"I knew there were other places that that information was hidden. So, day one I set out to find it and we found it."
He did not specify what he found or where. That gap matters. The FBI director is making a public claim that new evidence exists, but the details remain undisclosed. Whether those findings lead to referrals, declassifications, or formal accountability remains an open question.
The broader pattern Patel described, fabricated intelligence, concealed exculpatory material, secret court orders based on unverified claims, is not new to anyone who followed the Trump-Russia investigation. But hearing it from the man who now runs the FBI carries a different kind of authority. He is no longer a congressional staffer making allegations. He is the director of the agency he is accusing.
That distinction matters for accountability. Former FBI Director James Comey recently surrendered on federal charges tied to a social media post, a reminder that the legal consequences of the Trump-era FBI leadership saga are still unfolding.
Patel's remarks did not arrive in a vacuum. Congress had just renewed Section 702 of FISA for 45 days, a short-term extension that reflects ongoing disagreement over how much latitude the government should have to conduct surveillance without traditional warrants.
For years, civil liberties advocates on both the left and right have warned that FISA's secret court structure lacks meaningful adversarial oversight. Patel's account reinforces the concern from a different angle: not that the system is flawed in theory, but that it was actively abused in practice by the very officials entrusted to use it responsibly.
If the FISA court itself concluded the warrants were illegal, as Patel stated, then the 45-day renewal Congress just approved is not merely a procedural matter. It is a decision to keep alive the same surveillance framework that Patel says was corrupted from within.
The FBI's investigative reach continues to generate headlines on multiple fronts. Separately, the bureau executed search warrants at the office of Virginia Senate leader Louise Lucas, a reminder that the agency's enforcement actions carry political implications regardless of who sits in the director's chair.
Patel's interview raised as many questions as it answered. He did not name the political party he accused, though the context of the 2016 campaign and the Steele dossier leaves little ambiguity. He did not identify the ten congressional staffers or the elected officials he said were surveilled. He did not describe the specific evidence he said was found on "day one."
He also did not say whether the information he uncovered has been referred to prosecutors, shared with congressional oversight committees, or made available for public review. The difference between a powerful accusation and a consequential one is what happens next.
Trump himself has long maintained that his campaign was the target of unlawful surveillance, a claim that was dismissed for years by much of the Washington establishment. Patel's account, delivered from the top of the FBI, amounts to a formal institutional acknowledgment, from the accused agency's own leader, that the surveillance was real, was based on lies, and was illegal.
The legal landscape around Trump continues to shift on multiple fronts. His legal team is also pursuing Supreme Court review of the $83.3 million E. Jean Carroll judgment, another thread in the broader story of legal battles that have defined his political career.
Patel's willingness to name names, Rosenstein, Wray, and to describe the FBI's conduct as illegal surveillance sets a marker. The question is whether the marker leads anywhere.
Americans watched for years as the Russia investigation consumed Washington. They watched the Nunes Memo get dismissed as partisan overreach. They watched the inspector general's report confirm serious problems with the FISA applications. And they watched as no senior FBI official faced criminal consequences for what even the FISA court acknowledged were deficient submissions.
Now the FBI director is saying, on the record, that the warrants were illegal, that the applications were built on lies, and that the surveillance extended to him personally, to congressional staff, and to elected members of Congress. He says he found new evidence on his first day in office.
If that is true, the public deserves to see it. And if the officials responsible have not yet been held accountable, the public deserves to know why.
A secret court that operates on trust only works if the people filing the applications tell the truth. When they don't, and when the man now running the FBI says they didn't, trust isn't the problem. Consequences are.
