FBI Director Kash Patel has commissioned a classified report examining purported past FBI shortcomings, in what current and former bureau officials see as the Trump administration’s latest effort to rewrite history in the president’s favor.

“In an effort to promote fierce organizational accountability and rebuilding public trust, Director Patel is releasing a classified report to the workforce examining different chapters in our history,” says an internal FBI memo obtained by MS NOW. “We have titled this the ‘Patel Report’ and it documents where this institution fell short, but it also lays out what we have done and will continue to do to make certain those failures are not repeated.”

Three current and former FBI officials who spoke to MS NOW on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters say they do not know what is in the report, but they expect that it would cover matters important to President Donald Trump, including the Russia investigation and the more recent special counsel investigations involving classified documents and the alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.

Key questions about the “Patel Report” include who selected the cases, who drafted and reviewed the report, what evidentiary standard was used and whether the Justice Department’s inspector general or career FBI lawyers were allowed to test and challenge its conclusions.

The FBI declined to comment for this story.

The sources believe the “Patel Report” is designed to turn long-running political arguments over whether the FBI made mistakes into an authoritative FBI account. And by classifying it, the FBI will be making it much more difficult to challenge.

In essence, the sources say, Patel has created an official, classified vehicle to possibly relitigate the investigations that made his political reputation, including an investigation in which he was a fact witness.

In 2022, Patel publicly maintained that Trump had declassified the Mar-a-Lago documents, and he later testified before a grand jury on this question after receiving limited immunity. So, according to the sources, if the report deals with the documents case, it would amount to an FBI director supervising a narrative about an investigation that touched him personally.

Patel also has a personal stake in the Russia investigation of Trump. He made his reputation in MAGA world as a House staffer, challenging the FBI investigation of whether the Trump campaign improperly colluded with the Russian government operation to influence the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor. That probe found no evidence of Trump’s campaign colluding with Russia but declined to weigh in on whether Trump obstructed justice.

Trump, Patel and his allies have called the Russia issue a hoax, a formulation that sidesteps the findings of the Senate bipartisan probe.

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From MS Now.