BREAKING: 'Kash Patel's FBI': What the Bureau's Deleted Campaign-Style Video Claimed, What It Left Out, and Why It Crossed a Line
ANALYSIS | Florida Man News Network | Oct. 15, 2026
Four weeks before Election Day, with early voting already underway, the FBI put out a slick two-minute video. It set Democratic candidates against footage of riots, credited the director by name for falling crime, and ran to a Michael Jackson beat. Two days later the bureau deleted it without explanation. Here is what the video said, how its claims hold up, and why the law and decades of practice say the nation's top law enforcement agency should never have made it.
What the video showed
The FBI Rapid Response account posted it at 5:39 p.m. on Oct. 6, 2026. It showed altered footage of Kamala Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, Cori Bush and Rep. Ilhan Omar. Each was labeled by party and placed in front of "Defund the Police" signs, cut together with footage of rioting. El-Sayed, Michigan's Democratic Senate nominee, appeared on screen as "Progressive Democrat, Senate Nominee."
Then the video turned to the director. It played over the beat of "Smooth Criminal" and featured clips of Patel at work, including one of him walking away from a helicopter with Attorney General Todd Blanche. The narrator declared, "Kash Patel's FBI is taking safety back by force." It ended on the FBI's official seal.
The post itself was blunter. It told viewers the "defund the police crowd" wanted criminals to "run wild while cops take a backseat," then listed the bureau's numbers: 54,000 violent crime arrests (up 90%), more than 31,000 gangs disrupted and more than 3,200 kilograms of fentanyl seized. Its tagline: "They sold slogans. We delivered handcuffs."
Claim by claim
Claim: El-Sayed and the others are the "defund the police crowd."
That leaves out a lot. El-Sayed did embrace parts of the defund movement after George Floyd was killed in 2020. In a June 2020 radio interview he said police should be defunded in the sense of shifting money away from incarceration and toward education and community investment, and he described it as "re-funding." He has since called those past remarks dumb and unnuanced, though he still supports moving some police money to other public services. He told Politico the label doesn't describe his approach, and that he wants to give local departments more money to recruit good officers. The video showed none of this. It also pinned the label on a sitting candidate using the government's seal, not a campaign's.
Claim: 54,000 violent crime arrests, up 90%.
This is the video's central number, and it is the most disputed. The count includes arrests by state and local police and other federal agencies whenever an FBI employee was present, and the FBI has acknowledged many of those arrests are not its own cases. Public records show the FBI referred 15% fewer criminal cases for federal prosecution than in the same stretch under the Biden administration, and violent crime prosecutions across the Justice Department fell by the same margin. Even taken at face value, 54,000 is small next to the 11.3 million arrests made nationwide in the same period. One crime-data analyst called it a drop in the bucket.
Claim: More than 31,000 gangs disrupted and 3,200 kg of fentanyl seized.
These figures come from Patel's own Senate testimony, which also put the gang number at a 30% increase. FMNN could not find any independent check of either number, or a definition of what counts as "disrupting" a gang.
Claim: A "crime-first FBI" is driving crime down.
The narrator credited a crime-first FBI under Patel. But violent crime in American cities had started falling well before Trump took office, for reasons that are hard to pin down. State and local police, not the FBI, generally investigate homicides, which is why a former FBI official writing at Justice Connection says the bureau has little to do with the drop in murders. Patel has stretched these numbers before. In August he said rape, robbery and assault were all down by double digits. The FBI's own release showed robbery down 18.5%, but rape down 7.6% and aggravated assault down 7.2%.
Why this should never have happened
1. The FBI is held to the strictest political rules in government. The Hatch Act has kept federal workers out of campaigns since 1939. FBI employees are "further restricted" by statute. They may not campaign for or against candidates, even off duty. OSC's guidance says an agency's social media account should not like, post or repost about a candidate in a partisan race. This video did more than repost. It named a candidate and his race on screen.
2. El-Sayed holds no government office. That matters legally. CREW argued that he is not an officeholder and plays no role in FBI policy, so putting him in the video had no purpose except to help decide his race. Delaney Marsco, ethics director at the Campaign Legal Center, said criticizing "defund the police" isn't the problem by itself. It crosses the line when the government starts naming parties and specific candidates.
3. The government's own watchdog had just warned against exactly this. On Sept. 25, 11 days before the video went up, OSC declined to discipline agencies that blamed Democrats for the 2025 shutdown. But it warned that the "derogatory tone and broad dissemination" of messages like those can show their purpose was to affect elections, which the Hatch Act forbids. A riot-montage video labeling Democrats by party, posted during early voting, fits that description.
4. Congress bans agencies from spending tax money on propaganda. That ban has been in place since 1951, and the 2026 spending laws carry it forward for the FBI. GAO reads it as covering three things: self-aggrandizement, covert propaganda and purely partisan material. Self-aggrandizement means publicity that tends to emphasize the importance of the agency. A video built around the phrase "Kash Patel's FBI" is close to a textbook example. GAO has enforced this before. In 2015 it found the EPA's social media campaign for a clean water rule broke the ban and ordered it to account for the costs and report the violation to the president and Congress.
5. It breaks a long-standing Justice Department norm. Attorneys general traditionally issue an "Election Year Sensitivities" memo early in each election year. The 2024 version told every DOJ employee they must enforce the law in a neutral and impartial way, and that this is especially important in an election year. The FBI learned this the hard way in 2016, when Director James Comey's public statements about the Clinton email case days before the election led to years of criticism, including from the Justice Department's own Inspector General.
6. The agency with the power to investigate you should not campaign against you. This is the deeper reason. The FBI can open investigations, search homes and make arrests. When it brands one party's candidates as allies of criminals during voting, every voter, volunteer and candidate on that side has reason to wonder whether the bureau is neutral. Democracy Defenders Fund's letter puts it plainly: the video "has no place in a democratic society."
7. It fits a pattern. Late last month Patel told Fox News viewers they may want to vote for people who "back the blue" and fund law enforcement, "like this FBI does, thanks to President Trump." Attorney General Blanche has also appeared at political events, drawing criticism that it undermines public faith in law enforcement decisions. And at a Sept. 15 hearing Patel declined to rule out sending agents to polling places on Election Day.
The FBI's side
The bureau has not explained the video or why it was removed. It does defend its numbers. The FBI says it has always counted violent crime arrests where it has equity in the case, though multiple former officials told MS NOW that isn't true. It also says it and its partners delivered the largest one-year drop in violent crime in American history.
There are real arguments that this won't end in punishment. The video never mentioned the election outright. GAO has historically been very deferential, treating agency political messaging as allowed unless it is completely disconnected from official functions. And OSC let agencies off over the shutdown messaging because they relied on an earlier advisory. Supporters of Patel can also point out the FBI pulled the video within two days.
What happens next
CREW's president said OSC opened an investigation at the group's request under case number HA-27-000006. Democracy Defenders Fund's letter, sent today, asks OSC to seek penalties up to firing, GAO to rule on the propaganda ban, and the Inspector General to find out who approved the video, what budget paid for it, and whether contractors made it. OSC is now led by Special Counsel Charles Baldis, a former GOP Senate staffer, and CREW has complained that Hatch Act cases against senior officials have sat open for more than 10 months.
The FBI has not publicly commented on the video or its removal. FMNN will update this story if it does.
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