FBI Director Kash Patel laid out his most detailed public account yet of what he called illegal surveillance of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, telling Fox News host Sean Hannity that the bureau lied in secret court applications to obtain warrants targeting Trump and senior officials, including Patel himself.
Patel, who spent years investigating the matter before taking the helm at the FBI, said a political party funded the fabrication of intelligence overseas, funneled it to the bureau, and then used it to secure surveillance authority from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. The FISA court later rescinded those warrants in 2018, Patel said, after finding the FBI had omitted exculpatory evidence and submitted unverified information.
The remarks, made on the latest episode of "Hang Out with Sean Hannity" and reported by Fox News, amount to the sitting FBI director publicly accusing his own predecessors of weaponizing federal law enforcement against a presidential candidate, and then continuing the practice for years afterward.
Patel described the scope of the alleged misconduct in blunt terms:
"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."
He continued, saying that manufactured material was then packaged and presented to a secret court.
"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 president of the United States."
Patel served as chief investigator and primary author of the 2018 "Nunes Memo," which alleged FBI bias in the Trump-Russia interference investigation. He later joined the National Security Council in 2019, becoming deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism during Trump's first term.
That background gave Patel a front-row seat to the internal workings of the intelligence community, and, he says, made him a target of the same surveillance apparatus he was investigating.
The FBI director told Hannity that the illegal surveillance extended well beyond Trump himself. Patel named former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and former FBI Director Chris Wray as figures involved in what he described as spying on him personally.
"I was illegally spied on by the likes of Rod Rosenstein and Chris Wray and 10 other staffers on the Hill and people who were elected to serve this country in the halls of Congress."
Patel did not name the ten staffers or the elected officials. But the claim broadens the alleged misconduct from a single campaign-season operation into a sprawling surveillance effort that reached into Congress itself.
The allegation fits a pattern of FBI investigations touching members of Congress that have drawn increasing scrutiny in recent months.
Central to Patel's account is what happened after the warrants were issued. He said the FISA court itself reversed course once the full picture emerged.
"The FISA court themselves came back and said these warrants were illegal. The FBI did not provide evidence of exculpatory evidence and innocence and that the FBI essentially lied in those applications and all the information was unverified."
Fox News reported that the FBI-approved warrants were rescinded by the FISA court in 2018 after a federal investigation into the alleged spying was completed. Some of the original warrant applications were signed by former FBI Director James Comey, Patel said.
Comey's legal troubles have only deepened since. A federal indictment of Comey drew a sharp public response from President Trump, and a photo caption in the Fox News report placed Patel alongside Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at a Justice Department press conference on April 28, 2026, following reports of a second indictment of the former FBI director.
Breitbart reported that Patel cited internal FBI emails, FISA applications, and the Steele dossier as evidence that helped reveal misconduct connected to the Russia investigation, reinforcing the picture of an institution that abused its surveillance powers and then buried the evidence.
Patel also described finding what he called the FBI's "burn bag" room, a space full of sensitive documents tied to the "Russiagate" investigation. The discovery suggests the bureau may have been preparing to destroy records relevant to the very misconduct Patel has been investigating for nearly a decade.
That revelation, previously detailed in reporting on Patel's disclosure, raises serious questions about what else may have been concealed, or already destroyed, during the years between Trump's first and second terms.
Patel acknowledged that the four years Trump was out of office gave the old guard time to dig in.
"I knew in the four years that we were out of office, that they continued to regenerate that institution of weaponization."
When he walked back into the FBI, Patel said, he realized the cleanup was far from finished.
"So when I walked in the door, I said, 'We only got a bit of it. We only got maybe half of it.'"
The timing of Patel's remarks carries additional weight. Congress recently renewed Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for just 45 days, a notably short extension that reflects deep unease, particularly among conservatives, about how the surveillance authority has been used.
Section 702 permits authorized U.S. officials to collect phone calls and text messages of foreign targets. But in doing so, it can also sweep up Americans' communications. President Trump has long opposed Section 702, and Patel's account of how FISA warrants were abused against a presidential campaign gives that opposition concrete, documented grounding.
The short renewal window signals that lawmakers on both sides want answers before granting the intelligence community a longer leash. Given what Patel has described, fabricated intelligence, secret court deception, warrants later declared illegal, that caution is well earned.
Concerns about internal FBI conduct have also surfaced in other contexts. Reports that false details were fed to suspected leakers inside the bureau suggest the institution's integrity problems run deeper than any single investigation.
Patel's account, while detailed, leaves several questions open. He did not identify the ten congressional staffers he said were surveilled. He did not specify which FISA warrant applications or case numbers are at issue. And while he referenced the FISA court's finding that the warrants were illegal, the specific ruling or order has not been publicly identified in this reporting.
Patel said he plans to uncover additional evidence, but did not describe what form that evidence might take or when it might be released.
Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, whom Trump has accused of orchestrating the surveillance campaign, have denied involvement. Neither has been charged in connection with the alleged spying.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche's appearance alongside Patel at the April 28 press conference, tied to the second Comey indictment, suggests the Justice Department is pursuing accountability on multiple fronts. Blanche has publicly stated that the case against Comey rests on substantial evidence.
Patel himself seemed aware of how extraordinary the allegations sound, even after years of investigation.
"I don't think that's ever happened before... Hollywood couldn't come up with this."
Hollywood didn't have to. The FBI did it with a badge, a secret court, and the assumption that no one would ever check the paperwork.