The FBI director apparently decided that running a 'payback squad' targeting Trump's political enemies wasn't quite enough fun, so he also allegedly set up a personal slush fund to shower his loyalist agents with nearly $40,000 a pop in bonus checks. According to The Guardian, Congressman Jamie Raskin is now formally accusing Kash Patel of directing more than $1 million in taxpayer money to a small circle of favored agents, draining FBI reserve accounts so fast that some payments literally bounced.
The Numbers Are Genuinely Staggering
Here's the thing: these weren't modest little attaboy payments. According to information received by the House judiciary minority committee and reported by The Guardian, some agents in Patel's inner circle were collecting payments of nearly $8,000 every two weeks. On top of their regular federal salaries. Which were already at the federal pay ceiling.
The committee says it can confirm that a number of agents received at least five such payments in consecutive pay periods. Do the math: that's close to $40,000 per person, per cycle. The pace was so relentless that FBI reserve accounts set aside specifically for bonus payments were completely drained, causing some payments to bounce back from exhausted funds.
Let that sink in. The FBI director allegedly burned through his bureau's entire bonus reserve paying out what amounts to a loyalty premium to his personal crew. The FBI. The nation's premier federal law enforcement agency. Running a literal overdraft on a slush fund.
Who Exactly Is Getting Paid Here
Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking member of the House judiciary committee, sent a letter to Patel on June 15 laying out exactly who the main beneficiaries appear to be. The big winners, according to Raskin, are agents serving on Patel's 'Director's Advisory Team,' a unit Patel created in 2025.
What does this team actually do? Notus reported in May that the unit has been referred to internally as a 'payback squad.' Their stated mission: examining internal FBI documents to expose and discredit federal law enforcement officials who had the nerve to investigate Donald Trump and his allies. One of the cases they've reportedly been building is modeled directly on the indictment of former FBI director James Comey.
So to summarize: taxpayers may be funding a unit whose job is political revenge, and the agents running that unit are allegedly receiving massive bonuses to do it. Great system. Really inspired governance.
Raskin's Letter Gets Even Darker
The loyalty bonus angle is bad enough. But Raskin's letter raised a grimmer possibility about why the agents on Patel's personal security detail specifically might be receiving these payments. The letter cited reporting from The Atlantic alleging Patel had displayed erratic behavior and excessive drinking, and pointed out that his personal protective detail had been accompanying him on private outings.
The implication is not subtle. Raskin is asking whether these agents are being paid extra not for exemplary law enforcement work, but to stay quiet about what they've witnessed on the job. "Are they, in fact, collecting bonus compensation for engaging in actions outside of their duties and outside of the law?" Raskin wrote directly to Patel.
Patel has filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic and reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick over the piece on his alleged drinking and absences. Which, as responses to unflattering journalism go, is definitely one approach.
The People Who Got Fired While the Loyalists Got Paid
While Patel's circle was allegedly cashing $8,000 checks every two weeks, Raskin's letter catalogued a separate parade of firings that paints a pretty clear picture of what loyalty to Patel is worth in the current FBI. Former acting director Brian Driscoll, an FBI Medal of Valor recipient, was shown the door. Steven Jensen, who led the bureau's response to the January 6 Capitol attack, was also fired.
Then there's this: a dozen counterintelligence agents tracking Iranian threats were dismissed just days before the United States launched military strikes on Iran. Days. Before. Military strikes on Iran. The people whose job it was to monitor the threat were pushed out right before the threat became kinetic. Nobody has adequately explained this and nobody in power seems particularly interested in asking about it.
The Guardian reports that Raskin has given Patel until June 29 to provide a full accounting of all bonus payments, the identities of recipients, and any internal communications assessing whether any of this was even legal. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.
One Small Problem With Accountability
Here's where the story runs into the wall that every story about this administration eventually runs into. Democrats have no authority to compel the FBI to hand over documents. Raskin can write letters. He can ask pointed questions. He can lay out the full damning picture in writing and send it to a man who will almost certainly ignore him.
The Guardian notes that Democrats would gain subpoena power if they retake the House in November's midterm elections, which some forecasts suggest is possible. So the practical answer to 'how do we actually find out if the FBI director broke federal law with a taxpayer-funded slush fund' is: wait and see how the midterms go.
For context, when Democratic senators questioned Patel at a May 12 hearing about whether FBI staff had been subjected to polygraph tests to identify who was talking to journalists, Patel responded: 'I can tell you unequivocally this FBI is targeting and investigating no journalists.' Which is a very specific denial of a very specific thing nobody had asked about yet.
The Dingo Take
There is a version of this story where a senior government official directs a million dollars in taxpayer money to his personal loyalists, drains emergency reserve accounts in the process, fires decorated agents and counterintelligence professionals who don't suit him, and faces zero legal consequences because the minority party can only write strongly worded letters. We are living in that version of the story.
The thing that keeps getting lost in the daily churn of this administration's scandals is what the FBI actually is. It is the federal government's chief domestic law enforcement body. It investigates public corruption. It is supposed to be the institution that catches people who do exactly what Kash Patel is accused of doing. The cops are allegedly running the scheme. The referees are playing for a team. The institution built to check this kind of abuse is, if Raskin's allegations hold up, the vehicle for it.
Raskin's June 29 deadline will almost certainly come and go without a substantive response. The FBI will not hand over documents to a minority congressman. Patel will not answer questions he doesn't want to answer. And the agents who allegedly watched all of this happen will either stay quiet or find out whether their bonus checks were worth it. The American taxpayer, as usual, will not be consulted.
