Kash Patel Severs FBI’s Ties With James Comey-Backed Anti–Defamation League After Group Ripped Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA
FBI Director Kash Patel announced Wednesday that the bureau has officially cut ties with the Anti–Defamation League (ADL), blasting the group as a political outfit masquerading as a watchdog and accusing disgraced former FBI head James Comey of “embedding” agents within the organization to surveil Americans.
The move comes as the ADL faces heavy backlash for listing slain Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s conservative youth group in its now-pulled “Glossary of Extremism and Hate.” Kirk, assassinated last month by a sniper during a college debate, had been accused by the ADL of promoting “Christian nationalism” and making “problematic comments.”
Patel said the era of the FBI partnering with partisan groups is over. “James Comey wrote ‘love letters’ to the ADL and embedded FBI agents with them – a group that ran disgraceful ops spying on Americans,” Patel posted on X. “That era is OVER. This FBI won’t partner with political fronts masquerading as watchdogs.”
The announcement also follows a fresh indictment against Comey, who was charged by a federal grand jury last week for allegedly lying to Congress. Comey’s close ties to the ADL have long been a point of pride for the ex-director. At the ADL’s 2014 National Leadership Summit, he gushed, “If this sounds a bit like a love letter to the ADL, it is, and rightly so.” He praised the group’s “invaluable” leadership in tracking extremism and boasted of embedding FBI training programs with ADL research. In 2017, Comey doubled down, telling the ADL conference, “Three years later I can say, from the perspective of the FBI, we’re still in love with you.”
That relationship now appears severed. Patel said the FBI will no longer use ADL definitions of “hate groups” or rely on its training sessions. For years, the bureau worked with the ADL to host civil rights and hate crime courses for state and local law enforcement, and all new FBI recruits were required to take part in ADL programming.
Billionaire Elon Musk, along with a host of conservatives, had blasted the ADL for targeting Kirk and his group. Musk said the FBI’s reliance on the ADL was a reason the bureau was focused on Kirk instead of hunting down his killers. “The FBI was taking their ‘hate group’ definitions from ADL, which is why FBI was investigating Charlie Kirk [and] Turning Point, instead of his murderers,” Musk posted on X.
Further scrutiny of the FBI’s ADL partnership came after Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released unclassified files last month showing that Turning Point USA was among nearly 100 Republican-leaning groups targeted under the FBI’s “Artic Frost” probe after the 2020 election.
Under growing criticism, the ADL announced Tuesday that it was retiring its “extremism” glossary altogether, admitting that entries were being “intentionally misrepresented and misused.” In a statement responding to Patel’s move, the ADL said, “ADL has deep respect for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and law enforcement officers at all levels across the country who work tirelessly every single day to protect all Americans regardless of their ancestry, religion, ethnicity, faith, political affiliation or any other point of difference. In light of an unprecedented surge of antisemitism, we remain more committed than ever to our core purpose to protect the Jewish people.”
Patel, however, signaled that the bureau will be charting a very different course. “We are done outsourcing FBI credibility to partisan organizations,” he said.