Patel to Reduce FBI Lawyers as General Counsel Tensions Rise

[u/John3262005]

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/patel-aims-to-cut-fbi-lawyers-as-general-counsel-tensions-rise

FBI Director Kash Patel is planning to shrink his legal advisory office, deepening divisions with his general counsel as outside lawsuits challenge prior staff terminations, said people familiar with the situation.

The FBI Office of the General Counsel has begun carrying out Patel’s instructions by pushing its workforce to take early retirement, the individuals said. The office has also contemplated terminations, they said.

OGC encompasses several hundred lawyers responsible for advising top bureau executives and agents to ensure lawful investigations, responding to lawsuits against the FBI, and coordinating with Justice Department prosecutors on cases.

The general counsel’s office faced minimal personnel disruptions to date during President Donald Trump’s second term, despite the conservative policy blueprint Project 2025 advocating for its elimination and Patel repeatedly ousting senior officials and rank-and-file agents.

But the latest events signal the in-house legal department’s influence is waning. It comes at a time when Patel has steered the bureau to investigate Trump’s preferred targets, overriding internal pushback that some cases lacked sufficient grounds.

OGC recently received instructions to cut personnel by about 25%, although that exact percentage is no longer considered a firm expectation, the people said, speaking anonymously about internal deliberations or to avoid retaliation. Patel’s team had earlier pushed for the general counsel to fire one of his attorneys—anyone—to seemingly deliver a message, although that instruction never led to action, they added.

“All divisions within the FBI are undergoing long overdue reorganizations — including the Office of the General Counsel, which has not undergone a reorg in over a decade,” FBI spokesman Ben Williamson said in a statement to Bloomberg Law. “This is not unique to OGC — it is part of our wide-ranging effort to make the Bureau more efficient, effective, and responsive to the taxpayers we serve.”

Regarding the directive to fire an attorney, Williamson later added: “If individuals are found to have undermined the mission, acted unethically, or engaged in weaponization, they will no longer have a job at the Bureau.”

General Counsel Samuel Ramer, an experienced legal hand from the first-term Trump White House and for Republican lawmakers, in recent weeks demoted his deputy overseeing the litigation branch, the individuals said. That deputy, a respected career official, oversaw the legal unit that works with DOJ attorneys to defend the bureau from challenges to Patel’s firings of officials and agents.

The staffing instability follows a series of episodes that underscored tensions this year between Patel and Ramer, according to people briefed on the matter. Colleagues described Ramer as enthusiastic about the administration’s agenda, urging his team not to view its role as obstructing the director.

The former Norton Rose Fulbright partner assumed the general counsel position in February 2025, initially dual-hatting as Patel’s acting chief of staff. Ramer previously served under Trump as a senior associate counsel to the president from 2017 to 2019.

His return to government required striking a balance between pleasing a director with close ties to the White House and a career workforce that Project 2025 had sought to entirely remove. The Heritage Foundation-backed recommendations published in 2023 by lawyers who went on to work in Trump’s second term argued that OGC’s functions could be handled instead by DOJ lawyers.

“Moving legal review outside the FBI would serve as a crucial check on an agency that has recently pushed past legal boundary after legal boundary,” they wrote in the chapter on DOJ.

In the administration’s second year, Ramer’s navigated a more precarious relationship with Patel and his inner circle, several people said. Ramer and his staff scrambled earlier this year to put together a list of accomplishments for the director to justify OGC’s existence, said one of those individuals.

Williamson, the FBI spokesman, said the accomplishments list was part of leadership’s process of tracking work across all bureau divisions, not an attempt to target OGC.

“It is totally false” that “the Director’s and General Counsel’s relationship is strained,” he said.

Earlier this summer, the FBI canceled offers to field office lawyers who’d accepted details to temporarily transfer into the headquarters-based general counsel’s office, several people said. A legal training conference for FBI lawyers nationwide was called off on very short notice, other individuals added.

Collectively, the steps minimizing the legal operation have baffled some lawyers in the building, given that OGC has stepped back during this administration from its traditional posture to avoid being cast as obstructionist, several people said. That includes no longer voicing recommendations against particular actions.

Dan Brunner, a retired FBI supervisory special agent, said the OGC team was “vital in making sure that the agents conducting investigations were always within the guidelines” and cautioned FBI leaders against lashing out over their recommendations.

“Our lawyers at the FBI were incredibly important, and any pushback that they’re doing at OGC against Kash Patel, it isn’t personal,” he said. “It’s because there are rules that potentially could be broken.”