A new report by MS NOW revealed on Wednesday that the FBI under President Donald Trump has found a novel way to make its violent crime arrest numbers appear to surge: “juice the stats.” According to the report, the crime figures touted by FBI Director Kash Patel are padded with arrests carried out by state and local law enforcement and other federal agencies rather than by the bureau itself.

Patel has repeatedly boasted that the FBI has arrested 54,000 violent criminals, a figure he describes as a 90 percent increase in arrests over the same period of the Biden administration. What he does not mention, the report found, is that his count is inflated by including arrests that state and local police forces and other federal agencies have made when an FBI employee is present. And as the FBI itself acknowledged, many were not FBI cases.

“With fewer agents and a strained budget, the FBI under its director, Kash Patel, has brought thousands fewer criminal cases than previous administrations,” MS NOW reports, citing a review of Justice Department data. “The findings rebut Patel’s repeated claims that he has led a crackdown on violent crime.”

Justice Department data shows the FBI has referred 15 percent fewer criminal cases for federal prosecution during Trump’s second term than during the comparable Biden period. And while the FBI does not break down its criminal referrals by case type, the data also shows the DOJ prosecuted 15 percent fewer violent crime cases during the first 16 months of the Trump administration than in the same stretch of the Biden administration.

“There were nearly 3,800 fewer people charged federally with violent crimes during the first part of the second Trump administration than during the comparable Biden period — the opposite of what Patel says,” according to MS NOW. “That figure includes cases referred from all federal agencies, not just the FBI.”

The report is based on public DOJ data obtained and shared by Justice Connection, a group of former DOJ and FBI employees who have accused the administration of weaponizing the department to pursue Trump’s political ends.

The drop in criminal cases has coincided with a “huge” increase in focus on immigration crimes, made a priority at Patel’s demand. “Since the 9/11 attacks, the FBI’s priority mission has been stopping terrorism,” MS NOW noted. “The bureau is also devoted to hunting foreign spies, ferreting out political corruption and white collar fraud, and disrupting complex criminal schemes and organized crime.” The pivot toward immigration enforcement, combined with the inflated statistics, marks a major change in the FBI’s core functions and its transparency. And because the bureau’s referral counts are not broken down by case type, the public data offers no way to measure how far that shift has gone.

“Kash Patel is actively dismantling decades of statistical integrity just to feed a political narrative,” said Christopher O’Leary, a former senior FBI official and MS NOW contributor. “We are seeing a historic institution reduced to a metrics game, where the FBI is poaching credit for arrests made by other law enforcement agencies and departments. This artificial inflation of the stats is a deliberate smoke screen designed to mask internal chaos and the mass exodus of experienced talent by manufacturing an illusion of productivity that simply does not exist on the ground.”

In a statement to MS NOW, the FBI did not dispute the data showing a reduction in criminal referrals, but pointed instead to the declining rate of violent crime. As MS NOW explains, however, “That decline has been a nationwide trend for several years after crime briefly spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2022. It’s been steadily declining ever since.”

The outlet also noted that Patel’s claimed 90 percent increase in “violent crime arrests” ignores crucial context: that he is taking credit for the work of other agencies.

“By Patel newly including state and local arrests, as well as arrests by other federal agencies, his FBI progress report radically changes the way the FBI counts its cases to include the FBI did not do,” MS NOW elaborates. “The FBI has not previously counted other agency arrests as part of its caseload, according to internal DOJ data and the accounts of current and former officials. There is no way to say how many of the local police arrests — which Patel now claims credit for — would have been made regardless of the FBI’s presence.” Under the earlier counting approach, the comparison periods Patel cites were tallied without those arrests, meaning the two sides of his 90 percent claim are not compiled on the same basis.

The FBI asserts that its numbers have always been tallied that way, but multiple former FBI officials told MS NOW that is false. Former FBI agent Daniel Brunner said the bureau previously always resisted counting state and local arrests as FBI achievements.

“It’s never been done,” he said. “And when agents attempted to do it, it was always pushed back on at the local division. Headquarters did not want false numbers, they wanted the truth from the field.”

MS NOW’s findings were also shared on X.