FBI -Director Kash Patel will bring UFC to FBI, sources say

The newly installed FBI Director Kash Patel, whose proclaimed plans to review the country’s leading law enforcement agency has rattled many within the agency, has suggested to improve the FBI’s ranks with the help of the ultimate combat championship, the battles were told Martial, who was told if Patel’s proposal was told.

At a teleconference Wednesday with the heads of the FBI 55 field offices, Patel suggested that he wants the FBI to establish a formal relationship with UFC that could develop programs for agents to improve their physical fitness, sources said that had been informed on Wednesday’s call.

The virtual meeting with each Field Office’s Special-Agent-in-Charge has long been a weekly event, but this week’s call was the first led by Patel to swore as director on Friday.

Within a few hours after Wednesday’s request, Word of Patel’s UFC proposal spread to current and former FBI officials around the country.

“If they try to increase their physical fitness, UFC is very specific in their fitness,” said ABC News contributor Rich Frankel, the former special agent in charge of FBI’s Newark, New Jersey, Office.

It is not clearly exactly what Patel wants the UFC to do or give to help improve the fitness among the FBI rows.

Although Patel’s UFC proposal stood out for some who heard about the meeting, Patel addressed a number of questions on the call, according to sources.

The new director tried to reassure some of the concerns among the FBI agents, after the Ministry of Justice last month demanded a list of the thousands of agents who helped investigations derived from January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol and suggested that even those who could just be fired, the sources said.

There was also concern for Patel’s recent announcement that as many as 1,500 employees at the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, would be awarded to field offices and to a FBI office in Huntsville, Alabama. And last week’s controversial E -Mail from Office of Personal Management, which required all federal employees to show what they had achieved during the previous week or facial ending, added only concerns within the FBI, the sources say.

During Wednesday’s call, Patel expressed his own concerns about this e-mail and with confusing follow-up messages from the Trump administration’s new department of government efficiency, which has been governed by billionaire business Elder Elon Musk, sources said.

Patel, on the call, also proclaimed the FBI’s work battle crime and national security threats, and he asked the FBI officials to give him a chance to prove himself as their new leader, sources say. But he also warned them that he would not tolerate “leaks” or whatever he sees as other forms of insubordination.

Nevertheless, it was Patel’s proposal to ask UFC for help that quickly created some humming within the FBI community. UFC is based in Las Vegas, where Patel now lives.

White, estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, has long been friends with Trump and last year became a major donor for Trump’s presidential campaign. He joined Trump on stage in Florida during Trump’s victory speech in November just hours after the polls closed on election day.

During the speech, Trump remembered how he “helped (white) out a little” years earlier when no one else was willing to host UFC matches and claimed that UFC is now “one of the most successful sports companies everywhere at any time.”

Trump also said that UFC “is the roughest sport I’ve ever seen,” with fighters who “really go on it.”

Just days after Trump won the November election, Trump participated in a highly promoted UFC match in Madison Square Garden in New York City, sitting in the front row between White and Musk.

Frankel, who spent more than two decades with the FBI, said the FBI can benefit from increasing his physical fitness standards – so the idea that UFC helps with the FBI training regime may not be as unusual as it sounds.

He said some FBI offices have previously brought martial arts experts and others to offer tips to agents.

But, Frankel said, “I don’t want UFC to take over the gym.”

On the question of Patel’s proposal to collaborate with UFC, an FBI representative refused to comment on ABC News.