FBI director Kash Patel popped up in several news stories on Friday. He does this periodically, like a skin or glandular disorder – a Kash Rash, as it were. Looking as though he’d spent last night consuming the contents of the FBI’s seized-drug storeroom, Patel announced at an airport presser that the FBI had seized former Canadian snowboarder Ryan Wedding, a “modern-day El Chapo” or Pablo Escobar who was running a multinational drug ring out of Mexico City.
That seemed like good news, as did the fact that Patel said that there had been a 210 percent increase in gang takedowns and a reduction in FBI operational expenses in his first year. But Patel also came under fire from heavily partisan Democrat Congressmen Robert Garcia and Jamie Raskin, asking questions about the raid on the home and files of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson.
Separately, a story broke about a “purge” of senior FBI leadership, including the lead agent in Atlanta, the acting assistant director in charge of the New York field office, and six agents in Miami who were involved in the “Arctic Frost” investigation into President Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
All that seems like just another day in Kash-land, but it comes on top of a lengthy New York Times investigation, about Patel’s tenure at the FBI, which involved interviews with 45 current or former employees. The Times is always extremely worried about “the integrity of our country’s leading law enforcement” institution when Donald Trump is in charge, not so much when other Presidents are. We have to take their concern with a huge lick of salt. But the report still contains some incredibly wacky material.
The piece details all kinds of FBI personnel shifts and politicized investigations of Trump’s enemies, but, frankly, this is mostly insider baseball material. The personal details about Patel, on the other hand, confirm our suspicions that he’s actually a character from Veep, not a person in real life.
For instance, you have this bit from “Senior executive 2” about Patel’s comportment upon attending a secret Five Eyes conference in the U.K. with the intelligence services of major Commonwealth countries:
“Before the conference, his staff says he’s unhappy because he doesn’t like meetings in office settings. What he wants is social events. He wants Premier soccer games. He wants to go jet skiing. He’d like a helicopter tour. Everyone who heard about this was like: Hold on. Is he really going to ask the MI5 director to go jet skiing instead of meeting? The schedule is set, and every Five Eyes partner is doing this. They can’t just say that he’s not participating and instead he wants to go to a Premier soccer game. This is a job, guys.”
Patel angled to get his much-publicized girlfriend, Republican operative and country singer Alexis Wilkins, into a private meeting with King Charles at Windsor Castle. Arranged no doubt by his executive assistant, Nicole Rucker, who when “she’s not getting the food or the workout she wants, she’ll just start screaming at people.” Patel got the Windsor Castle meeting, and then published a photo of Five Eyes representatives, who don’t want their identities known to the public, on his Instagram.
Another jaw-dropper occurs in the section involving the FBI investigation of the Charlie Kirk assassination in Utah. An FBI source says that Patel and his friend (and now-FBI departed) deputy Dan Bongino were more concerned about how they were going to deal with the situation on social media than about the investigation itself, because appearances are important. Says a senior leader for counterintelligence:
“When he landed in Salt Lake City, Patel didn’t have a raid jacket and reportedly ordered people to go find him one. He needed a size medium. They found him a female’s jacket that didn’t have the patches that he wanted, so he had the SWAT team taking their patches off to put on his jacket before he would go to the press conference. I haven’t worn my raid jacket since Quantico, in 20 years of my career. You just don’t wear it, especially in a leadership position.”
This all seems to fit into Patel’s body of work, which includes a podcast interview by Katie Miller (and with Wilkins), where he answers criticism that he’s using a federal plane to fly to see Wilkins play her gigs in Nashville. He says he’s only going to “15 percent” of her shows.
We shouldn’t know anything about the FBI director’s personal life. And Patel, as a persona, is clearly a historic goofball. On the other hand, a major drug kingpin, one of the FBI’s top ten most wanted, is in federal custody. Crime is down, murders are at an historic low, and the agency has seized more than 2000 kilos of fentanyl in the last year.
As Dan Bongino, now back to fulminating on his podcast, said this week: “These morons don’t know anything about the safety status of the country – the border’s sealed, the military’s never been stronger under Pete Hegseth, and the FBI went out and just arrested a historic number of animals off the street and the murder rate plunged.”
So who are we to believe: The FBI and its media allies? Or its clear antagonists in the media and Congress? It remains to be seen if the FBI will burn through Kash.
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