The National Disgrace and Danger of Kash Patel

Yesterday, I wrote about five Trumpian scandals that are playing out beneath-the-radar, one of which, the personal misconduct of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-Deremer, actually led to her ouster by the end of day. I’m not saying I’m personally responsible for her firing, but you can draw your own conclusions. In that piece, I promised another column on the latest problems at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Here you go:

It’s been a few months since I wrote about how bad Kash Patel was at being FBI director, so let’s check in over at the FBI, shall we?

Back in November, I said that “the slow public unraveling” of Kash Patel’s tenure was “the biggest little scandal in Washington.”

It’s safe to say that things haven’t improved since.

On Friday evening, The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick published a new damning piece about his spreading paranoia, as he fears being fired, and raised concerns about what she called his “conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences.”

As she wrote, “Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff.”

Fitzpatrick is a former NBC News and 60 Minutes producer and not one likely to have published such allegations recklessly, but Kash Patel forcefully denied the reports and hit back on Monday with a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic. Needless to say, if The Atlantic chooses to fight the lawsuit, it stands a solid chance of winning — Patel faces an “actual malice” test, as a public figure, and surely The Atlantic’s lawyers would be thrilled at the idea of the discovery and depositions that could come out of a prolonged litigation. As Fitzpatrick wrote herself in the piece, “Patel oversees an agency that employs roughly 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify information that can be presented under oath in a court of law.”

Notably, the response by Patel’s lawyers appeared to put into public circulation two “defamatory” allegations that The Atlantic hadn’t even published, including as the Daily Beast noted, “an allegation that he once had his security detail shut down the FBI Association Store so he could shop alone, and complained that the merchandise ‘wasn’t intimidating enough.’ The claim that the merchandise was not sufficiently intimidating was published; that the store was shut down by his detail was not.”

With now three other scandal-prone Cabinet officials out in recent weeks, notably all women — Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Chavez-Deremer — there’s a lot of speculation that Kash Patel has moved up the to-be-fired-soon list.

Kash Patel has seemingly survived as FBI director this long because his personal shenanigans keep being overtaken by bigger stories. The growing tide of stories at the end of last year about his use of the FBI jets for personal trips and misuse of government resources to protect and chauffeur his girlfriend’s friends in Nashville was wiped from the front pages by the US attack on Venezuela and then by the even-larger scandal of ICE’s shooting of Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis. Then the humiliating and cringeworthy try-hard videos of him partying at the Olympics, which raised Trump’s ire, were wiped from the front pages by the US war with Iran that began just four days later.

And yet seemingly every week of this year has brought an embarrassing or worrisome story about how Patel seems focused on all the wrong things at the FBI. Remarking on a photo of him running at the FBI Academy this winter, Molly Jong-Fast declared, “He’s literally a Make-a-Wish kid living his best life.”

Let’s briefly recap the main (recent) scandals of the Patel era:

• Patel has turned the security requirement that the FBI director travel on government aircraft into a seeming jet-set lifestyle. As the Wall Street Journal summarized, “Last year he flew in it to a Texas hunting resort called the Boondoggle Ranch and to attend a wrestling event at which his girlfriend, a country and western singer, performed, and then to her home in Nashville, Tenn. He has been spotted at parties and sporting events and is such a huge fan of Ultimate Fighting Championship cage fighting that he once proposed a partnership with the FBI.” The fact that Patel either doesn’t have or doesn’t listen to advisors who could tell him that flying a government Gulfstream jet to a place literally called “Boondoggle Ranch” is all you need to know about his tenure at the FBI and level of talent he’s surrounding himself with.
  

• He’s using valuable and limited FBI SWAT resources to protect his girlfriend, country music singer Alexis Wilkins. And, according to MS Now, “Patel has — on more than one occasion — ordered that the security detail protecting his girlfriend escort one of her allegedly inebriated friends home after a night of partying in Nashville, according to three people with knowledge of the incidents.” That reporting has been backed up by the New York Times, which wrote, “To an extent not previously reported, Ms. Wilkins is escorted in her travels by Special Weapons and Tactics team members drawn from F.B.I. field offices around the country.” Needless to say, it’s unprecedented for a significant other of an FBI director to receive official protection — not even the Washington-based wives of previous directors have received protection, let alone a girlfriend in another city.
  

• Patel’s main deputy, podcaster Dan Bongino, quit over the holidays after his own short-but-colorful tenure where Patel evidently exempted him from key polygraph exams and he came under fire from his own right-wing conspiracist friends, who accused him of being part of the cover-up of the truth about the Epstein Files. Bongino had seemed to struggle throughout his tenure with the pressure of actually-showing-up-to-work-at-the-FBI, as the nation saw in a bizarre personal meltdown he had on live TV with his old Fox News colleagues last May. The White House had such concerns about Bongino and Patel last year that they took the unprecedented step of installing a “co-deputy director” in September, Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey, who was clearly intended to be the new grown-up at the bureau.
  

• Then came the Olympics, where Patel, a super hockey fan, took an FBI jet to Italy, watched hockey, and then appeared in what might be the most embarrassing video of the entire Trump administration — chugging beer and partying in the locker room with the US men’s team after it won the gold medal. It was surely the most unbecoming moment ever caught on camera for an FBI director and will almost certainly be the defining image of his tenure. Never has a leader looked smaller or sadder than pretend-tough-guy Kash Patel partying so enthusiastically alongside actual Olympic champions. His four-day junket likely cost six figures, with the plane expenses alone topping $75,000.
  

• The national embarrassment of the Olympics — which would have ousted any normal appointee — barely seemed to slow Patel’s “FBI-director-as-lifestyle-choice” down. Within days, he declared that MMA fighters were going to run a special training session for FBI agents — and he showed up at said training session in custom Nike sneakers emblazoned with his own personal logo, K$H, and the number 9, as the ninth FBI director. (The MMA training seemed particularly out-of-character and performatively “Make-a-Wish-y” to anyone who understands the actual work of the FBI — contrary to Hollywood dramas, being an FBI agent doesn’t require a lot of foot chases and personally grappling with criminals, and, absent a few specialized narcotics or street-crime task forces, most agents would consider it an operational failure and poor planning if an arrest operation resulted in actually wrestling with the arrestee.)
  

• Then, to add insult to injury, amid the war with Iran a group of purported Iranian-aligned hackers appear to have hacked Patel’s old personal email and released a series of photos and emails showing Patel enjoying cigars and posing in more cringeworthy situations.

• Then, as the US went to war with Iran, it came out that amid Patel’s political purges of the bureau had “gutted” the counterintelligence team that would have normally been focused on threats from Iran: “Just days before the United States launched a major military operation in Iran, FBI Director Kash Patel fired a dozen agents and staff members from a counterintelligence unit tasked with monitoring threats from Iran, according to two sources familiar with the matter.” (Patel’s lawsuit against The Atlantic clarifies that it was a counterterrorism squad, not counterintelligence.)

Patel has so mismanaged the bureau, both on purpose — firing, demoting, and transferring vital personnel who happened to work on investigations that he considered political or anti-Trump — as well as simply through his own personal foibles that he’s alienated a workforce that is overwhelmingly conservative and aligned politically with Trump. (As I’ve written before, the FBI is “arguably the most culturally conservative and traditionally white Christian institution in the entire U.S. government”; in 110 years, it has never had a Democratic director and was, until Patel, the last major federal law enforcement to never have a woman or person of color serve as director and deputy director.) The New York Post, usually a reliable mouthpiece for the arch-conservative wing of the FBI’s New York Field Office, has relished posting about Patel’s foibles.

But here’s the bigger issue for the country, as the Iran episode indicates: Kash Patel is simply bad at his job.

Look at the three biggest, highest-profile crimes of his tenure — the shooting of Charlie Kirk, the Brown University shooting, and the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie. Now, for various reasons, they wouldn’t have all been officially FBI cases, but given their national urgency and prominence under normal circumstances the FBI would have surged resources to support local and state law enforcement and helped play a key role in coordinating and ensuring everyone was working smoothly together.

In all three cases, the FBI has actually been notably absent — and, actually, in two cases Patel’s actions and decisions have actually reportedly made the work of law enforcement harder, and in all three cases the FBI appears to be both responsible for the prominent detention of an entirely innocent suspect as well as doing little to bring the actual perpetrator to justice:

• In Utah, Patel confusingly rushed out a statement that a suspect was in custody, only to backtrack and release the individual. The New York Times related that Patel’s leadership calls behind-the-scenes were filled with profanity, and a whistleblower reported to Congress that Patel’s personal flights on the FBI jets delayed the response of critical personnel to the shooting scene. When Patel himself went to Utah, FBI whistleblowers said he wouldn’t get off the plane until agents located a blue FBI raid jacket for him to wear — agents, according to the report, finally found a woman’s jacket that would fit him, at which point he complained it didn’t have the right Velcro patches on it.
  

• At Brown, Patel again rushed to put out a statement that the FBI had detained “a person of interest in a hotel room,” who proved unrelated. Again, according to that congressional whistleblower, the deployment of the FBI’s shooting reconstruction team was disrupted because there were no FBI planes available for them and they had to drive from Quantico, Virginia, to Rhode Island overnight. The Boston Globe’s roundup of the FBI’s involvement in the Brown investigation was titled “A series of miscues.”

• Kidnappings are usually the FBI’s bread-and-butter, but it’s been largely publicly absent from the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, which has remained under the control of the local sheriff, who has even blocked the FBI from key evidence — using a private forensics lab rather than relying on the FBI’s vast laboratory and forensic services at Quantico. The FBI has issued a reward, but only in recent days — two months late — does it appear to be at work on DNA testing. How much more could the FBI have done earlier? Hard to say — and perhaps it wouldn’t have made a difference — but what we do know is that (a) Patel journeyed to Tucson personally and that hours later, the FBI briefly detained yet another suspect who was completely unrelated and innocent. And then (b) the following week as the case stalled out, Patel was partying in Italy at the Olympics on his taxpayer-funded trip that involved very little actual work.

I’ve written a lot of stories about complex FBI investigations over the years — including some incredible politically-fraught investigative work it did during the first Trump term — and, sure, sometimes cases go unsolved for a long time or the wrong suspect gets caught up (see: the anthrax case). And yes, the FBI has had some high-profile successes in Patel’s era, like the long-overdue capture of the suspected January 6th pipe bomber. But I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a modern analogue to the high-profile losing streak like Kirk, Brown, and Guthrie, particularly since all three cases have had such similar bungles.

Add to all of that how his political purges are decimating the very expertise that the US relies on for its most complex investigations and threats. As Jackie Maguire, one of the FBI’s top executives who was purged last year, wrote this spring, “The ousters of dozens of experienced people since President Trump took office — some of whom handled threats from Iran — demonstrate a dangerous fact about the current leadership. Kash Patel is consumed by politically motivated revenge and conspiracy theories, distracting the F.B.I., once again, from the danger of terrorism.” I’ve interviewed Maguire repeatedly over more than 15 years — she was one of the case agents of the 9/11 investigation itself and rose to be one of the FBI’s highest-ranking and best respected executives — and we should as a nation all take her warning seriously.

Time and again throughout these scandals Patel and his spokespeople have insisted that he did nothing wrong and denied that he has compromised the nation’s safety or security nor slowed down the bureau’s response to any unfolding incidents.

And as part of his weekend response to the Atlantic allegations he made clear how he’s survived until now: Patel appeared to promise on TV that there will be “arrests” as early as this week in the plot to rig the 2020 election, a conspiracy that has been disproven again and again and again.

It’s surely this willingness to loyally do the president’s bidding, endorse his conspiracies, and investigate Trump’s enemies that has let Patel skate by in office as long as he has. As the New York Times wrote in December: “One factor perhaps working in Mr. Patel’s favor: Mr. Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, considers Mr. Patel to be a compliant purveyor of his directives on personnel and policy matters.”

That sentence and sentiment alone should be one of the biggest scandals in the FBI’s history — and unwinding the damage from it, indeed if we are ever able to do so, will take years if not decades — but it’s one that is unlikely to even be remembered amid Patel’s all-too-colorful tenure, however much longer it lasts.

GMG