FBI Director Kash Patel’s tenure has been marred by a series of avoidable problems, but last week was especially difficult for the former podcast personality.
On Friday morning, for example, the bureau’s controversial director alerted the public to a “potential terrorist attack” in Michigan that he said the FBI had thwarted. Senior law enforcement personnel were not pleased. As MSNBC reported, Patel’s public disclosure came “before investigators had a chance to flesh out key details, including whether the attack actually was imminent.”
A day earlier, Patel forced out a special agent in charge, not because of wrongdoing, but because Aaron Tapp, a 22-year veteran of the bureau, had appeared in documents recently released by Senate Republicans as part of the partisan hysterics surrounding a faux scandal known as “Arctic Frost.”
And then there’s the plane controversy.
A couple of years ago, when Patel was known as little more than a conspiratorial media personality, he publicly derided then-FBI Director Chris Wray for allegedly using an FBI jet for personal reasons. Two years later, as Wray’s successor, Patel is confronting a series of difficult questions about his use of an FBI jet for a personal trip to Pennsylvania, where his country singer girlfriend was performing, and then to Nashville, where she lives.
Soon after, Bloomberg Law reported:
The FBI forced out a senior official overseeing aviation shortly after Director Kash Patel grew outraged about revelations of his publicly-available jet logs indicating he’d flown to see his musician girlfriend perform, said three people familiar with the situation. Steven Palmer, a 27-year veteran of the FBI, became the third head of the critical incident response group — which includes FBI pilots — to be fired or removed in Patel’s short regime, adding to a year filled with retributive terminations.
According to the report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC, Palmer’s exit was made official Friday “and a replacement to head the bureau’s crisis management operations including hostage rescue and bomb detection, has already been posted on the FBI’s website.”
Patel has been responsible for a dramatic political purge at the bureau over the past several months, but forcing out Palmer appears to be an especially ridiculous example of the phenomenon.
For his part, the FBI director didn’t deny the accuracy of the report, although he did publish an odd item to social media, condemning “disgustingly baseless attacks” against his girlfriend, whom he said is “a rock-solid conservative and a country music sensation who has done more for this nation than most will in ten lifetimes.”
But as Patel really ought to understand, the underlying controversy has nothing to do with his girlfriend and everything to do with his own alleged abuses.
That he seemed a little too eager to change the subject with a nonsensical response suggests Patel is facing difficult questions he doesn’t yet know how to answer.
