After a gunman shot and killed right-wing personality Charlie Kirk in Utah last September, Donald Trump immediately requested more money be allocated for “security” of elected officials. In reality, Trump should’ve chosen competent adults for cabinet jobs: Kash Patel, unelected bureaucrat and former (perhaps future) vlogger, delayed FBI response to Kirk’s assassination specifically due to personal use of Bureau planes.
Benjamin Weiss of Courthouse News reported that minority whip Dick Durbin, citing whistleblower reports, called Patel’s aircraft commandeering “irresponsible joyriding”:
Durbin, top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, accused Patel of ‘irresponsible joyriding’ on aircraft operated by the FBI and Justice Department that he said frustrated senior Trump administrative staff and amounted to ‘misuse or mismanagement of government resources.’ Patel has repeatedly come under scrutiny for reports that he used FBI aircraft for non-official travel, such as trips to a wrestling match at Penn State University and an excursion to a hunting resort in Texas.
But the FBI director found himself under the microscope once again this week after images circulated online showing him celebrating with the U.S. men’s hockey team after their gold medal victory over Canada at the Winter Olympics in Italy.
And in his letter to the Justice Department’s acting inspector general and head of the Government Accountability Office, Durbin said that he’d received ‘credible’ disclosures from a whistleblower which show that Patel’s decisions about the use of government aircraft damaged the FBI’s response to several high-profile criminal probes.
Kash’s “fancy free road trips in the sky” have occurred in multiples, according to other reports. In the middle of last December, a different incident of gun-violence broke out on the campus of Brown University: Patel’s reported visit to see his parents in Florida gravely hampered disaster response. According to Carol Leonnig and another reporter at MS NOW, investigating-FBI agents had no plane available and had to drive through a snowstorm instead.
Agents with the FBI’s elite evidence response team were delayed in reaching the scene of a mass shooting at Brown University in December because there was no FBI plane available to take them to Rhode Island, according to three sources and a whistleblower’s account newly provided to Congress.
Kash Patel was in south Florida at the time with one of the FBI’s two available jets and had given an order to hold the other for another team that would not normally respond to the scene, according to the whistleblower and the sources. The evidence response team instead had to drive through the night amid a snowstorm to reach the university in Providence, Rhode Island, by 9 o’clock the next morning, according to the whistleblower’s account.
As has been well-documented, the FBI’s Brown-shooting probe was mired in missteps and accusing the wrong person of the crime—including false statements by Trump himself that the shooter was apprehended when he wasn’t. Whether or not Patel’s extravagant use of planes was to blame we may never know.
Patel’s now-infamous jaunt to Italy for the Winter Olympics—where Kash was filmed partying with the Men’s hockey team, swilling champagne—happened concurrent to unrest in Mexico, again, according to reports.
Notably, last October, Patel used an FBI plane (Gulfstream 550) to fly to see his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, sing at a wrestling event. That same aircraft apparently flew back to Nashville a few hours later, with no further details reported who was aboard.
AUTHOR FOOTNOTE
Incredibly slippery slope, hijacking government planes for personal use. Sure, “I’ll take bribes in” Kash Patel slammed Chris Wray for using resources and is a colossal hypocrite. Who in Donald’s fiefdom isn’t? But it’s a complete and total failure of media that his waste, fraud and abuse (ya know, the stuff Elon‘s “Department of Government Efficiency” or DOGE was supposed to eradicate) isn’t a career-ending scandal. To say nothing of Wilkins *poof* getting platformed on one of Donald’s favorite channels as “expert” on national security.
My other point is simple: Kristi Lynn Noem got fired by Donald after she claimed in public testimony (in between under-oath lies, naturally) that Trump “approved” her expenditures. So all Kash Patel has to do to relieve himself of a job for which he is spectacularly unqualified is go before Congress and claim his Big Boss and sundowning mobster “approved” all his plane commandeering.
Let the chips fall where they may.
