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Kash Patel’s ‘Effin Wild’ Ride as FBI Director
In just one week in October, he ticked off his bosses with premature comments about a terror investigation
On Halloween morning, FBI Director Kash Patel had a big announcement to make: “The FBI thwarted a potential terrorist attack,” he said in a 7:32 a.m. social-media post that referenced arrests in Michigan.
There was one problem: No criminal charges had yet been filed and local police weren’t aware of the details. Two friends of the alleged terrorists in New Jersey and Washington state caught wind of the arrests and moved up plans to leave the country, according to court documents and law-enforcement officials familiar with the investigation.
Justice Department leaders complained to the White House about Patel’s premature post, saying it had disrupted the investigation, administration officials said.
In his nine months on the job, Patel has drawn flak from his bosses in the Justice Department and from his underlings at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where he has fired dozens of agents deemed hostile to Donald Trump or to conservative ideals.
But the Halloween announcement wasn’t the biggest controversy to envelop the director that week. Patel hit the news for taking an FBI plane to attend a wrestling event where his girlfriend, a country western singer, performed, and then to her home in Nashville. A former FBI agent, Kyle Seraphin, publicized the trip and called the taxpayer funded travel in the middle of a shutdown “pathetic.”
After that, Patel visited a Texas hunting resort called the Boondoggle Ranch, according to flight records and people familiar with the trip, which hasn’t been previously reported.
Patel’s travel has frustrated both Justice Department officials, who complained to the White House about it, and the White House itself, which had told cabinet officials months ago in writing to limit their travel, particularly if it was overseas or unrelated to Trump’s agenda, according to an administration official. Details about Patel’s trips to visit his girlfriend and an August trip to Scotland have been passed around the White House in recent days, officials said.
The FBI director is required by law to take the bureau’s private plane instead of commercial flights in order to have access to secure communications. If the travel is personal, the director is required to reimburse the government for the cost of a commercial flight—typically far less than the actual costs of private-jet use.
Patel has defended his travel, dismissing his critics as “clickbait haters.” A spokesman for the bureau said the director has taken only about a dozen personal trips since assuming the role in February, and had taken steps to cut down on travel costs. In a written statement, Patel said the bureau has achieved historic success on violent crime and drug trafficking.
“Thankfully, Americans can see through WSJ hot garbage—this FBI has never been stronger,” he said.
President Trump himself has occasionally expressed irritation in private with his FBI director, but continues to support him, a senior administration official said, noting that Patel meets with Trump every two or three weeks.
Trump is “very proud of the work the FBI is doing under Director Patel’s leadership,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said, adding that the president views Patel as a “key player on his law-and-order team.”
Last month, Patel gave Trump an unusual public presentation in the Oval Office, where he credited the president for the bureau’s successes on everything from drug seizures to the arrests of several most-wanted fugitives.
“We are absolutely crushing violent crime like never before and defending this homeland, sir,” Patel said, gesturing toward large poster boards showing a surge in arrests this summer.
Patel’s presence at the bureau has been something of a culture shock for a buttoned-up workforce, used to wearing suits and ties. Instead, Patel has appeared at events in hooded sweatshirts, jeans or hunting vests, and often speaks colloquially, calling agents “cops,” and telling podcaster Joe Rogan that the job of FBI director was “effin wild.”
He has also handed out an oversize commemorative coin to colleagues resembling the logo of the Marvel “Punisher” character, who came to embody a general distrust of the U.S. justice system. The coin also has a large number nine on it, in a reference to himself as the FBI’s ninth director.
Patel’s supporters say he is trying to present himself as down-to-earth and accessible to the workforce. He “wants the Bureau to get back to focusing on field and agent work vs. an elitist D.C. culture,” FBI spokesman Ben Williamson said. The FBI declined to discuss Patel’s plane travel, citing safety concerns. Justice Department and FBI representatives said the two agencies closely coordinated plans for the terrorism operation in advance.
Patel and Trump first bonded when in 2018 he found, as a House staffer, improprieties in how the FBI targeted a onetime Trump campaign adviser. Patel went on to serve in several senior national security roles for Trump, where he garnered critics including then-attorney general William Barr, who said at the time Patel would become a senior FBI official only “over my dead body.”
After Patel left government, he pounced on the man he would later succeed, Chris Wray, for using a government jet for an Adirondacks holiday. “Chris Wray, hey, you don’t need a government-funded G5 jet so you can fly off to the Adirondacks for vacation,” Patel said during a September 2023 appearance on the X22 Report podcast.
That has fueled critics of Patel’s recent travel itinerary. The Justice Department’s Gulfstream G550 took nine trips to Las Vegas—where Patel lived before running the FBI—and seven others to Nashville, according to a Wall Street Journal review of flight records.
On a late October Friday, he took the FBI private jet to State College, Pa., for a Real American Freestyle Wrestling event where his girlfriend, country music singer Alexis Wilkins, was performing the national anthem. The next day, the same FBI plane traveled to Nashville.
That Sunday, the FBI jet landed in San Angelo, Texas, where Patel visited the Boondoggle Ranch, owned by the family of a Republican donor and friend of Patel’s, C.R. “Bubba” Saulsbury Jr. The plane stayed in San Angelo until Wednesday. The government was shut down, and much of the FBI workforce was working but not getting paid.
The ranch’s website, which was taken down after the Journal reached out for comment on the trip, describes itself as a “scenic hunting resort nestled in the heart of Texas.” It had said that the ranch, which isn’t open to the public, offers luxury accommodations and the opportunity to see more than a dozen different species of animals including kudu, addax, blue wildebeest, and Nile and red lechwe.
Saulsbury has posted photos of himself with Patel, including at Patel’s swearing-in ceremony at the White House in February and visiting FBI headquarters in June.
While Patel’s travel has become a source of gossip within the bureau, his firings in particular have riled the broader workforce.
During the Biden years, Patel pressed the idea that law enforcement was pursuing investigations to undermine Trump’s political prospects. The next FBI director, Patel wrote in a book called “Government Gangsters,” needed to bring the agency under political control. “The “agents and lawyers who think they can hide in the shadows while abusing their positions will be put on immediate notice,” he said. Trump called the book a “brilliant road map” for his second term.
In his confirmation hearing in January, Patel said he had no interest in going backward and wouldn’t punish agents just because they participated in politically charged investigations.
Patel has since fired at least 30 agents, all of whom did things Trump allies disapproved of. Some took a knee in a show of solidarity with the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests; another implemented government policy denying religious exemptions for the covid vaccine; a third displayed a gay pride flag. The FBI declined to comment on the firings.
Several others also worked on the investigation that led to Trump’s indictment related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election, dubbed internally as Arctic Frost. The FBI in October gave an internal document to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) showing investigators analyzed phone records from some half-dozen Republican lawmakers for three days around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Grassley released the records, which contained the names of agents involved. “You’re darn right I fired those agents,” Patel told Fox News explaining his decision.
The day after returning from his October hunting trip, Patel forced out the head of the San Antonio field office, Aaron Tapp. Tapp was a 22-year agent and expert in financial crimes whose job had been to work with FBI lawyers to make sure department policies were followed when opening sensitive cases, including Arctic Frost.
The firings have sparked some confusion. Two of the ousted Arctic Frost agents were told they would be retained after the Trump-appointed top federal prosecutor in Washington, Jeanine Pirro, privately said they were needed for active cases, people familiar with the matter said. Patel overruled her.
On Halloween, Patel also fired Steven Palmer, a 27-year agent who ran the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group, the unit that responds to high-risk situations like child abductions and hostages. It also oversees the agency’s use of its government planes.
Palmer and other officials had tried to explain to Patel’s staff that the more he used the plane for personal travel, the less it could be used for other bureau operations, according to people familiar with the matter. An FBI official said Palmer’s ouster wasn’t related to the plane issue, and said Patel regularly consults his advisers on how to allocate resources.
Dozens of other agents—especially those eligible for retirement after 20 years of service—have also left. “If you threaten the workforce with dismissal, you are going to kill initiative,” said Frank Montoya, a longtime FBI counterintelligence agent who retired from the bureau in 2016.
The FBI Agents Association, which represents most FBI agents, said that Patel had “launched a campaign of erratic and arbitrary retribution.” “FBI Agents deal in facts, and we urge Director Patel to do the same,” it said.
The FBI spokesman declined to comment on the association’s statement.
Trump has complained in recent months that he believed Patel wasn’t moving fast enough with some of the firings, and about Patel’s media appearances, including on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which Trump believed weren’t helpful, according to the officials familiar with the complaints.
Trump had also been upset with Patel over his handling of the review of the investigation into deceased financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which had consumed the White House earlier this year, the officials said. Bondi had accused FBI leadership of “trying to destroy her” by leaking information about internal discord, the Journal previously reported. Other administration officials who tried to repair the ties concluded the issue had spiraled largely because the Justice Department and the FBI had mishandled it.
Patel is now in better standing with Trump, the White House officials familiar with the complaints said.
He has taken some cues from Trump for the job, emphasizing the public relations aspects of the job, traveling to news conferences and appearing for several Fox News interviews.
At times he has publicized information before other law-enforcement officials felt it was ready for release. Soon after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot to death in September, Patel told his 1.8 million X followers that a suspect had been captured, raising hopes of a quick arrest, only to backtrack about two hours later. The actual alleged killer turned himself in to law enforcement the following night.
Patel’s Halloween post of the arrests in Michigan, in which he praised the FBI and law enforcement for “crushing our mission,” also sparked confusion. Local and state officials, who would usually be briefed on such an announcement before its release, were unaware of the investigation and called each other to find out what was going on.
Soon after the early morning post, Patel had left Washington, D.C. At 4:56 p.m. on Halloween afternoon, the FBI plane landed in Fort Lauderdale, raising speculation on social media that Patel was attending Trump’s Great Gatsby themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago scheduled for that night. He was actually in Florida visiting his parents, according to Williamson, the FBI spokesman.
Prosecutors raced to file a 93-page complaint on Saturday alleging that a group of young men had allegedly stockpiled guns and ammunition for a possible ISIS-inspired attack on gay nightclubs in suburban Detroit. The men scoped out potential locations, researched other mass shootings and spent weeks practicing shooting at a gun range, the complaint said.
The men, from Dearborn, Mich., had been communicating with two other teenagers from New Jersey and Washington state, who had discussed “comprehensive plans” to travel abroad to fight for ISIS, prosecutors wrote in a separate criminal complaint. After learning of the Michigan arrests, they stepped up their travel plans, rebooking the original mid-November flights to Turkey for Nov. 5, the complaint says.
“So you know what happened in Dearborn?” one of the 19-year-old men told a confidential informant on a messaging app after details of the Michigan case became public, according to a criminal complaint filed in New Jersey federal court. “The feds are gonna be looking for us in a week maybe, so we are leaving today or tomorrow,” the man said. “We’re gonna delete everything off of our phones,” he said. “We need to leave urgently before this gets bigger.”
On. Nov, 4, FBI agents who had been monitoring the men arrested him as he was awaiting a flight to Istanbul at Newark Liberty International Airport. The other was arrested that night at his home in Kent, Wash.
Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com, Aruna Viswanatha at aruna.viswanatha@wsj.com, Josh Dawsey at Joshua.Dawsey@WSJ.com and Jack Gillum at jack.gillum@wsj.com
