It is unusual for President Donald Trump to spend a weekend in Washington DC. But this weekend, he eschewed both Mar-A-Lago in Florida and his golf club in New Jersey for a weekend with his nose allegedly affixed to the Oval Office grindstone.
Engaged in what the White House opaquely refers to as “Executive Time”, the President perhaps wanted to stay across every jot and tittle of negotiations with the Iranians (although the previous weekend he chose to attend an Ultimate Fighting Championship bout in Miami instead).
But it is also possible that Trump had another major issue on his front burner: the administration’s next big scandal that is now engulfing FBI Director Kash Patel whose future at the Bureau may have less life expectancy than a Liz Truss lettuce.
On Friday night, The Atlantic magazine published a devastating profile of Patel, accusing the FBI Director of often being missing in action, and of alarming colleagues “with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences”.
The article, based on interviews with two dozen current and former officials, alleges that “Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government…On multiple occasions members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated.”
Fitzpatrick, author of the article, reports that at one point “a request for ‘breaching equipment’ – normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain access into buildings – was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors”.
On Saturday, Patel threatened to institute legal proceedings against the magazine, claiming the article is defamatory. Using his official FBI account on Elon Musk’s “X” platform, he wrote that “no amount of BS you write will ever deter this FBI from making America safe again and taking down the criminals you love”.
But the FBI Director’s time atop the agency may now be coming to an end.
Kash Patel is said to have courted controversy with his ice hockey escapades (Photo: Tom Brenner/AP)Patel was always a deeply controversial, some said unhinged choice to lead the FBI. A dyed-in-the-wool Maga ideologue, he spent Joe Biden’s years in the presidency using his Kash’s Corner podcast to lambast the FBI and Department of Justice while trumpeting the innocence of Trump’s insurrectionists whose Capitol Hill deadly rampage on 6 January, 2021, was aimed at overturning the outcome of the 2020 election.
In appointing Patel to sit in the office where J Edgar Hoover presided for 48 years and turned the FBI into the country’s most powerful law enforcement agency, Trump knew he was taking a risk.
But he also knew Patel’s mere appointment sent shudders through the President’s enemies. They feared –seemingly with justification, as it turned out – that the new Director would shred the FBI’s traditional independence and instead turn the Bureau into the President’s personal office of retribution.
Former officials on the receiving end of FBI probes have included former FBI director James Comey, former national security adviser John Bolton, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, among many others. Patel personally authorised January’s raid on an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, where agents filched 700 boxes of 2020 election ballots in Trump’s continuing efforts to prove Biden never legitimately won the presidency.
But, Patel himself now stands facing burgeoning accusations of personal misconduct in office. For months, reports have alleged the FBI Director has continually misused the Bureau’s executive jets to ferry him and his girlfriend to non-essential events worldwide.
In February, he traveled to the Winter Olympics where he was filmed engaged in boisterous, beer-chugging celebrations of the US ice hockey team’s gold medal win, with the Bureau insisting he was engaged in long-planned official business that just happened to coincide with finals. (One of Patel’s earlier engagements in Washington DC was volunteering as an assistant ice hockey coach at one of the city’s leading state schools).
When Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September, Patel was accused of a series of missteps, including announcing on social media that his agents had detained a suspect in the slaying when they had not. It was later reported that the Director was in New York dining at the exclusive restaurant Rao’s while the search for Kirk’s alleged killer continued.
Patel was criticised for his handling of the assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk (Photo: J Scott Applewhite/AP)Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, accused Patel of being “so anxious to take credit for finding Mr. Kirk’s assassin that he violated one of the basics of effective law enforcement: at critical stages of the investigation, shut up and let the professionals do their job”.
The Atlantic article is now seen by many in Washington as the last nail in Patel’s political coffin. Trump is widely expected to defenestrate the FBI Director within days. Indeed, the report suggests that Patel “is deeply concerned his job is in jeopardy” and “has good reasons to think so”.
Those reasons include fears that the FBI Director’s alleged conduct may even pose a national security risk to the Trump administration. Last month, hackers from Handala, a hacking group with ties to Iran, broke into Patel’s personal e-mail account and published years of his e-mails and photos online. The images included a shot of Patel holding a large of bottle of rum, a snap that may no longer look as anodyne as it did when it first entered the public domain.
Patel’s woes also raise questions for the Prime Minister. The UK Government shares intelligence on a routine basis with the US, remains a member of the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing alliance, and may be pondering how much longer it can trust Britain’s secrets with an FBI Director now facing serious and growing allegations against him.
As Trump spent the weekend in the Oval Office, Washington reporters were regularly checking his social media feed for any word about Patel’s future. It appears to be untenable.
Like former homeland security secretary Kristi Noem and former attorney general Pam Bondi, the FBI Director’s usefulness to the President may have passed its expiry date.
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