FBI Director Kash Patel has certainly generated a lot of headlines recently. A week ago, for example, the public learned about his personally branded liquor bottles. The same day, MS NOW reported that the bureau had launched a highly controversial criminal leak investigation focusing on a journalist at The Atlantic who wrote a deeply unflattering account of Patel.
Days later, the former podcast personality threw a bit of a tantrum during a Senate hearing. The same day, NOTUS reported that Patel’s FBI had put together a team of special agents that has been internally referred to as the “payback squad,” featuring members “willing to pursue political targets set by the Trump administration.” One day later, MS NOW also reported that, according to FBI insiders, Patel had manipulated data and was “padding the stats” in order to exaggerate federal arrest data and make himself look better.
He might not have needed another mess, but the director appears to have one anyway. The Associated Press reported on Patel’s visit to Hawaii last summer, which the FBI insisted was not a vacation. There’s fresh evidence to the contrary:
Left out of FBI’s news releases was an exclusive excursion that Patel took days later when he participated in what government officials described as a “VIP snorkel” around the USS Arizona in an outing coordinated by the military. The sunken battleship entombs more than 900 sailors and Marines at Pearl Harbor.
The swim, revealed in government emails obtained by The Associated Press, comes to light amid criticism over Patel’s use of the FBI plane and his global travel that has blended professional responsibilities with leisure activities. The FBI did not disclose the snorkeling session or that Patel had returned to Hawaii for two days after his initial stopover on the island.
An FBI spokesman did not answer questions about the snorkeling session, according to the AP, though it acknowledged that regional commanders hosted Patel at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam “as they commonly do with US government officials on official travel.”
The AP also quoted Stacey Young, who founded Justice Connection, a network of former federal prosecutors and agents who advocate for the Department of Justice’s independence, who said, “It fits a pattern of Director Patel getting tangled up in unseemly distractions — this time at a site commemorating the second deadliest attack in U.S. history — instead of staying laser-focused on keeping Americans safe.”
Part of what makes the new allegations so striking is the fact that many of Patel’s troubles stem from leaks from FBI insiders. The director has struggled for months with critics within the bureau, but there’s every reason to believe the problem is getting worse.
What’s more, it’s worth appreciating just how unsurprising the latest controversy is.
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A year ago this month, Patel attended a secret conference of U.S. intelligence allies, and ahead of the gathering, the FBI director’s team apparently made some unusual requests. The New York Times reported earlier this year:
Before the conference, his staff says he’s unhappy because he doesn’t like meetings in office settings. What he wants is social events. He wants Premier soccer games. He wants to go jet skiing. He’d like a helicopter tour. Everyone who heard about this was like: Hold on. Is he really going to ask the MI5 director to go jet skiing instead of meeting? … His staff only cared about three things: what his meals were, when his workouts would be and what his entertainment would be.
To know anything about Patel’s tenure is to know that work doesn’t appear to be this guy’s top priority. He seems far more interested in having a great time, which happens with great regularity.
Time will tell what, if any, impact this will have on Patel’s professional future, but it’s worth noting that it was just a few weeks ago when Politico reported that things “aren’t looking great” for Patel, adding that he appears likely to be the next high-ranking official to exit the administration. This dovetailed with related observations about just how little the White House has done to defend Patel, or even to say his name out loud, in the face of multiple controversies.
The director started scrambling soon after to save his job, but between the latest reporting and the “Saturday Night Live” sketches that lampooned Patel as a national joke, no one should be too surprised if the president starts looking for some faraway land that needs a new ambassador. Watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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