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.”








