Law enforcement officials have identified a 22-year-old Utah man Tyler Robinson as the suspect in the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and according to the latest reporting, it was one of Robinson’s family members who turned him in to the authorities.
These are obviously encouraging developments, though they don’t erase recent questions surrounding FBI Director Kash Patel and his competence.
On Wednesday afternoon, for example, Patel suggested via social media that Kirk’s shooter had been captured. That wasn’t true, and the bureau’s director was forced to walk that back soon after.
“It was amateur hour,” Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told HuffPost. “He was doing a running commentary. Historically, the FBI keeps its mouth closed until it believes it’s the right time and the right message.”
A Politico report added, “Patel’s blunder came at a time when the embattled director was already under scrutiny from all sides of the political spectrum — and from many current and former agents in the bureau itself.”
A day later, according to The New York Times’ latest reporting and multiple sources, Patel convened an online meeting with 200 agents to discuss the manhunt, launched into profanity-laced tirades and whined about not being kept in the loop by his subordinates. From the article:
The killing of Mr. Kirk on Wednesday not only poses a challenge to agents racing to find the shooter, it also represents a grave leadership test for Mr. Patel. His swift pronouncements about the inquiry have revived concerns about his lack of experience, obsession with social media and purge of some of the bureau’s most experienced investigators, according to current and former officials, most of whom spoke on the sensitive matter on the condition of anonymity.
The Times’ report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News added that the director’s recent actions “have already invited scorn and scrutiny from the bureau’s work force, and some senior officials at the Justice Department, who think his behavior has eroded public confidence in the F.B.I.”
That’s plainly true. Patel’s tenure has featured a variety of embarrassments and brazenly partisan personnel purges. Things went from bad to worse this week when three former senior FBI officials filed a brutal federal lawsuit, which characterized Patel’s bureau as fixated on “politically motivated retribution” and consumed by the whims of a Trump White House. In case that weren’t quite enough, Patel, just a few weeks ago, fired the highly regarded head of the FBI field office Salt Lake City for reasons that have not yet been explained — and given that the Kirk shooting happened in Utah, the director’s decision received obvious and unavoidable scrutiny anew over the last couple of days. When Donald Trump first announced Patel’s nomination, there was a lengthy list of reasons why this was a bad idea, starting with Patel’s record of being a hyper-partisan conspiracy theorist and sycophantic ally to the president. But just as notable was the fact that he simply didn’t have the experience or qualifications to lead the FBI. Patel has been battling suspicions that he simply wasn’t up for the job ever since. He still enjoys the White House’s backing, but he nevertheless took additional steps toward confirming those suspicions this week.
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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