The FBI director, Kash Patel, has loads on his plate simply now. There’s the shooting death of the armed man who entered Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence; the weeks-old seek for lacking Nancy Guthrie, mom of Today co-host Savannah Guthrie; to not point out the continued furor across the so-called Jeffrey Epstein recordsdata.
So eyebrows have been raised on Sunday when cellphone footage emerged of Patel whooping it up with the boys’s USA hockey team in Milan after their gold medal victory in opposition to Canada on the Winter Olympics.
All this pressing enterprise occurring, “and our FBI Director thinks he’s a frat bro?!” was simply one among the comments. It got here from Xochitl Hinojosa, former head of public affairs on the US justice division.
The phone video – despatched by a supply to a ProPublica reporter, William Turton – exhibits Patel dressed in a white USA hockey shirt, gold medal slung round his neck. He chugs on a bottle and splatters beer spray across the locker room because the team sings Toby Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.
Patel is an avid hockey fan. He flew to Milan on a justice division airplane on Thursday on what his spokesperson Ben Williamson insisted was official enterprise.
After CBS News reported that Patel used an FBI jet to attend the Olympic males’s hockey video games, Williamson insisted that this was “not a personal trip. Director Patel is on a trip that was planned months ago.”
Patel had quite a lot of official conferences scheduled with Italian regulation enforcement officers and the US ambassador to Italy, the spokesperson added.
Patel himself waded into the controversy on Sunday night, when he portrayed himself as a misunderstood social gathering. “I love America and was extremely humbled when my friends, the newly minted Gold Medal winners on Team USA, invited me into the locker room,” he wrote on X.
“Greatest country on earth and greatest sport on earth.”
The rightwing podcast Kyle Seraphin, a former FBI agent, riposted in the feedback: “That’s called ‘Misuse of Official Position.’”
Patel has been dogged by accusations that he mixes work with pleasure since he was sworn in as FBI director in late February 2025. In November, he was embroiled in controversy after he used an FBI jet to journey to Pennsylvania to look at his girlfriend, nation singer Alexis Wilkins, sing the nationwide anthem at a wrestling match.
