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JET FUEL ON THE FIRE
Kash Patel is facing harsh criticism for taking a fancy FBI jet to attend his girlfriend’s musical performance at a wrestling match. The fallout is only growing.
FBI Director Kash Patel may be a ruthless MAGA henchman, bent on targeting President Donald Trump’s enemies. But he wants you to know he has a human side, too: An inner hopeless romantic, with a rose in his teeth, and cartoon hearts dancing in his eyes. And don’t you dare say otherwise… or else!
That, at least, is the tack this 45-year-old conspiracy theorist is taking to defend himself from criticism over his latest self-induced scandal, stemming from his use of a $60 million FBI jet to watch his 26-year-old country singer girlfriend belt out the national anthem before a wrestling match at Penn State last week. The vibes appear to have been high when country singer Alexis Wilkins posted a selfie [ [link removed] ] with her big-shot boyfriend, who flashed a toothy smile. Afterwards, the couple apparently proceeded to Nashville, Wilkins’s home town, according to publicly available flight logs.
That selfie may have been the last time anyone caught Patel smiling. Since then, he’s faced an onslaught of criticism from the left and right, pointing out the very obvious double standard: Patel has long criticized FBI directors for taking government jets on private trips. Just two years ago, he argued that [ [link removed] ] the FBI should ground then-FBI Director Chris Wray’s “private jet that he pays for with taxpayer dollars to hop around the country.”
Kash is crashing out. “The disgustingly baseless attacks against Alexis — a true patriot and the woman I’m proud to call my partner in life — are beyond pathetic,” Patel tweeted [ [link removed] ]. “She is a rock-solid conservative and a country music sensation who has done more for this nation than most will in ten lifetimes.”
Fact check: The FBI director is actually required to take government jets, even on personal trips, for security reasons [ [link removed] ] — although that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t exercise judgement about which trips they choose to take, whether they may be flagrantly indulging in hypocrisy, who they blame for their own mistakes, and what they say about it in public. (Fact check No. 2: Wilkins has just over 6,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, or a bit more than three times what my editor Greg’s rock band [ [link removed] ] had last month... and they haven’t played a show in years, let alone been dragged into a national scandal by the director of the FBI! Pretty sensational!)
Even though the flight logs were public, the FBI reportedly forced out [ [link removed] ] a senior employee who oversees aviation. He had worked at the agency for 27 years. FBI jets were subsequently wiped from at least one top public tracking service [ [link removed] ].
This scandal reinforces one of Patel’s worst qualities: He can’t keep his mouth shut.
Historically, the FBI director is supposed to play the role of level-headed, steady-handed, tight-lipped lawman. After all, stray comments can mess up important cases. Patel, an ex-podcaster who is incredibly unqualified for his current job, has repeatedly exacerbated his various dramas with unhinged public appearances and statements.
“Rather than let that sit and keep his mouth shut and take his licks like a man, which is what you’re supposed to do when you get called out… the guy went out and doubled down on being stupid,” Kyle Seraphin, an ex-FBI agent whistleblower who first revealed Patel’s flight logs, said on his podcast this morning. “He keeps doing stupid things.”
Another one of those stupid things: On Friday, Patel tweeted that the FBI had foiled a “potential” terrorist attack that would’ve taken place over Halloweekend. He apparently didn’t have permission to do so: Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy AG Todd Blanche are “very frustrated” with Patel for tweeting about the threat before investigators could determine how serious it was, MSNBC reports [ [link removed] ]. Was he trying to change the subject from his own scandal? Seems plausible.
“You guys keep screwing it up,” Seraphin said, directly addressing Patel and his allies. “You should have hired smarter people. You should have hired people who knew how to do the job. You should have just done the job and stopped trying to talk about doing the job.”
I think Patel should listen to his girlfriend’s music and take her advice: “Get knocked around, you get up off the ground, and handle it,” she croons on a song called “GRIT.” [ [link removed] ] “It makes you who you are, and it’ll take you faaaaaaar.”
WHAT ELSE?
Donald Trump threw a “Great Gatsby”-esque [ [link removed] ] Halloween party on Friday, with the theme “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody.” (That was notably not the message of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s greatest novel, as astute readers will recall!) MAGA elites sipped champagne and ran around in flapper costumes, 42 million Americans braced to lose their federal food assistance (SNAP) because of the government shutdown, and millions more faced a dramatic spike in healthcare costs for the same reason. Fun party, old sport?
Relatedly, the Trump administration said [ [link removed] ] that it will partially fund SNAP, after two judges separately ruled that it must keep the program running. But disbursing the funds could take “a few weeks to up to several months,” a top USDA official told a federal judge today. I’m sorry, but hunger doesn’t wait that long.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Trump [ [link removed] ], the highest disapproval rating in either of his terms, according to a CNN poll.
Trump’s political operation quietly doled out [ [link removed] ] $1 million in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races to boost voter turnout ahead of the elections on Tuesday. It’s the latest example of the president digging into his massive personal war chest, which he aims to use to bolster GOP candidates for years to come.
Trump said he’ll “be involved” in Israeli Prime Minister [ [link removed] ] Benjamin Netanyahu corruption trial, pledging to “help him out.” It’s widely believed that Netanyahu didn’t want to end the war in Gaza because the fighting effectively paused his corruption trial. “Cigars and champagne, who the hell cares about this?” Trump told 60 Minutes, referring to illicit gifts that Netanyahu allegedly accepted — and, presumably, to the vibe at his big “Great Gatsby” party over the weekend.
Israeli authorities detained the former top lawyer [ [link removed] ] of the Israeli military after accusing her of leaking footage, which showed soldiers sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee at a Gaza Strip detention center. Netanyahu criticized the leak because of “enormous reputational damage to the State of Israel.” In her resignation letter, the former lawyer struck a defiant tone: “Unfortunately, this basic understanding — that there are acts that must not be committed, even against the most despicable of detainees — no longer convinces everyone.”
An FDA official resigned after being accused [ [link removed] ] of seeking a bribe and tanking a pharmaceutical company’s stock by writing a defamatory LinkedIn post about one of its drugs. (A lawyer for the official told the Wall Street Journal that his client didn’t solicit a bribe.) This guy was hired in July to lead the FDA’s drug division. Only the best!
Exxon funded right-wing think tanks [ [link removed] ] to discredit climate change across Latin America in the 1990s and 2000s, according to hundreds of documents DeSmog. The goal: Sabotage U.N.-led efforts to create a global climate treaty. “What happened 30 years ago matters very much,” Carlos Milani, a professor of international relations at Rio de Janeiro State University’s Institute, told the outlet. “The atmosphere has a huge historical memory when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.”
LIGHT AT THE END OF THE EMAIL…
A federal judge in Oregon once again barred [ [link removed] ] the Trump administration from sending federal troops into Portland. There’s “no credible evidence” that anti-Trump protests have grown out of control, she said, despite the administration’s claims.
Conservative influencer Ben Shapiro blasted [ [link removed] ] Tucker Carlson for having known antisemite Nick Fuentes on his podcast. “The issue here is that Tucker Carlson decided to normalize and fluff Nick Fuentes and that the Heritage Foundation then decided to robustly defend that performance,” Shapiro said, also criticizing the far-right think tank.
Late night icon Jon Stewart is expected [ [link removed] ] to return as the Monday night host of the “The Daily Show” through 2026. Shoutout to Comedy Central for not being spineless!
International pop star Rosalía is releasing [ [link removed] ] her highly anticipated “Lux” album this week, and early reviews say that it lives up to the hype. “For fans of: The classics, summiting mountains, supernaturalism, Kate Bush,” the Associated Press writes. I’ve been loving the single “Berghain, [ [link removed] ]” which features Bjork and Yves Tumor.
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