FBI Director Kash Patel’s latest boast about his apparent crime bust is not going over well.
Patel, the conspiracy theorist turned FBI boss, said his agency charged five people in three states for casting ballots illegally over the past two election cycles. The FBI claims that four noncitizens voted illegally in either the 2022 or 2024 election, and one U.S. citizen has been charged with allegedly aiding his wife’s illegal voting.
“Election integrity is a top priority for this FBI. We will investigate every credible allegation of election fraud and illegal voting, following the facts wherever they lead,” Patel wrote on X.
President Donald Trump has been fixated on the 2020 election, which he lost but has been obsessing over for nearly six years now. The president has claimed repeatedly, and falsely, that the election was stolen from him due to voting irregularities, which his legal team at the time could never prove in court nor present to the public.
Even so, nearly every chance he gets, Trump repeats his lies that election irregularities made the results of the 2020 election fraudulent, including in a recent primetime address in which he rambled again about nonexistent voter interference in that election.
He has filled his entire administration with only loyalists who believe his election claims.
The second Trump administration has been fixated on the idea of noncitizens voting, even though, as proven by the FBI’s latest “bust,” cases of noncitizen voting are extremely rare and are not happening en masse as the Trump administration portrays.
Patel was widely mocked for hailing this five-person arrest as some kind of proof of widespread voter fraud.
“Five people across three states spanning two whole election cycles—you really cracked the code on ‘widespread voter fraud,’” one user wrote sarcastically. “At this rate, you’ll hit double digits by 2040. Pack it up, folks, the 160 million other votes were just a distraction.”
“But Trump claimed millions of illegals voted in our elections. You got five?” another wrote.
“You found a total of FIVE people and that’s a win? You’re basically telling us Trump was lying about his election fraud claims then,” another noted.
Trump and his MAGA supporters have invoked voter fraud while pushing the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to present photo identification when voting and documentary proof of citizenship when registering..
U.S. citizenship is already a requirement to vote, and cases of noncitizen voting, as evidenced by Patel’s not-so-big bust, are very rare.
The bill does not appear to have the 60 Senate votes needed to overcome a filibuster, despite Trump furiously pressuring Senate Majority Leader John Thune to just blow up the filibuster to get it passed.
