Kash Patel is planning an eyebrow-raising trip to Russia that would make him the first known FBI director in more than a decade to visit the U.S. adversary.
Patel has come under fire for his extensive travel that often mixes business with pleasure, including partying with the U.S. men’s hockey team after their gold-medal win at the Milan Olympics, snorkeling near a battleship sunk by the Japanese in Pearl Harbor, and jetting around the country to see his country-singer girlfriend perform.
He also has a history of getting paid to promote Russian propaganda as part of a years-long crusade to dismiss the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. election as a “hoax,” despite ample evidence of interference.
Two sources told Politico that Patel was scheduled to visit Moscow and then St. Petersburg on Oct. 14 and 15, and that he would likely be hosted by Russia’s security service, the FSB, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB.
It wasn’t clear what topics were on the agenda or whether Patel would meet with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, whom President Donald Trump hosted in Alaska last year, Politico reported.
The White House referred Politico’s request for comment to the FBI, which didn’t respond. The Daily Beast has reached out as well.
News of the planned visit comes as the Trump administration has failed to stop Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—despite Trump’s vows to end the war on his first day back in office—leading U.S. lawmakers to demand heavy new sanctions against Russia.
The timing is also awkward considering just last week Trump declassified documents providing evidence that Moscow tried to help swing the 2020 election in his favor by directing proxy efforts to spread fake claims that his presidential rival Joe Biden had engaged in criminal activity.
U.S. intelligence officials also believe Moscow has been responsible for cybersecurity breaches of government agencies and private-sector companies.
The last known time an FBI director visited Russia was a 2013 trip by Robert Mueller, who was later appointed special counsel to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
Mueller’s investigation concluded that Russia engaged in “sweeping and systemic” interference, including launching a social media “information warfare” campaign that favored Trump, hacking Clinton campaign-related databases and releasing stolen materials, and targeting state databases in an effort to gain access to millions of registered voters.
It also noted extensive ties between Trump officials and Russia, and detailed multiple examples of the president allegedly obstructing justice.
But Patel—who from 2017 to 2018 was a staffer to then-Rep. Devin Nunes of California on the House Intelligence Committee—spent years trying to discredit the bipartisan finding that Russia mounted an influence operation to “undermine the U.S. liberal democratic order.”
In 2024, he was paid $25,000 by a Kremlin-linked film company to appear in a TV episode claiming that “Russiagate” was a hoax concocted by Democrats, the media, the FBI, and the CIA to discredit Trump, Mother Jones reported last year.
In the episode, Patel said the FBI headquarters in Washington should be shut down, lied about the origins of the investigations, and pushed the Kremlin’s line that Russia did not attack the 2016 election, according to Mother Jones.
