Megyn Kelly has joined in on the MAGA meltdown over her pal Kash Patel’s latest manhunt blunder.
The conservative firebrand, 55, couldn’t hide her disappointment with the FBI director, 45, after he touted the detention of a “person of interest” in the mass shooting at Brown University—who was later released after authorities admitted they got the wrong guy.
“I really actually think we can get past ‘person of interest’ turned out not to be the person. I think we can get past it. But it has to require utter, blatant transparency and honesty. But I’m not gonna lie, it’s not good,” Kelly said on a Monday episode of her eponymous podcast.
“It’s not good that our friend Kash Patel tweeted out they have a person of interest in custody and kind of patting themselves on the back when it wasn’t the guy. None of this is good,” she went on.
Patel announced in an X post on Sunday that the FBI detained a person of interest after a shooter killed two students and injured nine others at the Brown campus in Providence, Rhode Island.
“This FBI will continue an all out 24/7 campaign until justice is fully served,” he wrote as he thanked agents for their teamwork.
Mere hours later, however, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said the person of interest would be released after authorities found that the evidence “now points in a different direction.” Neronha said Patel was “fully aware” of the 180-degree twist that meant the shooter remains at large.
The high-profile faux pas was another huge blow for Patel, who has been mockingly referred to as “Keystone Kash,” after the bumbling police troop from the 1912 silent film, even by Kelly herself.
“I’m sorry, but Keystone Cops comes to mind when you look at what happened at Brown University over the past 36 hours,” she said. “Now, how much time has been lost in tracking the real killer because they were very focused on this guy?”
The FBI did not immediately return a request for comment on Kelly’s remarks.
Patel has also faced widespread backlash for similar gaffes in the hunt for the killer of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and delays in the release of the highly anticipated files related to notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Kelly hardly stands alone in MAGAworld in her criticism of her own friend. Other conservatives sharpened their knives for Patel after the Brown shooting flub.
“Director Patel, tens of millions of us have supported you at the highest level but we are extremely disappointed in the results after almost a year,” a MAGA-aligned X account wrote.
President Donald Trump, for his part, remains confident in his pick for FBI chief.
Asked whether Patel has explained the FBI’s difficulty with nailing down the school shooter, Trump said: “Well, it’s always difficult. So far we’ve done a very good job of doing it.”
“But you’d really have to ask the school about that because this was a school problem,” he added. “They had their own guards, they had their own police, they had their own everything. But you’d have to ask that question, really, to the school and not to the FBI.”
