Two of Donald Trump’s most loyal hatchet men were sent out to defend embattled FBI Director Kash Patel after damaging reports about his alleged abuse of agency resources.
The cleanup operation was launched after a sweeping New York Times investigation on Friday revealed how Patel, 46, allegedly used the FBI’s Gulfstream V jet to fly his country-singer girlfriend Alexis Wilkins, 27, to a luxury suite costing up to $50,000 for a George Strait and Chris Stapleton concert in Philadelphia last year, as the Daily Beast reported.
The newspaper also exposed Patel’s secretive “VIP snorkel” jaunt around the USS Arizona, the sacred war grave entombing the remains of more than 900 U.S. service personnel lost in the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
First to leap to Patel’s rescue was chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, who fired off a furious X post which branded the Times piece a “pathetic hit piece” and accused the “Fake News media” of trying to smear the FBI chief.
Parnell claimed Patel had been personally invited to Pearl Harbor by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command boss Admiral Samuel Paparo to lead a senior delegation, and insisted the snorkel excursion was nothing more than the standard tour offered to officials across administrations.
Then up popped acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who also hit out at the Times for criticizing the taxpayer-funded SWAT detail Patel had allegedly arranged for Wilkins in Nashville. Blanche dismissed the newspaper as having “zero credibility” and claimed every FBI director had been given the same protection given the constant threats facing their loved ones.
But the MAGA pushback did little to quell the outrage on Capitol Hill. Rep. Jason Crow, a former Army Ranger and Bronze Star recipient with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, posted that Pearl Harbor was not a playground but “a final resting place for fallen servicemembers,” and slammed Patel as “not a serious or qualified person for the job.”
Rep. Ted Lieu, a retired Air Force colonel, drew his own searing parallel, asking whether it would be appropriate to play paintball at Arlington National Cemetery—before answering his own question with a thunderous “NO.” After Patel refused to say who paid for him and Wilkins to attend the concert, Lieu asked: “What is Kash Patel hiding?”
Former Obama spokesman and Pod Save America host Tommy Vietor needled Parnell directly, writing that the more the public heard about Patel’s “VIP snorkeling trip over a hallowed, watery graveyard,” the better.
Democratic strategist Doug Landry added: “Imagine spending two full days workshopping your department’s response to this story and the best you can come up with is that the ‘VIP snorkel of a hallowed gravesite’ was meant to ‘advance joint operations against our adversaries’.”
The coordinated administration push to insulate Patel echoes a familiar MAGA playbook. As the Beast reported after April’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner shooting, MAGA accounts and influencers swiftly posted in apparent unison in support of Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom project, with dozens of tweets pushing the same line in the hours after the attempted assassination of the president.
Asked for comment by the Daily Beast, White House communications director Steven Cheung said: “Under President Trump and Director Patel’s leadership at the FBI, crime across the country has plummeted to the lowest level in more than 100 years and many high profile criminals have been put behind bars. Director Patel remains a critical player on the Administration’s law and order team.”
The Pentagon declined to comment further when contacted by the Daily Beast.
