Gold Medal Moment for Kash Patel Is Latest Bad Optic in His Young FBI Career

Surely one can’t begrudge FBI Director Kash Patel for pounding a celebratory beer and singing Toby Keith with the boys from the United States hockey team — just moments after they captured their first gold medal in years. Besides, on paper, any FBI director would be hard-pressed to dream up a more storybook moment to cap off a first year in the role than Mr. Patel’s. He flew on the bureau’s jet to Italy for a series of meetings with local officials on what an FBI spokesman, Ben Williamson, emphatically said was a pre-arranged work trip. That trip culminated with tickets to the gold medal men’s hockey final between Team USA and Team Canada at the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena, where he watched the Americans defeat Canada in overtime, “courtesy of the red, white and blue,” as Mr. Keith’s MAGA anthem goes.Mr. Patel had a lot to celebrate. In his own estimation, it took him just one year to “make America safer.” He said he reoriented the FBI’s core mission to “crush violent crime, defend the homeland, strengthen transparency, and rebuild public trust.”Under his leadership, the FBI contributed to a “historic” 20 percent drop in the nationwide murder rate. Arrests were up 197 percent from the year prior. They seized more than 2,100 kilos of Fentanyl. “Nihilistic Violent Extremism” arrests were up by 490 percent. Six of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted fugitives were apprehended in one year. These were just a few of the achievements Mr. Patel cites.Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel looks on prior to the Men’s Gold Medal match between Canada and the United States on day 16 of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic games at Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena on February 22, 2026 in Milan, Italy. Elsa/Getty Images“It is hard to believe that it is the same agency working with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department in Tucson that was politicized in 2022 when it raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home under fumbling, mumbling and stumbling President Joe Biden,” Boston Herald political reporter Peter Lucas wrote last week.As sensational as Mr. Patel’s locker room celebration seemed, it didn’t make him the first FBI director in the bureau’s 118-year history to rub elbows with celebrities and athletes while on the job.J. Edgar Hoover had his evenings with Ethel Merman and his longtime deputy — rumored boyfriend, Clyde Tolson — at the Stork Club in the 1930s.William H. Webster, who died this past August at age 101, played in the 1979 Robert F. Kennedy Pro-Celebrity Tennis Tournament in Flushing, Queens, parrying jokes from actress Margaux Hemingway about President Carter’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, who was facing allegations of snorting cocaine at Studio 54. Kash Patel celebrates with the American hockey team after their Olympic win. YouTubeMr. Webster also lost a charity match against actor Robert Duvall, who died last week at 95, and former NFL running back Joe Washington at First Lady Nancy Reagan’s 1985 charity tennis tournament at the White House, despite “breathtaking recoveries and crisp volleying” by him and his doubles partner, “Hill Street Blues” actress Veronica Hamel.Mr. Webster was listed among the “celebrities in attendance” at game two of the 1984 World Series between the San Diego Padres and Detroit Tigers, where Olympic gold medal gymnast Mary Lou Retton and another “Hill Street Blues” actor, Daniel Travanti, were also in attendance.If Mr. Hoover could rub elbows with Ms. Merman and Mr. Webster could serve to Mr. Duval, then why can’t Mr. Patel wear a gold medal and pump his fists with the Tkachuk brothers?Many found fault with Mr. Patel’s celebration. Conservative former FBI agents “The Suspendables” Kyle Seraphin and Steve Friend jumped to the unlikely defense of the liberal outlet MS NOW after Mr. Williamson dismissed it as “a rag outlet” for reporting that Mr. Patel went “to hang out at the Olympics on the taxpayer dime.” Mr. Williamson’s post has since received a community note that highlights Mr. Patel’s locker room video. Kash Patel and his girlfriend Alexis Wilkins at a wrestling match where she performed the National Anthem. InstagramEnvironmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin fired back at MS NOW, calling one of its reporters a “Karen” while saying the video made Mr. Patel look “cool and relatable.” Geraldo Rivera said Mr. Patel deserved “some slack for getting caught up in the enthusiasm.”Many FBI rank and file, current and retired, saw the video as a reflection of an unserious person who was disinterested in the day-to-day of the role, but head-over-heels in love with its perks. Ex-agents were already angry over Mr. Patel’s decision to amend the Special Agent Selection System for existing support staffers — including intelligence analysts, financial experts, linguists, and others in non-Special Agent roles — which they believe amounts to an avoidable lowering of necessary standards for the world’s most powerful law enforcement agency. Mr. Patel, a former national security staffer and federal public defender who had no prior FBI experience before being confirmed as FBI director in 2025, is under pressure to hire 700 new agents in 2026 to replace the exodus of thousands of special agents who were fired, forced out, or resigned since President Trump took office, sources tell the Sun. Many of the departures involved FBI officers and executives who participated in the criminal investigations of Mr. Trump during the Biden Administration.Attorney General Pam Bondi swears in the new Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel as his girlfriend Alexis Wilkins holds the Bhagavad Gita in the Indian Treaty Room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on February 21, 2025 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesIn September, the FBI announced it was allowing qualified 1811s — the Office of Personnel Management’s designation given to criminal investigators — from other federal agencies to sign up for an abridged version of its new agent training at Quantico, now called Advanced Special Agent Training or ASAT. “It should be getting harder to become a member of the FBI as standards rise, leadership expectations improve, and the bureau returns to what it once was,” a retired FBI executive assistant director in charge, Christopher M. Piehota, tells the Sun. In a statement on X, Mr. Patel addressed “the very concerned media” and defended his actions. “I love America and was extremely humbled when my friends, the newly minted Gold Medal winners on Team USA, invited me into the locker room to celebrate this historic moment with the boys.”The timing of Mr. Patel’s video antics, which happened at the tail end of his work trip, is doing him no favors. Nancy Guthrie is still missing. Jalisco New Generation boss Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, was killed in a Mexican military operation, igniting chaos in neighboring Mexico. An armed 21-year-old, Austrian Tucker Martin, was fatally shot by Secret Service agents after entering President Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort while carrying a gas can and a shotgun.Porter Goss and William Webster, both former directors of the CIA, confer during a conference at Washington, D.C., on October 4, 2017. Win McNamee/Getty ImagesThat kind of timing, seemingly unintentional and presumably out of Mr. Patel’s control, is the one constant that has dogged the 45-year-old throughout his young FBI tenure.In December, he appeared on a podcast with his 27-year-old girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, to discuss, among other things, first concerts and favorite musicians, which aired just as his agency was in the thick of a manhunt for the Brown University mass shooter.Just before the podcast’s release, Mr. Patel was criticized for touting on social media that a suspect in the Brown University shooting had been detained, only for that suspect to be released a short while later. Mr. Patel had made a similar announcement during the early stages of the FBI’s investigation into the killing of Charlie Kirk, which he was also forced to walk back.That situation echoed a previous controversy in October, when Ms. Wilkins posted photos of herself and Mr. Patel at a Pennsylvania wrestling event — to which they had flown on the FBI’s jet during the government shutdown. The FBI director, Kash Patel, and his girlfriend, the singer Alexis Wilkins. XThe two of them technically did nothing illegal. But their decisions generated a result similar to the one Mr. Patel faces now: bad optics.But at the end of the day, Mr. Patel’s fate rests in the hands of Mr. Trump. For those thinking that Mr. Patel’s latest antic would be his ultimate undoing as FBI director, Mr. Trump does not appear to be in any hurry to find his replacement.In another video from the USA Men’s hockey team locker room, Mr. Patel held up his phone while Mr. Trump invited the players to attend Tuesday’s State of the Union address. When asked by one player if Mr. Trump could pick them up from Miami, where the team is scheduled to arrive on Tuesday morning, the president replied: “We’ll get Kash, or we’ll get the military to get you guys over.”

Gold Medal Moment for Kash Patel Is Latest Bad Optic in His Young FBI Career

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