The FBI director,  Kash Patel, threw cold water on theories that the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein was murdered, telling Fox News that Epstein did, in fact, die by his own hand. 

“I’m telling you, he killed himself,” Mr. Patel said during a rare sit-down interview with a Fox News host, Bret Baier, on “Special Report with Bret Baier.”

Responding to calls from victims’ advocates and conservative media figures for the FBI to fully declassify all of its Epstein files, Mr. Patel preached patience and assured Mr. Baier that he was “not going to rush to get it out there in a format in which they can’t rely on.”

“I’m not going to withhold information from the American public, ever,” Mr. Patel said. “So on the Epstein matter … we are diligently working on that, and it takes time to go through years of investigations, years of political maneuvering, and years of cover-up to get the American people what they deserve, and that’s what I’m going to give them on everything.”

The feds’ files on Epstein are voluminous. They investigated him in the mid-2000s (he signed a controversial plea deal in 2007, pleading guilty to hiring an underage prostitute), then arrested him again in July 2019 and charged him with sex trafficking and other offenses. A month later, he was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell, hanged by his bedsheets. Epstein was known as a collector of rich and powerful friends, including prominent liberals such as Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, and Epstein’s death, which the authorities declared a suicide, was met with suspicion by some observers who surmised he may have been murdered to keep him from disclosing kompromat he’d kept as an insurance policy.

Mr. Patel’s appearance on Fox News, his second in as many weeks, was more of the “check is in the mail” approach from Mr. Patel, whether that be a breakdown of the FBI’s budget, damning evidence from the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, or the identity of the January 5, 2021, pipe bomber.

Mr. Baier gently pressed Mr. Patel on his earlier pledge to deliver “a wave of transparency,” made to another Fox News host, Maria Bartiromo, regarding the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia. So far, neither Mr. Patel nor the FBI has released much in the way of blockbuster “transparency.” 

“So, just quickly on Crossfire Hurricane, that is a continuing production. We have found material, and I am the Crossfire Hurricane guy, that I didn’t even know existed in FBI holdings,” Mr. Patel said, without elaborating on the nature of the material he referenced. He said the material “has been flowing to Congress nonstop on a rolling basis” since his interview with Ms. Bartiromo.

Mr. Patel, as a GOP congressional aide at the beginning of Mr. Trump’s first term, played a role in the Russian investigation as a conduit between sympathetic House Republicans and the White House. Now in the FBI director’s chair, he has an opportunity to provide the full transparency he’s long demanded.

One of his predecessors as FBI director, James Comey, who recently came under fire for posting on Instagram the number “8647” spelled out in shells on a sandy beach, which brought him a visit from Secret Service agents and free publicity for his new book, likened Mr. Patel to a dog that barked “nonsense” at the FBI for years and said he felt “sorry” for his successor.

“Now he has not only caught the car, but he’s got to drive the car, and so that is a daunting task for him,” Mr. Comey said during a television appearance on MSNBC’s “The Briefing With Jen Psaki.”

“If he wants to come after me, no problem. I’ve been living rent-free in that guy’s head for years, and that’s just a bonus,” Mr. Patel said in response to Mr. Comey’s jab.

Known for his staunch criticism of the bureau he now oversees, Mr. Patel said he has been “pleasantly” surprised by the response from those FBI agents who he says welcomed both him and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, previously a top conservative podcaster. 

“When I got in the seat, when Dan Bongino got in the seat, they said, ‘We want to fix this place. We want to work with you. We’ve been trying to do it for years. We’ve been trying to increase training. … We’ve been trying to take the technological advancements around the world and import them into the FBI.’ That hasn’t been done. And so we’ve just seen a void in terms of long-range planning at the FBI that all the men and women at the FBI wanted to do, and their leadership wouldn’t let them,” Mr. Patel told Mr. Baier. 

Mr. Patel also provided an update on the FBI’s planned move from the brutalist J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., to a new space that Mr. Patel now says will be in the same city, “right next to our partners at the Department of Justice.”

Addressing accusations that FBI agents were secretly embedded among the protesters during the January 6, 2021, unrest at the Capitol, Mr. Patel said the FBI was “in the process, again, of working with our partners to divulge that information, and it is coming.”

“I will tell you this, the answer to that question will surprise and shock people because of what past FBI leaders have said about it,” Mr. Patel said.

So far, Mr. Patel has granted sit-down interviews to Fox News hosts, including Ms. Bartiromo and Trey Gowdy, something Joe Valiquette, a former FBI spokesman and WNBC correspondent, was quick to point out.

“I would recommend @FBIDirectorKash grant some interviews to other media organizations than just @FoxNews.  Just a thought,” Mr. Valiquette posted on X Wednesday.

A representative for Mr. Patel told the Sun that the FBI director has an interview with a “non-Fox” news show slated for next week.

Mr. Baier asked Mr. Patel for the latest on the January 5 pipe bomber who was caught on camera planting bombs outside the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee headquarters on the eve of the deadly January 6 riot at the Capitol. Mr. Baier played old audio clips from Mr. Bongino, himself a former Fox News host before becoming Mr. Patel’s second in command, in which he insists the FBI knew the identity of the pipe bomber, calling it “an inside job.”

“The FBI, under me and Dan Bongino’s leadership, has re-established … investigations of great public importance that almost blew up the DNC and RNC in Washington, D.C., an area in which then Vice President Harris was in the vicinity of,  is something that needs to be answered. And we learned that FBI leadership in the prior administration slow-rolled and basically shut that investigation off,” Mr. Patel said. 

The FBI currently has “great leads” on the pipe bomber investigation, which Mr. Patel said Mr. Bongino will share more details about during his upcoming appearance on the Fox News program “Fox & Friends” on Thursday morning.