Kash Patel: A Profile of the FBI Director Who Couldn't Properly Chug a Locker Room Beer

This feature on our FBI Director begins as most such profiles should, with a SportsCenter style recap of weekend action. On Sunday February 22, 2026, the United States Men's Olympic hockey team closed out the 25th Winter Olympiad held across several venues in Milan-Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy with a thrilling 2-1 "golden goal" victory over their most fearsome rival Team Canada. Jack Hughes earned the victory for the Americans, but most of the credit went to Connor Helleybuyck, who made an array of seemingly impossible close-range stops. His most iconic block will no doubt be a no-look behind the back stick deflection of Jonathan Toews point blank shot across the wide face of the goal, redirecting a certain and likely decisive Canadian goal by merely a half inch.

For the tiniest moment, Americans allowed themselves to rekindle some magic of the famous Miracle on Ice which had taken place precisely 46 years ago to the day. There a group of unheralded college kids, who now present as rotund elderly Trump supporters, lead the United States over the heavily favored professional team fielded by the Soviet Union. Despite the United States hosting the world class National Hockey League, this was only the second time American men stood as gold medalists. (The women it should be noted are like their USWNT soccer and USA Basketball counterparts: world conquering, globe spanning, always champions.)

Even if you were a casual fan or uninitiated happenstance spectator, it was hard not to get momentarily caught up in the patriotism. More so when the players paraded around the unworn 13 jersey intended for teammater Johnny Gaudreau. The Columbus Blue Jacket player was tragically killed by a drunk driver with his brother Matthew while riding bikes the day before their sister's wedding. Who could not feel a pang of emotion for his children huddled among the gargantuan Team USA players gathered in victory on the ICE? But on this auspicious Sunday, America became acquainted with another very serious student of the game.

His name is Kashyap Pramod Patel. Better known as the ninth director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the history of the United States. Director Patel might have been expected to tweet a congratulations while at his office in the nation's capital monitoring numerous crises. But that's bush league. Our FBI Director made sure he was in the stands in Milan, because more than being FBI Director, Kash is America's number one hockey superfan.

Patel was sworn in as FBI Director on February 20, 2025. In the year since taking office he has completely desecrated what was one of the most serious and intentionally dull positions in American law enforcement. I do not say "dull" to say boring. I use the term to indicate the manner in which FBI Directors used to conduct themselves. The public might not even see the FBI Director except for a carefully choreographed press conference or Congressional testimony. Otherwise, this powerful role was virtually invisible to the public. This is because FBI Director is presumed to be a very busy position with many high stakes confidential meetings and virtually no time for leisure. Prior to this year, one's image of the FBI Director was a tired white man in a suit and starched shirt.

Our recent directors, Chris Wray and James Comey were dull men. Not unwise. Not without skill. But men who might not be willing to engage in something as frivolous as filling out a sudoku puzzle because it might imply a penchant for gaming and light diversions. Robert Mueller, the long serving director and he of the eponymous and disappointingly down-played report, was rumored to have been such a martinet that he did not even allow the agents in his leadership team or the field offices to wear anything other than a deep navy suit with a white shirt. He strictly forbid something as ostentatious as a pin-striped or grey suit, blue dress shirts or patterned ties. Mueller bristled at the very idea of such unseemly "show-off behavior" at a place as sober and serious as the FBI.

These are different times and Kash Patel is a different FBI Director. Plucked from the world of online podcasting alongside his pal Dan Bongino, both men were acolytes of Steve Bannon. Kash made a name for himself screaming for hours every day on YouTube about a web of Deep State conspiracies. These so happen to be the same fantasies Trump nursed like a baby bottle during the Biden administration. There is little doubt that during the interregnum, when Trump stomped around Mar-A-Lago seething at the "stolen election" of 2020 and his failed insurrection, he quite enjoyed listening to Kash Patel spin the gobleydegook conspiracies the former President held so near and dear to his heart.

Thus, on January 21, 2025, when Trump ascended the steps of the Capitol he had once tried to burn down, to take the oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States that he despises in his DNA, we should have braced ourselves for the cast of charlatans and incompetents that would become the backbone of his second term revenge tour American Carnage Promised, American Carnage Delivered. Kash was well positioned for some role in the administration. Maybe running the social media accounts. Or some kind of Karoline Leavitt-overseen "White House After Dark" or "Keeping it 1600 with Kash" podcast.

I confess my surprise that just a month later Kash Patel would be sworn in as the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As many suspected, Kash Patel's rank incompetence and obsession with Deep State FBI conspiracies made him the naturally overqualified choice for Donald Trump. The GOP, ever the plush toilet seat for Trump's Golden Throne, never fails to impress me with their shambolic irresponsibility. They confirmed Kash despite having no good reason to do so. If Bob Mueller blanched at the idea of his agents wearing grey wool suits, let him behold this Brave New World. Our FBI Director wears leather pants, lives in Las Vegas, is frequently filmed at the gym, and seems to have an array of tight-fitting camouflaged theme outfits.

Trump's hatred of and paranoia with the FBI has probably existed his entire adult life. After all, this is a man who has credibly been accused of running his family business as a Russian money-laundering operation for decades. The Trump Organization has always been a Matroyshka Doll of shell companies designed to shuttle money around. Back in 2017, as President, Trump was livid to find out that his moronic sons bungled a high stakes election interference meeting to hack into the email communications of his 2016 rival Hillary Rodham Clinton. He practically turned stop-light red when he found out Donald Trump, Jr., his always clumsy namesake had managed to get them all taped on an FBI wiretap engaging in the election conspiracy from the Trump Tower itself.

Thus began the President's take-no-prisoners war on James Comey, then the FBI Director. Comey of course is one of the rarest figures in modern politics because he is loathed in equal measure by all factions of the political spectrum. Trump and his MAGA acolytes are of course enraged that they were caught in a symphony of illegalities run directly out of the Trump Tower. On the left, Comey will always be remembered for revitalizing the bogus investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails one week before election day in 2016, very likely tipping the election to Trump. His interference offered one last minute ready-made Clinton scandal the New York Times was only too glad to plaster above-the-fold in the days leading up to the vote-casting.

It stood to reason that this time around, Trump would try to appoint a genuinely inadequate fool to run the Bureau. He made getting rid of Chris Wray a top goal. Wray, being a Republican, did his expected part and resigned early and barely put up a fight. This is not to say Trump only learned to install patsies in 2025. You'll recall that Trump happened upon Matthew Whittaker whose previous role was selling oversized toilets for men with allegedly large penises. On those qualifications, Trump chose Whittaker to be our Acting Attorney General. (He's now our Ambassador to NATO, because of course). But even with this track record of wanton carelessness, I didn't see Kashyap Pramod Patel storming into the J. Edgar Hoover Building (or more accurately zoom-calling from a Vegas casino every other week) in the role of the top domestic intelligence law enforcement officer in the United States.

There's been one major problem for Kash Patel since he took the reins at the FBI. Patel made a name for himself as a fierce advocate for disclosing the Epstein Files. We may owe Kash a moment of sympathy. After all, he was merely parroting what Donald Trump himself had been clamoring for from the Veneral Versailles he haunted in Palm Beach. Trump was able to howl for the files to be opened because he had been told by his lawyers that they were never going to be made public while the trial of key Epstein conspirator Ghislane Maxwell worked its way through the court system.

Indeed, the DOJ then led by Merrick Garland did not release the files to preserve the guilty verdict that sent Maxwell to prison, while she pursued her longshot appeals. Kash, like an eager puppy, echoed Trump's empty and symbolic calls for the files to be made public, probably in a moment of earnest wonderment about them. He took to the airwaves of his podcast and that of his patron Steve Bannon to call daily for a grand reveal. No doubt Patel and Bongino both thought the Epstein global pedophile and child-rape ring involving elites from politics, business, and society would somehow only implicate the Democrats they ceaselessly demonized on their right-wing manosphere podcasts.

Only at the FBI, Patel and Bongino, suddenly found themselves delaying and slow-walking action on the Epstein Files. It's here that you can glean why Trump brought in Patel. It was a "keep your troublemakers closer" gambit. With Patel at the FBI he could shut him up and prevent him from pushing for the release of Epstein materials. In fact, he could make Patel a ringleader in the coverup itself. Patel and Bongino were caught as flat-footed as Trump's lackey Pam Bondi, our somehow worse-than-toilet-salesman Attorney General.

Bondi famously said she had the Epstein Files on her desk ready to be released, then did a 180-degree pivot and started finding any reason not to touch the radioactive files. All three Trump lackeys found themselves with increasingly murkier orders from their boss to do anything but release the files. Bondi and Patel appeared for Congressionally mandated updates and berated and insulted the various Congressional members while engaging in intentionally theatrical and belligerent distractions when anyone asked them about action on the Epstein files.

Bondi-Bongino-Patel form a sort of Epstein Coverup Three Stooges act. Bondi is a Moe, she seems to understand the full scope of her job to do anything but provide the survivor's justice. Bongino was a Curly-figure, who seemed perpetually on the brink of a nervous breakdown until finally resigning from the Bureau, tearfully complaining to sympathetic ears on the Fox News therapy couch that the job was actually requiring him to do real work. This leaves us with Kash as a sort of Larry. A perpetually brain-fogged, bug-eyed stand in for a real person. A man around whom the chaos seemed to swirl without his direct participation.

Patel also presents as a sort of plastic figurine, which has made AI spoofs of him seem altogether too accurate and real. He usually appears bug-eyed and confused, as though he has ingested too much ketamine, molly, mushrooms or ecstasy and is in the middle of a terrifying trip. One imagines that he must see the faces of the assembled press or the Congressional panels he is called before melting like heated wax into ghoulish shapes. His most consistent act as FBI director has been to always get ahead of the evidence or to disclose sources and methods his agents were trying to keep quiet thus compromising fast moving investigations. Patel embarrassed the Bureau in investigations involving Charlie Kirk's murder as well as a shooting an ICE facility in Dallas where he laughably alleged bullets had been founded inscribed with "ANTI" for Antifa. In the Nancy Guthrie investigation he theatrically dropped into Tucscon, caused a person unrelated to the crime to be detained, and then left as though he was bored with the entire story and wanted to change the channel.

Since becoming FBI Director, in addition to doing absolutely nothing to bring clarity to the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's decades long nightmare of rape and child abuse and generally tripping up high profile real-time investigations, he seems to have made a point to turn the FBI into a personal pleasure piggybank. He picked up a new girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, an aspiring country music singer who lives in Nashville and appears entirely too photogenic to be spending any time with a terrified lumpen creature like Patel. Stories have now emerged of Nashville FBI agents summoned to ferry around Patel's girlfriend on shopping trips, girls' nights out, and to do her daily tasks instead of investigating, you know, federal crimes. Patel has also made prolific use of a private jet to attend Wilkins' concerts and to travel with her on vacations.

It has also seemed all together strange that Kash Patel lives in Las Vegas instead of Washington, D.C., where FBI headquarters is located? Anonymous complaints emerged in the media that Patel was hardly ever seen in the FBI offices, seemingly completely disinterested in leading the ageny's senior ranks. At his first teleconference with all the agency's field directors after his confirmation, he seemingly had no prepared agenda more than "What's up?" Surely, Donald Trump is thrilled that his pick to run the agency is doing exactly what he expected: nothing at all.

So now we find ourselves right back where we started. Kash Patel, our FBI Director, took a taxpayer financed private jet to Milan to watch Olympic hockey. He sneered at the media and the public that his trip was absolutely related to FBI business including meeting his Italian counterparts and reviewing Olympic security preparations. Everyone replied with the blank stare such a transparently ridiculous assertion demanded.

Of course, in the hours after the U.S. Men's hockey team won the gold medal, images emerged of Kash Patel screaming and drinking beer in the locker room with the winning players, all NHL athletes. To Kash's credit, he seemed genuinely happy. For most of his tenure as FBI Director he has appeared terrified and flummoxed. He looks pained wearing a suit. Like a young boy dragged to the wedding of a distant cousin. But here, clad in sports gear and shaking up a beer that he began to chug, he seemed at home. This is what Kash Patel has always been meant to do. Play recreational hockey and get wasted with the boys.

It is to our inconvenience and dismay that we actually pay him to do a very complex job. While Patel was hooting and hollering with the boys and taking a profane call with the President of the United States, Mexican drug cartels had trapped countless Americans in Puerto Vallarta and other Mexican cities during running street battles over the capture and kill of a notorious cartel leader. A high profile case involving the disappearance of NBC Today's Show host Savannah Guthrie's mother had stalled, entering its third week with no credible leads. Oh, and apparently someone tried to kill the President by showing up to his Mar-A-Lago compound with a gun and gas can.

While all these events unfolded, Kash was spraying himself with beer and wearing a gold medal he did not earn. If Patel wants to be the Hype Man for various hockey teams like Team USA or the Vegas Golden Knights, then he should do us all a favor and himself too, and stand down. Let us appoint a tenth FBI Director. He is subjecting our nation to an intolerable embarrassment. The United States is a joke of a country under the autocratic collapse being overseen by President Trump. But this time the joke has gone too far. Patel should resign immediately. Trump can issue him a pardon and spare him the many criminal trials he should face for embezzling FBI assets for his own personal use. He should be gone, that much is clear.

The worst part of Kashyap Pramod Patel's display on Sunday? He couldn't even finish chugging the beer. He ended up spraying it around. That's just bush league. Not the kind of brass you have to have to be Hockey-Superfan-FBI Director. Resign, Kash. You spilled the beer you were supposed to guzzle. Lace up your skates, hit the rink for some ice time with the boys, and grab a cold beer or eleven afterwards. Leave leading the most complex domestic intelligence service in the world for someone else who might accidentally disappoint the President by doing the job.