About four hours after the right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk was assassinated by an unknown shooter at Utah Valley University Wednesday, FBI Director Kash Patel posted a picture of himself with Kirk on his personal X account. The undated photo shows the two men grinning, apparently about to tape Kirk’s daily livestream show; Patel wears a branded shirt with his own name on it, styled as K$H. Roughly five minutes later, Patel’s official FBI account published another post on X, this time announcing the good news that the suspected shooter was already in custody. Then, an hour and a half later, that account posted again—alerting the public that the suspect “has been released after an interrogation by law enforcement.” The killer remains at large.
Prominent MAGA-aligned influencers on X were not amused by the initial mistake. “Why is the @FBI speculating like everyone not in the know?” demanded Joe Biggs, a leader of the Proud Boys who was sentenced to 17 years in prison for his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. (President Donald Trump commuted his sentence.) “Stop all the click bait shit you keep doing,” he wrote.
Kyle Seraphin, a former FBI agent turned right-wing internet personality after losing his job at the bureau during the Biden administration, put it this way: “These two posts are the most embarrassing thing I have seen from a FBI Director.” X commenters demanded in droves that Patel work more quickly to find the shooter.
Typically, the FBI waits until it’s certain before making announcements. It also doesn’t normally provide quick successive updates midway through a sensitive investigation before abruptly backtracking. But, as the photo with Kirk suggests, Patel is not a typical FBI director. He posted his way into the job—moving from roles as a congressional staffer and national-security aide in the first Trump administration to a career as a pro-Trump influencer who sold MAGA children’s books and called for purges at the FBI to “defeat the Deep State.” Now he’s posting through it. After becoming director, according to a recent lawsuit filed by fired FBI officials, he put a twist on challenge coins—a common token in the national-security bureaucracy—by having an oversize coin made that read DIRECTOR KA$H PATEL. Patel’s handling of the early stages of the Kirk investigation is a reminder that the skill set required to succeed as an influencer is not the same as what is required to effectively run the FBI. It’s not just amateur hour at the FBI, but influencer hour.
Kirk’s horrifying murder is the latest escalation in a disturbing uptick in American political violence. In June, a shooter killed Minnesota State Senator Melissa Hortman and her husband and attempted to kill another lawmaker and his family as well. In April, an arsonist firebombed the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro after Shapiro’s Passover seder. (No one was hurt.) These attacks followed the 2024 assassination attempt against Trump on the campaign trail. Judges, meanwhile, have expressed increasing concern about the rise in threats against them in recent years. This level of fear is poisonous to a democracy. It is in the best interests of everyone for Kirk’s killer to be swiftly apprehended and brought to justice.
In this long chain of attacks, Kirk’s murder seems to be the first to be fully refracted through the hall of mirrors that is today’s influencer culture: Not just the victim, but also the victim’s fans and allies, the president he built his career supporting, and now the people leading the agency investigating his death are or were people who cannot stop posting. Over the course of his decade-long career, Kirk himself helped write the playbook that many right-wing figures now use to thrive in a frenetic, adversarial media ecosystem. Almost immediately, graphic videos of his murder circulated on X and other social-media platforms. In one video, an influencer who had been attending Kirk’s event films bystanders fleeing from the shooting while repeatedly shouting out his TikTok handle.
Shocking events without immediate explanations tend to generate collaborative, public efforts to sort through evidence and try to figure out what happened, a process that the academic Kate Starbird calls “collective sensemaking.” In Kirk’s case, that online process spun into conspiracy theorizing nearly instantly. The identity and motivation of the shooter remain unknown, but MAGA influencers nevertheless rapidly adopted the consensus that the assassin had been aligned with the political left, an idea promoted by Trump as well. Others theorized baselessly, in an anti-Semitic twist typical of the far right, that perhaps Israel was responsible.
If the influencer’s job is to baselessly theorize, creating content to feed the internet’s gaping maw, then the job of federal law-enforcement agencies is to exercise restraint and provide reliable information about what is actually going on. When the FBI gets out ahead of itself, things often don’t end well. Consider, for example, FBI Director James Comey’s ill-fated 2016 announcement that he was choosing not to recommend charges against Hillary Clinton after the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s email server, which helped spark a frenzy of speculation and dragged the FBI into exactly the political morass that Comey was seeking to avoid. After Patel posted that the initial suspect in Kirk’s shooting had been released, one former FBI official texted me a photo of Richard Jewell, the Atlanta security guard who suffered from intense public scrutiny after leaks that the FBI suspected him of having planted pipe bombs during the 1996 Olympics. (Jewell was innocent.) The incident proved to be an enormous and lasting embarrassment for the bureau.
Patel’s X posts were practically a model of what not to do. They created confusion among the public and potentially among law-enforcement officers as well—which could undercut the effectiveness of an urgent and fast-moving investigation. They could also risk undermining trust in the FBI’s work. The next time Patel announces that someone is in custody, will people believe him? “Can’t overstate the incompetence,” one federal law-enforcement officer told The Atlantic. “The guy is a click-bait chaser and that is no way to conduct comms in the initial chaotic phase of an incident.”
Theoretically, Patel could simply stop posting, keep his head down, and let the FBI do the important work of finding the killer. But he and his deputy, the conservative podcaster Dan Bongino, have built their reputations as right-wing firebrands, and they seem desperate to stay in MAGA’s good graces. (Bongino, too, posted a photo of himself with Kirk, writing, “We will not rest.”) Both men found themselves struggling over the summer to convince influencers that Jeffrey Epstein really had killed himself, threatening their standing with the MAGA faithful, after having pushed conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death before they entered the government. Just hours before Kirk’s death, a group of fired FBI agents filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that the two leaders—Patel and Bongino—had repeatedly made personnel decisions on the basis of angry social-media posts by MAGA influencers. One agent noted Bongino’s “intense focus on increasing online engagement through his social media profiles”—which, the agent worried, could “risk outweighing more deliberate analyses of investigations.”
Yesterday, the right-wing podcaster Stephen Crowder posted what he claimed was an internal bulletin from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reporting that law enforcement had found bullet casings engraved with “transgender and anti-fascist ideology”—in line with the theories promoted by other MAGA influencers. The Wall Street Journal reported the claim. Soon thereafter, The New York Times reported that the bulletin “had not been verified by ATF analysts” and “did not match other summaries of the evidence,” and the Journal later backtracked as well. Crowder’s update wasn’t helpful either to public understanding of the investigation or, likely, to the investigation itself, but it got clicks. It was, to paraphrase a meme from the 2016 election, “tremendous content.” The general public, meanwhile, still does not know what is true.
Patel has presided over a bureau that is strapped for resources and hemorrhaging expertise. According to a recent analysis by the Cato Institute, roughly one in five FBI agents has been shifted from their previous position to aiding ICE with immigration enforcement, a change that can’t help but affect the FBI’s ability to carry out other crucial work. It’s far too early to say whether this shake-up will turn out to have degraded the bureau’s ability to find Kirk’s killer, or to have prevented the shooting from occurring in the first place. But the agency is not in fighting form.
This July, I spoke at length with Michael Feinberg, a former FBI agent (and a friend) who was pushed out of the bureau over his friendship with a critic of Trump. “We are in the cosplay era of the FBI,” he told me then. Now the cosplayers have found themselves at the head of an agency charged with solving a real crime. Yesterday afternoon, Patel and Bongino headed to Utah—according to The New York Times, with plans to “more directly oversee” the search for Kirk’s killer. At a press conference later in the evening, Patel stood next to the podium as Utah Governor Spencer Cox gently suggested that onlookers remain wary of rumors on social media.
Isaac Stanley-Becker contributed reporting.
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