The FBI has reportedly fired an official who had been at the bureau for 27 years, after stories of Kash Patel using an FBI jet to go on a date broke on Wednesday.
Steven Palmer, who joined the bureau in 1998, was deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG) and charged with overseeing its aviation units. His exit was made official on Friday, making him the third CIRG boss to be fired during Patel’s brief tenure, Bloomberg reported.
According to three people familiar with the situation who spoke to Bloomberg, Patel was outraged by articles and social media posts that highlighted his private jet use that skyrocketed this week after a self-styled FBI whistleblower drew attention to his flight logs.
“We’re in the middle of government shutdown where they’re not even gonna pay all of the employees that work for the agency that this guy heads. And this guy is jetting off to hang out with his girlfriend in Nashville on our dime?” Kyle Seraphin, a former FBI agent said on his podcast.
“He flew a $60 million aircraft to go hang out there. Is that gross to anybody else?”
Publicly available data for Patel’s plane shows the plane landing near Penn State on Oct. 25 before flying to Nashville later that evening. A now-deleted photo posted to Instagram by Patel’s girlfriend, country musician Alexis Wilkins, shows the couple attending a Real American Freestyle event at Penn State that evening.
The FBI’s Assistant Director for Public Affairs Ben Williamson posted a lengthy defense of his boss on X on Thursday, calling the criticisms “disingenuous and dumb” and an example of “bad faith whining.”
“This FBI is delivering and it’s because of a great team working incredibly hard with Kash Patel and Dan Bongino at the helm. We have zero time for people who peddle trash because they have nothing better to do,” he wrote in response to a Daily Beast report on the matter.
People familiar with the situation told Bloomberg that Palmer was informed he needed to resign or he would be fired, which the sources claimed was “at least partially connected” to the negative stories about Patel in the press. The Daily Beast has contacted the FBI for comment.
The sources also told Bloomberg they were “baffled” as to why Patel would blame Palmer for the stories. While Palmer’s role involved supervising the FBI’s aviation units, the flight logs are publicly available.
FBI directors are allowed to use government planes for personal travel, and are only required to repay the cost of an economy ticket. Former FBI directors including James Comey and Christopher Wray both faced criticism for improper use of the bureau’s planes.
Patel himself dubbed Wray “#GovernmentGangster” in a 2022 Truth Social post criticizing the former director for “jetting off on our taxpayer dollars”.
With his ouster, Palmer became the third head of the CIRG to be pushed out during Patel’s regime, which only began in late February.
Palmer was made acting leader in August after his predecessor, Brian Driscoll, was fired. Driscoll and other former officials are suing the Trump administration, arguing that they were fired for failing to show sufficient loyalty to President Donald Trump.
A previous head, Wes Wheeler, was caught up in mass firings at the bureau in March and told to resign. Patel has fired countless bureau employees since taking office, including those viewed as the president’s political enemies and those deemed too political.
Earlier this month, one agent was fired after refusing to arrange a “perp walk” photo op for former FBI director James Comey, whose indictment is viewed by many as an act of revenge by the president.
The post Keystone Kash Fires FBI Veteran Over $60M Jet Date Debacle appeared first on The Daily Beast.
