FBI Director Kash Patel gushed about making long distance work with his 27-year-old girlfriend in an interview that dropped as the manhunt for a mass shooting suspect stretched into its third day.
Patel has been under scrutiny for his handling of the investigation into Saturday’s shooting at Brown University, which left two students dead and nine injured. He announced that a “person of interest” was in custody, only for authorities to clear the person in question.
As the search for the unidentified shooter passed the 48-hour mark, conservative podcaster Katie Miller, the wife of President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, posted a clip Monday night of Patel discussing his romance with his country singer girlfriend.
It was not clear when the interview was filmed. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But the mass shooting investigation did not come up in the teaser clip shared by Miller. Instead, the sit-down—which also features Patel’s girlfriend Alexis Wilkins—tackles hard-hitting topics such as when Patel, 45, plans to propose, and why people think Wilkins is an Israeli intelligence agent.
The teaser shows Miller asking Wilkins to clarify if she’s Jewish or from Israel, both of which she responds to in the negative.
“So how did we get to, ‘Are you a Mossad agent?’” Miller asks.
“You know, that’s a great question,” Wilkins replies.
At other points in the interview, Miller turns to Patel and asks, “Where’s her ring?” leading to awkward laughter all around. The couple has been together since January 2023, and Wilkins has been dropping online hints that she’s ready to take the next step.
The clip also shows Miller asking how often Patel has visited Wilkins, who is based in Nashville, Tennessee, since taking over as FBI director, and whether there were any moments that made the couple think, “You can’t make this up.”
The goal was apparently to rehabilitate the couple’s image after Patel repeatedly used taxpayer-funded jet rides to visit his girlfriend, assigned an entire FBI SWAT team to act as her security detail, and ordered the agents protecting her to drive her drunk friend home.
Critics quickly blasted Patel over the timing of the interview.
“There’s a mass shooter still on the loose while Keystone Kash’s defunded FBI can’t catch him. But good to know he’s got time to hop on a taxpayer-funded private jet to record a podcast with his girlfriend,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office wrote in response to the clip.
The bureau released new images Monday of the suspect in Saturday’s shooting, which took place at about 4 p.m. local time inside a university building in Providence, Rhode Island, and said it was offering up to $50,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction.
The suspect is described as a man who is 5 feet 8 inches tall with a stocky build, wearing a black beanie and a face mask.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha told reporters Monday that officials were “learning more about his movements as we gather additional video evidence.” It wasn’t clear yet whether the shooter was still in Providence, Police Chief Oscar L. Perez Jr. said.
The Brown University shooting wasn’t the first time Patel had prematurely announced on social media that a suspect was in custody; he made the same mistake in September after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was murdered on a college campus in Utah.
The suspect in that shooting, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, eventually turned himself in 33 hours after the killing.
The Brown University suspect still had yet to be identified 60 hours after the killing.
On Monday, Trump offered a baffling explanation as to why the FBI had struggled to identify the shooter.
“Well, it’s always difficult. So far, we’ve done a very good job of doing it… they’ve done it in record time,” he said, before trying to shift blame to the university.
“You’d really have to ask the school about that because this was a school problem,” he added. “They had their own guards, their own police, their own everything. But you would have to ask that question to the school and not to the FBI.”
Patel himself, however, wrote on social media that the FBI had launched an “all-out 24/7 campaign” to arrest the shooter.
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