FBI Director Kash Patel suffered through a series of embarrassing malfunctions as he appeared on Fox News to heap praise on the Trump administration’s Venezuela operation.
The conspiracy theorist and former podcaster spoke with Fox & Friends on Monday morning about President Donald Trump’s lightning invasion of Venezuela over the weekend to successfully capture the country’s despotic ruler, Nicolas Maduro.
Staff at the Fox News studio seemed on the backfoot from the very start, with one employee heard screaming over a radio, “Guys, you cannot be adjusting his light!” as Patel tried to talk about Saturday night’s shocking raid.
The radio then continued to sound out as Patel gushed about the role played by the FBI in Maduro’s seizure.
Dubbed “Keystone Kash” over what critics describe as his bumbling oversight of several high-profile investigations, Patel then suffered a further indignity.
Rounding off the segment, host Brian Kilmeade attempted to ask the FBI director if he thought Dan Bongino, who leaves office Monday as Patel’s deputy director, had done “a great job.”
Unfortunately for Patel, the studio apparently cut him off before Kilmeade had even finished his sentence.
The Daily Beast reached out to the network to clarify what technical difficulties may have prevented Patel from answering.
“The LiveU van operator mistakenly had his phone on speaker during the live shot and was picked up on Patel’s mic,” a spokesperson said.
Both gaffes were conspicuously absent from an extract of the interview shared by Patel on X later in the morning.
Bongino’s departure comes after less than a year on the job. In that time, the FBI has faced repeated backlash over its handling of a number of high-profile probes—from the manhunt for far-right activist Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer to the release of heavily redacted new documents on the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted pedophile and one-time associate of Trump.
Formerly a key proponent of conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein’s crimes and death, Bongino has not publicly given a reason for his resignation beyond saying it was “the honor of a lifetime” to serve Trump alongside Patel.
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