FBI Director Kash Patel spent more time watching Olympic ice hockey than attending actual meetings while he was in Italy, according to a leaked itinerary of his four-day trip.
Patel’s team has insisted that the point of his taxpayer-funded trip to Milan—where he was busted partying with the U.S. Men’s Hockey team Sunday in their locker room after they won gold—was to conduct official bureau business, including helping oversee security at the Olympics.
His spokesperson shared photos of him visiting the Joint Operations Center at the U.S. Consulate in Milan on Saturday, nothing that it was Patel’s fourth public official event since his arrival in Italy on Thursday night.
But an unclassified itinerary leaked to The New York Times shows that while Patel did in fact attend six public meetings and two classified ones, the start and stop times indicate he only spent “several hours” total at the official events, the Times reported.
For example, his visit to the operations center was only scheduled to last 30 minutes, while a briefing with the Olympic security team was expected to take 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, the two hockey games that Patel attended in Milan—Friday’s semi-finals match against Slovakia and Sunday’s finals against Canada—lasted nearly six and a half hours total.
After Team USA beat Canada in overtime, Patel joined the players in the locker room to chug beer, pound his fists, thump the table, try on a gold medal, and sing along to Toby Keith’s post-9/11 anthem “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.”
The itinerary, which was distributed to federal agencies responsible for staffing events, raises questions about whether Patel squeezed in some personal time on the margins of a business trip, as he claims, or whether he sprinkled in a few official events to justify flying half-way around the world to watch his favorite sport.
“Director Patel had highly productive meetings in Italy focused on strengthening joint counterterrorism coordination, transnational crime enforcement, the extradition of high value targets and Olympic security planning with our closest allies,” Patel’s spokesperson Ben Williamson told the Times.
He also said the leaking of the itinerary was a “criminal act that jeopardizes security.”
The Daily Beast has also reached out to the FBI for comment.
Notably, Patel waited until the second-to-last day of the Olympics to meet with the security teams in Milan, weeks after their operations had begun.
According to the itinerary, Patel landed in Rome on Thursday night and had a late dinner with the U.S. Ambassador to Italy, billionaire Tilman Feritta.
The next day, he spent an hour meeting with the head of Italy’s domestic security agency, signed a cybersecurity agreement and posed for photos with the country’s chief of police, went for an aperitivo at the Interior Ministry, and attended “several ceremonial events” before flying to Milan for the hockey semi-finals, according to the Times.
The next day, Saturday, he spent just 50 minutes in security meetings, then set aside four and a half hours in the afternoon for “personal and cultural activities.”
He also had a private lunch and a private dinner with unspecified guests, which could have been work-related. Even so, the biggest chunk of his day was dedicated to leisure time.
On Sunday, Patel’s schedule listed only the 7 p.m. hockey finals, followed by his 4,000-mile flight back to the U.S., according to the Times.
The trip comes at a loaded time as the FBI is dealing with several high-profile cases, including the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, a gunman who breached the perimeter of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, and a wave of cartel violence in Mexico that is forcing Americans to shelter-in-place.
Critics have also pointed out that Patel made a habit of criticizing his predecessors for their taxpayer-funded travel, only to repeatedly blur the lines between his personal life and professional duties.
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