A former FBI director has blown up Kash Patel’s excuse for taking a taxpayer-funded trip to the Milan Cortina Olympics.
Patel’s team has insisted that the point of his four-day trip to Italy—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 Winter Games.
“That explanation is just patently ridiculous,” former director Andrew McCabe told Anderson Cooper during Wednesday’s edition of 360 on CNN.
“I can tell you from having been involved in overseeing the FBI‘s deployment of assets to help secure foreign Olympics, those decisions, those meetings—particularly ones that would require the involvement of the FBI director—they took place a year ago,” he added.
None of those meetings are taking place the second-to-last night of the Olympic Games, McCabe said.
Patel flew to Rome on Thursday night and spent several hours on Friday and Saturday attending meetings with Italian officials and the U.S. security team in Milan.
He spent considerably more time—about six and a half hours—watching the U.S. Men’s Hockey team take on Slovakia and Canada, according to a leaked itinerary of the trip.
After Team USA beat Canada in overtime on Sunday night, 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.”
“We can see why he went,” McCabe said as Cooper played a video of the locker room antics. “That’s what he was there for.”
McCabe, a former special agent and SWAT team specialist who served as acting FBI director during Donald Trump’s first term in office, said that every analyst and agent who joins the FBI is told on their first day to never do anything that will embarrass the Bureau.
“That performance was an embarrassment,” McCabe said, adding that while everyone is happy about the team’s win, Patel’s optics were “terrible.”
“It sends a terrible message to FBI people that in this time of crisis—maybe on the verge of hostilities with Iran, we have an extended high-profile missing persons case in the case of the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie—that’s where he chooses to be at taxpayer expense,” he said.
Patel had previously criticized his predecessor, Chris Wray, for using the FBI’s private jets to travel, which is required by law so that the director always has access to secure communications.
Since taking office, he has come under fire for his own private jet use, including using taxpayer dollars to go on a date night in Pennsylvania, fly his girlfriend back to Nashville, and attend other sporting events.
According to McCabe, previous FBI directors were far more discerning with their personal travel than Patel has been. The fact that despite the criticism Patel then took a high-profile trip to the Olympics reflected poorly on his judgment, he said.
“It shows a lack of judgment and that that is very concerning,” he said. “It should concern Americans as to how that poor judgment is affecting his performance as director in many other ways.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the FBI for comment.
The post Keystone Kash Lashed for ‘Patently Ridiculous’ Olympic Antics by FBI Insider appeared first on The Daily Beast.
