Even the FBI’s own informants are demanding to know what is happening inside the bureau as Kash Patel’s chaotic tenure lurches from one embarrassment to the next.
That jaw-dropping detail was shared by reporter Daniel Edward Rosen, who cited a law enforcement source as saying that an FBI agent had been contacted by one of his criminal sources after footage of Patel’s Olympic locker-room party went viral.
“What the f— is going on at the FBI?” the informant reportedly demanded, Rosen said in a post on X.
The same question—without the profanity—has allegedly been circulating within the bureau itself for months, causing Patel, 45, to be dubbed “Keystone Kash” after a string of blunders that have rattled his agents and alarmed observers.
His latest very public boo-boo came last Sunday in Milan, Italy. Having flown to Europe on the bureau’s Gulfstream jet—ostensibly for meetings with Italian law enforcement, the U.S. ambassador, and FBI Legal Attaché staff—Patel appeared in the Team USA men’s hockey locker room after their victory over Canada to claim gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Videos on social media showed Patel swigging from a beer bottle, thumping a table, and allowing forward Matthew Tkachuk to drape a gold medal around his neck while the group belted out the late Toby Keith’s MAGA anthem “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.”
At one point, footage appeared to show Patel cracking open a fresh can of beer directly beside the speaker of his phone, through which teetotal President Donald Trump,79, was congratulating the team.
The trip’s official justification then began to unravel. FBI spokesman Ben Williamson had insisted the previous week, when it was first reported that Patel had boarded the agency’s jet for Italy, that it was not a personal trip.
But when the locker-room footage emerged, eight former FBI and Justice Department officials subsequently sent the footage to MS NOW, noting it was “drawing outrage” in their circles.
Patel eventually addressed his critics in a statement on X. “For the very concerned media,” he wrote in the early hours of Monday, “yes, I love America and was extremely humbled when my friends, the newly minted Gold Medal winners on Team USA, invited me into the locker room to celebrate this historic moment with the boys.”
But current and retired agents saw the video as the behavior of a man more devoted to the perks of the job than to its responsibilities.
The real-world backdrop to the party footage made it worse. FBI investigators appear to have made no progress in the case of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of NBC Today host Savannah Guthrie, who has been missing for more than three weeks.
A Mexican military operation that killed Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes—the head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel—sparked widespread violence and shelter-in-place orders for Americans in Mexico.
The same day, an armed intruder, Austin Tucker Martin, 21, was shot dead by Secret Service agents after breaching the perimeter of Donald Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago. Martin was carrying a shotgun and a gas can while Patel watched hockey from a VIP box inside the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena.
The optics problem is compounded by the scale of the institutional crisis Patel has presided over.
As Rosen, a senior investigative reporter for The New York Sun, reported, Patel is under pressure to recruit 700 new agents to fill the void left by the many sacked, pressured out, or driven to quit since Trump’s return to power. A large proportion, Rosen noted, were veterans of criminal probes into Trump during the Biden years.
To plug the gap, the FBI announced in September that selected criminal investigators from other federal agencies could attend a condensed version of agent training at Quantico. This has drawn criticism from former senior agents.
Patel’s nickname, a dig at the bumbling Keystone Kops of silent-movie fame, was cemented by a run of high-profile fiascos.
They included hours after right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was shot dead at Utah Valley University in September, Patel announcing on X that “the subject for the horrific shooting… is now in custody,” only to post less than two hours later that the suspect had been released.
He then repeated the feat during the FBI’s investigation into a mass shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, triumphantly publicizing the detention of a person of interest, only for Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha to announce the same evening that the evidence “now points in a different direction.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the FBI for comment.
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