A former FBI boss has claimed that the bureau’s director Kash Patel has been spotted in nightclubs more regularly than he has been seen at work.
Former counter-intelligence official Frank Figliuzzi said on Morning Joe Friday that President Donald Trump’s man is a bit of an anomaly in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C.
He has however been spotted elsewhere, according to Figliuzzi, who was appointed as assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division by Robert Mueller in 2011.
“Reportedly, he’s been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building,” Figliuzzi told Morning Joe co-host Jonathan Lemaire.
“And there are reports that daily briefings to him have been changed from every day to maybe twice weekly.”
Figliuzzi added that the lesser-spotted Patel has been splitting his time between D.C. and his home in Las Vegas.
“So this is both a blessing and a curse, because if he’s really trying to run things without his experience, without any experience level, things could be bad. If he’s not plugged in, things could be bad. But he’s allowing agents to run things so we don’t know where this is going,” he said.
He said that the FBI is “chaos” behind the scenes. “But the one word that keeps coming back at me from inside is that the building is chaos,” he told Lemaire.
“People don’t know what’s happening from day to day. There’s also been reporting, I believe, from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, that Patel spent a lot of his time at his home in Las Vegas—he’s been sort of working remotely for at least part of the week.”
It comes as some Senate Democrats call for a probe into Patel’s use of government aircraft, particularly the FBI’s private fleet of jets, according to CBS, citing sources.
If they get their way, the U.S. Government Accountability Office will look into the reason behind Patel’s trip, how much they cost the bureau and whether or not he paid the agency back for personal trips.
Patel, meanwhile, has used polygraph tests to try to identify the sources of alleged “leaks” to the news media from his agency, The Washington Post reported.
“The seriousness of the specific leaks in question precipitated the polygraphs, as they involved potential damage to security protocols at the bureau,” an FBI spokesperson confirmed to the Post.
The polygraphs are part of an administration-wide effort to clamp down on dissent, sources told the Post.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the FBI for comment on Figliuzzi’s clubbing claims.
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