analysis
The FBI director is also facing criticism over his handling of the Epstein files
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FBI Director Kash Patel is coming under fire for his handling of high-profile investigations ( Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Not long ago, Kash Patel was a hero to MAGA world. A Trump loyalist, former Fox News regular and podcaster fluent in grievance politics, Patel was supposed to be the man who would finally bend the FBI to the will of a movement that spent years insisting the bureau was hostile to conservatives. Less than a year after his appointment as director, the same right-wing media ecosystem that once elevated Patel is increasingly turning on him — mocking his missteps and, in some cases, openly calling him a liar.
Patel’s tenure has been marked by a pattern of premature announcements and theatrical incompetence. Under his leadership, the FBI has lost significant institutional expertise.
Patel’s tenure has been marked by a pattern of premature announcements and theatrical incompetence. Under his leadership, the FBI has lost significant institutional expertise. About 3,063 FBI employees reportedly left the bureau in 2025, according to data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Of those who remain, roughly 1,000 special agents and others are said to be focused on redacting materials related to the Epstein files. A leaked internal FBI document from December revealed agents describing the bureau under Patel as “dismal,” “all f****d up” and a “rudderless ship,” concluding the director is “in over his head.”
The FBI’s investigation into Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance isn’t helping Patel brighten MAGA’s dimming view of his leadership. The 84-year-old mother of “Today” show co-host Savannah Guthrie was reported missing on Feb. 1 after failing to show up at a friend’s house, where they had planned to livestream their church’s service. This week Patel went on Fox News’ “Hannity” to boast that the FBI was investigating “persons of interest” and that “substantial progress” had been made. Hours later, authorities detained delivery driver Carlos Palazuelos during a traffic stop in Tucson. He was questioned and released the same day without charges.
“It was terrifying,” he told reporters, visibly shaken. “I felt like I was being kidnapped, bro.” On the same day the FBI detained Palazuelos, the bureau released black-and-white surveillance footage from Guthrie’s doorstep showing a masked figure wearing gloves, carrying a backpack and disabling her door camera — with a holstered pistol clearly visible. Nearly two weeks since Guthrie’s apparent abduction, law enforcement still hasn’t apprehended a suspect.
On Friday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that she had spoken with Patel and that the “full resources and weight of the federal government” were on the ground in Arizona. For days, Donald Trump has suggested answers were coming soon. At his press conference in Tucson this week, Patel opened by crediting Trump for improved cooperation with public sectors.
But the lack of progress in the investigation is causing right-wing media apparatus to turn its gaze inward.
The conservative One America News Network aired a debunked report on Friday claiming the Pima County Sheriff’s Department had refused to cooperate with Patel’s FBI. Candace Owens, who called for Patel to “step down” after revelations that he was using his legal team to support lawsuits filed by his girlfriend, suggested the director was complicating the Guthrie investigation. “Goes without saying that there is something wrong with the Savannah Guthrie story,” Owens wrote on X. “The issue is it’s Arizona which is a political cartel. And Kash Patel is racing over there to play hero.”
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The director has made a habit of being careless with high-profile investigations. In September, mere hours after Charlie Kirk was killed, Patel prematurely announced a suspect had been apprehended — only to have to backtrack when authorities had taken the wrong man into custody. He repeated the mistake in December, touting how the FBI had detained a person of interest in the shooting at Brown University who was later cleared of any connection to the deadly crime.
As if Patel’s blunders in these cases and the Guthrie investigation weren’t damaging enough, his handling of the Epstein files may prove his ultimate undoing with the MAGA base.
This week, the director’s previous testimony to Congress that the FBI had “no credible information” that Epstein had trafficked young women for anyone but himself — a claim that looked increasingly absurd as more Justice Department documents were released — came back to bite him.
“Everyone in the world now knows that there was 100% a human trafficking operation where Jeffrey Epstein was procuring girls for wealthy and powerful people. Everybody knows that,” conservative podcast host Tim Dillon said, dedicating a portion of his latest podcast to torching Patel as a “big fat liar” and calling on him to resign. The takedown earned praise from Joe Rogan, who voted for Trump and called Dillon the “greatest ranter that has ever lived.”
MAGA antagonist Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., directly accused Patel of lying to Congress about the Epstein files. “Kash Patel testified to Congress that FBI had no evidence of other sex traffickers,” Massie wrote on X. “This is FBI’s own 2019 document listing [Leslie] Wexner as coconspirator in child sex trafficking.” (Notably, Ghislaine Maxwell is currently serving 20 years in federal prison for sex trafficking in coordination with Epstein.)
Over the past year, right-wing media had been learning a hard lesson: that the institutions it spent years attacking don’t magically become infallible when they are run by loyalists. Some MAGA influencers are realizing — far too late — that competence does, in fact, matter. The chaos and dysfunction at the Justice Department and the FBI is proof that politicization and job turnover serve to hollow out institutions that demand experience and credibility to function. You can’t run the FBI like a podcast segment or a Twitter thread.
MAGA may be turning on Patel now, but they created him, and they celebrated his appointment. His shambolic leadership exposes the bankruptcy of their “burn it down” approach to institutional reform. Most ironically, Kash Patel’s FBI is a case study in why qualifications matter.
