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Kash Patel’s trip to Milan that coincided with the end of the Winter Olympics is putting the spotlight on taxpayer-funded travel by FBI directors, a practice Patel harshly criticized before he was in government.
Patel’s use of the FBI Gulfstream G550 to travel to Italy became public knowledge last week, and the director was far from circumspect in his activities after arriving.
Videos of the dressing room scene on Sunday after the U.S. men’s hockey team defeated Canada in the gold medal final showed a pumped-up Patel, a hockey fan, drinking beer from a bottle and spraying the rest around players.
Kendall Witner, rapid response director for the Democratic National Committee, said that Patel was “happy to use Americans as a blank cheque to party and get drunk in Italy or visit his girlfriend while everyday Americans are tightening their wallets to get by in Donald Trump’s economy.”
FBI spokesman Ben Williamson said on social media that the trip was not personal in nature, had been planned months ago, would include meetings with a cross-section of officials and was consistent with the FBI’s “major role” in Olympics security.
Patel himself responded on social media late Monday.
“For the very concerned media — 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. Greatest country on earth and greatest sport on earth,” he said.
The White House signalled its backing for Patel, with communications director Steven Cheung writing on X that “Kash was also in Italy meeting with regional partners and security teams.”
‘Required use’ traveller
FBI director travel, and the discretion they have in setting their schedule, was an issue that came to the fore when William Sessions was fired six years into a 10-year term during Bill Clinton’s first term as president.
Sessions was ousted after a scathing 1993 ethics report questioned a host of expenses he had incurred at his home, and with limousine and airplane travel.
Responding to the report, then-attorney general William Barr — who decades later would serve in the same capacity in the first Trump administration — said in a letter to Sessions it was clear the director had arranged “trivial” functions with officials or business people in several cities to justify trips that were really personal in nature.
“Among other things, it is evident that you and your wife used the FBI plane to take personal trips and then sought to characterize these trips as ‘official’ to avoid reimbursing the government,” wrote Barr.
The attorney general made note of 111 occasions where the FBI’s director travelled on the government-provided plane. It wasn’t a hockey trip on the taxpayer dime that caught the media’s attention but rather a Bolshoi ballet performance in Atlantic City, N.J.
Both the FBI director and the attorney general are among U.S. officials considered “required use” travellers. They use government aircraft for their travel — including for personal reasons or “non-mission” flights that don’t include meetings, conferences or visits to field offices — due to security issues and the need to be available for communications from the administration.
If these high-ranking officials use the plane for personal reasons, they are expected to reimburse the government — albeit at a commercial travel rate for the destinations in question.
The Government Accountability Office in 2013 assessed the use of planes by two attorneys general and FBI director Robert Mueller between 2007 and 2011. Some 697 flights were taken, with 38 considered non-mission, at a cost to taxpayers then of $11.4 million US, or $16,355 per flight.
In November, Williamson of the FBI told the Associated Press that Patel consistently reimburses the government.
“He works far more full weekends than he does otherwise. And maybe most importantly — ask anyone who works for him, he’s on duty 24/7 regardless.”
Up until 2011, the FBI director could fly commercial, but the White House issued a directive to end the option, and it hasn’t been changed changed since.
Patel a previous critic of FBI trips
It’s difficult to gauge what would constitute abuse of plane travel. Directors may have residences in different locations — Mueller and James Comey resided near D.C., Christopher Wray in Atlanta and Patel in Las Vegas.
As well, directors may place a different priority level on personal travel to meetings, while the COVID-19 pandemic likely impacted Wray’s air travel.
With respect to Comey, the most controversial plane story involved a power struggle when he was fired.
Comey learned of his May 9, 2017, dismissal by Trump while speaking to agency employees in Los Angeles, and according to multiple accouts and a book later written by Andrew McCabe, his second-in-command at the time, the White House wanted Comey to arrange his own way home on a commercial airline. McCabe, citing security issues, ordered the FBI plane that brought Comey to California be used to bring him back.
Patel on more than one occasion was a harsh critic of Wray when he was outside of government and a frequent guest on conservative media podcasts and cable news outlets.
“Chris Wray doesn’t need a government-funded G-5 jet to go to vacation. Maybe we ground that plane — $15,000 every time it takes off. Just a thought,” he said when appearing on The Glenn Beck Program in 2024.
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri also appeared to harshly judge Wray’s use of the FBI plane, after the director cut short a committee hearing appearance and travelled to a vacation home in New York state.
There is no known record of Hawley criticizing Patel’s use of the plane since 2025, but Democrats have taken note.
“You used a $60 million US government jet for an overnight date with your girlfriend, a Scottish golfing excursion with your buddies, and a trip to a luxury hunting retreat called Boondoggle Ranch,” Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland wrote to Patel in December, when House Democrats were launching a probe of the director’s travel.
It is known Patel travelled to a pro wrestling event in October in Pennsylvania in which his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, performed the national anthem.
Patel’s Italy trip came with the agency busy on a number of fronts. The FBI was called in to help investigate after a man was shot dead at the gate of Trump’s Florida estate on Sunday, and the agency is assisting in the mysterious disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, mother of Today Show host Savannah Guthrie.
Patel’s FBI has also touted its role in helping combat Mexican drug cartels, an issue that has come to the forefront since Friday, when authorities received information about the sought-after head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), leading to an operation that fatally killed the leader and has led to deadly counterattacks across Mexico.
Patel is not the only Trump administration figure to face questions about his use of government resources. Congressional Democrats are also demanding answers from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem about her department’s contract for upgraded jets.
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