After FBI Director Kash Patel incorrectly announced that law enforcement had caught the person responsible for assassinating right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk — a declaration that was quickly, and embarrassingly, walked back — even some of the Trump administration’s biggest cheerleaders were fed up.
Joe Biggs, a Proud Boys leader who helped lead the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and had his 17-year prison sentence commuted by President Donald Trump after he was convicted of seditious conspiracy, asked why the head of the FBI was “speculating” instead of putting out authoritative information.
“Stop all this click bait shit you keep doing,” Biggs wrote on X, tagging Patel. “It’s unbecoming of the office in which you represent and only proves you were a horrible pick for this position.”
Kyle Seraphin, a right-wing former FBI agent and occasional Patel critic, didn’t hold back, either.
“FBI director fucked up and is desperate for a win,” Seraphin wrote. “This is absolutely ridiculous.”
“It was amateur hour. He was doing a running commentary. Historically, the FBI keeps its mouth closed until it believes it’s the right time and the right message.”
– Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)
The far-right criticism echoes what Democrats had said about Patel, who became a right-wing entrepreneur and podcaster after serving in the first Trump administration, back when Senate Republicans confirmed him to his position in February.
“After meeting with Mr. Patel, reviewing his record, and questioning him at his hearing, I am convinced that he has neither the experience, the judgment, nor the temperament to lead the FBI,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said at the time.
After Kirk was shot in the neck while speaking for his “American Comeback Tour” at Utah Valley University in Orem, chaos erupted. Students ran for their lives while local law enforcement and university police scrambled to contain the area and find the suspect who had fired a fatal gunshot at the 31-year-old executive director of Turning Point USA.
Kirk was shot around 2:20 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, and by 2:53 p.m. Eastern, Patel had announced that the FBI was monitoring reports of the shooting and promised agents would be on the scene quickly.
Right after Kirk was shot, photos flooded social media of Utah police appearing to arrest an older man from the scene. Utah police would later reveal that the man was a 71-year-old local with a reputation of being a “political gadfly,” according to the Salt Lake Tribune. He was charged with obstruction of justice. A second person of interest was also detained, questioned and released.
Neither man, according to the Utah Department of Public Safety, had any ties to the shooting.
Left: Benjamin Hanson / Middle East Images via AFP; Right: AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana
Then, at 6:21 p.m. Eastern, Patel announced on X that the “subject for the horrific shooting today that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody.”
The post garnered nearly 35 million views on the social media site.
But within minutes of Patel’s declaration on X, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) spoke at a press conference and said only that a “person of interest” had been taken into custody. Utah Public Safety Commissioner Beau Mason told reporters at that same conference that Kirk’s shooter was, in fact, still “at large.”
It was 7:59 p.m. Eastern — a little more than an hour after his first post — when Patel took to X again. And this time, without acknowledging his error in proclaiming that Kirk’s killer was in custody, the FBI director simply stated that a “subject in custody” had been released after being interrogated.
“Our investigation continues and we will continue to release information in interest of transparency,” he wrote.
Patel never clarified whether the person he was referring to was either of the two men who had been questioned, or someone else entirely.
Historically, critical updates in high-profile cases aren’t unveiled scattershot by an FBI director on social media. Updates for an active probe typically come from local police who, oftentimes, will work in partnership with local or regional law enforcement agencies, including regional FBI offices.
“It was amateur hour,” Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the Justice Department, told HuffPost on Thursday. “He was doing a running commentary. Historically, the FBI keeps its mouth closed until it believes it’s the right time and the right message.”
The FBI and DOJ did not return HuffPost’s requests for comment on Thursday.
At a press conference on Thursday morning in Utah, FBI officials said they believed they had located the weapon used to kill Kirk. They also located “footwear impression, a palm print and forearm imprints for analysis.”
Patel’s stewardship of the FBI had already been called into question on Wednesday when three former senior FBI officials filed a lawsuit alleging they’d been fired by Patel for purely political reasons, including their work prosecuting Jan. 6 rioters. The lawsuit went into detail about how Patel commissioned an especially large “challenge coin” to give subordinates, inscribed with “Ka$h Patel,” and how he had an extensive whiskey and cigar collection in his office.
“Patel not only acted unlawfully but deliberately chose to prioritize politicizing the FBI over protecting the American people,” former FBI officials Brian Driscoll, Steven Jensen and Spencer Evans said in their complaint against Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The former officials described themselves as exactly the sorts of professionals the FBI needed to counter a complicated public threat. They accused Patel of having “degraded the country’s national security by firing three of the FBI’s most experienced operational leaders, each of them experts in preventing terrorism and reducing violent crime.”