President Donald Trump on Tuesday appeared reluctant to directly endorse the performance of embattled FBI Director Kash Patel when speaking to reporters before departing the White House for London.
Patel, the lawyer and ex-podcaster who was confirmed to run the nation’s premier investigatory agency along party lines earlier this year, has been under fire for what critics say has been his lackluster and bumbling performance in the days since a gunman murdered activist Charlie Kirk in Utah last week.
Numerous Democrats — and some from the president’s own party — have called for Patel to resign or be fired, with some critics noting the poor optics of his decision to reportedly patronize an upscale Italian restaurant in New York within hours of Kirk’s death.
Asked about the director’s performance, Trump declined to directly say he has confidence in Patel but instead immediately pivoted to endorsing Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“First of all, I think that Pam Bondi has done an unbelievable job, and everybody agrees with that,” Trump said.
Trump then offered some qualified praise of Patel, noting that the alleged killer of the Turning Point USA founder was in custody within two days and credited the FBI director for that fact even though it was the alleged killer’s father who turned him in to local law enforcement.
“You know, if you look, take a look at what he did with respect to this horrible person that he just captured. He did it in two days. It took other similar cases, four days, five days, four years. If you look at certain shooters now,” Trump said.
He added that he has confidence in “everybody in the administration, my administration” and suggested that “a lot of people” have said it is “the best administration ever formed.”
Trump’s tepid comments about Patel come after Fox News reported that tensions between Bondi and Patel over the will-they-or-won’t-they back and forth over release of the Epstein files are spilling out into the open, with former Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s appointment as a second FBI Deputy Director seen by some as a move to lay groundwork for Patel’s ouster.
“The White House, Bondi, [deputy Attorney General] Blanche have no confidence in Kash,” one source with knowledge of ongoing personnel discussions told Fox News. “Pam, in particular, cannot stand him. Blanche either.”
He has also been accused by MAGA influencers like Chris Rufo of bungling the Kirk shooting investigation after an embarrassing mixup in which the FBI director falsely stated in the hours immediately following the assassination that a suspect had been apprehended by law enforcement
For his part, Patel was defiant when he appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for an oversight hearing on Tuesday.
In his opening testimony, he told senators he was “honored” to be the bureau’s ninth director and said he was “not going anywhere.”
“If you want to criticize my 16 years of service, please bring it,” he said.
