Is Kash Patel up to the job?

The morning after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, FBI Director Kash Patel stood in a Utah conference room, the state’s Governor Spencer Cox looking appropriately somber behind him, and uttered these words:

“To my friend Charlie Kirk, rest now, brother. We have the watch. And I’ll see you at Valhalla.”

A Hindu speaking to a dead Christian in front of a Mormon governor, none of them soldiers, invoking a mythical heaven for Norse warriors: ain’t that America? Yet beyond the absurd and harmless cognitive dissonance, there is a more serious question: does Kash Patel actually “have the watch?”

If the Kirk assassination really does demark a new Days of Rage, and if President Trump is serious about labeling antifa a terrorist organization, today’s FBI needs to be up to the job. In the Kirk case, they had their suspect within thirty-three hours. As Patel pointed out in testimony to Congress the following week, it took five days to find the Boston bomber and five days to catch Luigi Mangione.

But there were still mistakes leading up to Tyler Robinson’s arrest. On the evening of the assassination, Patel announced on X that “the subject for the horrific shooting today that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody.” The FBI had someone in custody to be certain, but it wasn’t the shooter. Two hours later Patel had to tweet that a 71-year-old man named George Zinn, who later said that he confessed to distract from the actual shooter but also revealed that he had child porn on his phone, had been “released after an interrogation by law enforcement.”

The situation deteriorated before improving. The morning after the shooting, Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino convened agents in Salt Lake City and chewed them out for taking nearly twelve hours to show him a photo of Tyler Robinson. He called their efforts “Mickey Mouse operations,” and, the New York Times said, “it was one of his few utterances without profanity.” By that evening, Patel was offering, profanity-free, a $100,000 reward for information leading to Kirk’s killer’s arrest. Appearing on Fox and Friends the Monday after the assassination, Patel said that the FBI had evidence, including the alleged killer’s messages.

“The suspect wrote a note saying, ‘I have the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I’m going to take it.’ That note was written before the shooting.” Robinson had destroyed the note but the FBI had reconstructed it, “because of our aggressive interview posture.” By Tuesday, we were all reading Robinson’s confession to his lover and roommate online. Patel had his man.

Patel was a controversial FBI pick from the jump. He joined the federal government as a Department of Justice staffer during the Obama administration but left the DOJ to work for Trump loyalist Congressman Devin Nunes. Patel was the primary author of the “Nunes Memo,” which argued, among other things, that the FBI had over-relied on the Steele Dossier in its attempt to prove that Russia had interfered on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 election. This proved Patel’s MAGA bona fides and helped win him a seat on the National Security Council. Toward the end of his first term, Trump said that he intended to make Patel the deputy director of the CIA, an action that caused then-director Gina Haspel to threaten to resign.

If the Kirk assassination really does demark a new Days of Rage, and if President Trump is serious about labeling antifa a terrorist organization, today’s FBI needs to be up to the job.

After Trump lost in 2020, Patel wandered a bit in the wilderness, publishing three children’s books and joining the board of the Trump Media & Technology Group. He hosted a streaming show called Kash’s Corner on a Falun Gong-run streaming service and filled in for Steve Bannon on War Room when Bannon went to jail. He also worked as a consultant for a company, based in the Cayman Islands, that operates the e-commerce platform Shein.

Given his typically bizarre Trumpian résumé, a partisanly divided Congress narrowly confirmed Patel in February. Soon afterwards, he announced he would transfer 500 FBI agents to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, which didn’t happen. Then he said he would shift the bureau’s operations to his home in Nevada, which also didn’t happen, and that he would partner with the Ultimate Fighting Championship to change the bureau’s fitness test. Trump briefly named Patel the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Patel rarely appeared at the ATF offices and by April someone else had the job.

But all of that was background chatter until the Kirk assassination placed Patel square in the klieg lights. His endlessly meme-able face wasn’t just a comic sideshow anymore.

Even as the investigation into Kirk’s murder continued, Patel headed to DC for congressional hearings into his dismissal of several prominent agents, including, controversially, the senior agent of the Utah field office. Patel played his partisan bulldog role at the hearing, calling California’s Adam Schiff “the biggest fraud to ever sit in the United States Senate” and “a political buffoon at best.” New Jersey’s Cory Booker was in full schoolmarm mode.

“Mr. Patel, I think you’re not going to be around long. I think this might be your last oversight hearing,” Booker said. “Donald Trump has shown us in his first term, and in this term, he is not loyal to people like you. He will cut you loose.”

That’s not likely. Trump is proving much more loyal to his appointees in his second regency. Patel may be the most eccentric person to hold his office since the first (and most powerful), J. Edgar Hoover. But with the swift, if somewhat chaotic, capture of Robinson – which was helped along by the suspect’s family – the ninth FBI director delivered a return on Trump’s investment. As long as he stops preemptively tweeting, he might stick around. Discretion is at least half the job.