Kash Patel Parties With US Olympic Hockey Team Like World's Most Try-Hard Fraternity Pledge
Does the FBI Director not have more important things to do?
The thing we love most about Donald Trump’s presidency is the dignity of the selfless public servants staffing his administration. You’ve got Kristi Noem, with her luxury jets and her alleged banging of her right-hand man and her more costume changes than an entire theatrical run of The Mystery of Irma Vep. You’ve got Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer with her alleged day-drinking in the office and her also banging a subordinate and a husband who has been banned from her office because he kept giving female employees unwanted and lingering hugs to the point that the Washington DC police investigated him for sexual assault. (It was announced over the weekend that he won’t be charged.)
But if we were ranking Trump’s lickspittles for sheer shamelessness, we might have to go with FBI Director and bug-eyed jackal fart Kash Patel. Believe us, it’s a tough call. But it’s hard to watch video of Patel shotgunning beers with the USA hockey team after their gold medal game in the Olympics in Italy on Sunday and not put him at the top of the list. (Video here if you need the giggle.)
In theory, Patel was in Italy for “security meetings,” getting tips from officials for securing the Summer Olympics scheduled for Los Angeles in 2028, assuming Olympic athletes will risk our immigration officials slapping them into concentration camps when they come here. In practice, Patel is a hockey nut who plays in adult rec leagues and announced last July that he’d be seeing the men’s team at the tournament. Which suggests that the security meetings were scheduled to give him an excuse to be in Italy to watch hockey, not the other way around.
In any case, Patel’s job is a serious one that every past FBI director treated with dignity. Partly this is because they were all experienced FBI agents steeped in the Bureau’s bland culture, and partly because cultivating a certain seriousness of purpose when you run the nation’s top law enforcement agency seems like a self-evidently good idea. You keep the degeneracy behind closed doors. Just ask J. Edgar Hoover, who would have had anyone who got pictures of him dressed as a French maid or whatever killed on the spot. (ALLEGEDLY dressed as a French maid or whatever!)
Not Patel, though. He’s a publicity whore through and through. He’s also a 45-year-old man who appears to be living out all sorts of adolescent fantasies: guzzling beer with professional athletes, dating a much younger woman he can fly around on his private government jet, making super-cool challenge coins with his personal brand on them. That he’s doing all this on the taxpayer dime is, for him, incidental.
For his part, Patel would like you to know that he was too on a very serious mission, and don’t be mad at him for loving America so darn much:
Calling the USA men’s hockey team his “friends,” like they’re just a bunch of bros hanging out and celebrating with a few beers, might be the most pathetic part of this.
Remember when Condi Rice cut a vacation short during Hurricane Katrina because someone saw her shopping for high-end shoes in a Ferragamo store in New York and yelled at her until she fled? Shoot, even Ted Cruz meekly returned from Cancun after fleeing an ice storm in Texas while his constituents were freezing to death. Of course he shouldn’t have gone in the first place. But compared to Kash Patel, who would have tweeted pictures of himself and his bikini-clad twentysomething girlfriend lounging poolside while guzzling brightly colored drinks with little umbrellas in them, Cruz was a model of moral rectitude.
And all of this while the FBI is working the high-profile case of the abduction of Savannah Guthrie’s mother. Which led to internet wags wondering what major event Keystone Kash will attend under the cover of claiming Nancy Guthrie is being held there. The Final Four in Indianapolis? The Masters in Georgia? The NHL Finals in June? Curious minds want to know!
Ironically, there was a major crime on Sunday. An armed 21-year-old tried to get into the secure perimeter around Mar-a-Lago and was shot and killed by Secret Service agents. (As it happened, this was one of the rare weekends when Trump wasn’t at his dumb club.) Patel tweeted that the FBI was working with the Secret Service to investigate the incident. We joked that he must have sent it from the beer line at the hockey arena in Milan. And then Chris Geidner pointed out that that may in fact have really been the case:
Wonkette, you are asking, are you a genius? And the answer is no, we are not. It’s just that even a decade into the nightmare that is Trumpism, we still occasionally lack the imagination about how dumb things can get around here.
Patel and his allies swear that he will follow the rules and reimburse the taxpayers for any personal expenses on his trip. And maybe people would be willing to give Patel the benefit of the doubt if there weren’t so many stories about his abuse of the FBI director’s plane to fly around the country to listen to his girlfriend sing the national anthem at D-list wrestling events, or on a golf vacation with his buddies. Or there weren’t so many stories of his prima donna behavior, like when he flew to the scene of Charlie Kirk’s murder in Utah but refused to leave the plane until real FBI agents gave him some patches to wear on his raid jacket.
Or maybe people would give him the benefit of the doubt if video clips like this didn’t exist:
Maybe he’d get the benefit of the doubt if he wasn’t a known liar who has spent the last year firing half the FBI for slights as petty as, say, keeping a gay pride flag in your workspace or not believing in your bullshit conspiracy theories about the Deep State working against Donald Trump.
In short, maybe he would get the benefit of the doubt if he was anyone other than Kash Patel.
Speaking of sweaty political figures desperate for famous people to like them, Trump called the men’s hockey team while Patel was partying with them and invited them to come to his State of the Union address on Tuesday. Based on how many Democrats are reportedly boycotting it, there should be plenty of seats.
[MS NOW]
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It's hard to believe Patel turned in the most embarrassing drunken jackass performance by a member of a regime that includes Judge Boxwine and Kegseth, a literal fall-down drunk.
Jemele Hill has some things to say about FBI Director Kash Patel using taxpayer money to see the Olympic men's hockey team win gold over Canada and Trump's awkward post-victory phone call to the team.
She also reacts to 'Sinners' stars Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo having their BAFTA awards presentation interrupted by a racist slur.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuUVMY37Cds
BAFTA *did not apologize* to Michael Jordan or Delroy Lindo.
“Why is it always Black people who are put upon to make EVERYONE ELSE feel comfortable when the public slur is levied against Black people and it is Black people who need the comfort?”
“How is there more responsibility placed on the people who are actually victimized by this – the people who are always than the people who are DOING it?
IF THAT MAN HAD SHOUTED A DIFFERENT SLUR THAT OFFENDED A DIFFERENT GROUP, THERE WOULDN’T BE NEARLY AS MUCH RATIONALIZATION
“If the slur had been against Jewish people – would BAFTA have not found the grace to apologize to the people against whom the slur was levied? Gay folks? Other disabled folks?”
“Why is it always Black people who are put upon to make EVERYONE ELSE feel comfortable when the public slur is levied against Black people and it is Black people who need the comfort?”
The ENTIRE WORLD is so accustomed to anti-Blackness than when it happens, the IMMEDIATE RESPONSE NO MATTER WHERE WE ARE IN THE WORLD IS TO ATTEMPT TO JUSTIFY IT.
Black people are always the ones told to “get over it” when it comes to racial harm.
THE WORLD *DOES NOT* TELL EVERYONE ELSE THAT.