If Trump won’t fire Patel, the Democrats should loudly demand his resignation or impeachment. Now.
Remember the mass shooting at Brown University on December 13th? “Hundreds of police officers swarmed the streets” after a gunman “opened fire in a campus building, killing two students and injuring nine more,” then left the scene, as The New York Times described it. The manhunt lasted five days before police found the shooter, Cláudio Manuel Neves Valente, dead by suicide.
Students and others in the surrounding areas were terrified knowing that an armed, mass killer was on the loose.
But FBI Director Kash Patel was using one of the FBI’s two available jets for a visit to his parents in Florida and had “given an order to hold the other for another team that would not normally respond to the scene,” according to new reporting from MS Now, based on three sources and a whistleblower’s account to Congress.
“The evidence response team instead had to drive through the night amid a snowstorm to reach the university in Providence, Rhode Island, by 9 o’clock the next morning, according to the whistleblower’s account,” MS Now said.
The incompetent, unqualified and corrupt Patel ordered that the Hostage Rescue Team be put on standby after he learned of the shooting, thus making the second plane unavailable to any other FBI team. “FBI officials were confused by his order as numerous SWAT team agents in the nearest local field offices — in this case, Boston and New York — would ordinarily be called upon to provide immediate support, rather than the Quantico, Virginia-based Hostage Rescue Team,” MS Now added.
That’s a polite way of saying Patel caused a possibly deadly cluster f**k. Because two days after the Brown massacre, Valente allegedly shot and killed MIT Professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro.
The FBI’s evidence experts based in Quantico, the ones who had to drive through Providence in a snowstorm, “are some of its most experienced veterans and often deploy in the case of a major crime scene or mass shooting,” MS Now noted. Could a faster arrival have resulted in finding the shooter sooner?
Sen. Richard Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has requested the Government Accountability Office and the Department of Justice’s Inspector General investigate what he described as Patel’s “irresponsible joyriding” on DOJ and FBI-operated aircraft.
Durbin’s scathing letter to the two oversight offices also noted that after Charlie Kirk’s murder, the FBI’s shooting reconstruction team was delayed by at least a day because of a plane and pilot shortage caused by Patel’s personal flights. More recently, Patel took a taxpayer-funded flight to Italy where the Winter Olympics just happened to be occurring.
Also this, via Durbin: “Unfortunately, as a credible source described to my staff, the tone was set early during Director Patel’s tenure when he said in a meeting with the field offices last year, ‘If you have golf, hockey, fishing, or hunting and beautiful sights, you’re going to see a lot of me.’”
