This dude can’t stop flying to Nashville.
(Composite / Photos: GettyImages)
Kash Patel keeps taking a private jet to his girlfriend’s home city
FBI DIRECTOR KASH PATEL has had quite a week.
Facing criticism for taking a government jet to see his country-singer girlfriend perform at a wrestling match in Pennsylvania—then taking the jet to her home city of Nashville—he chose to fire a veteran FBI official in charge of the bureau’s planes. He then followed that by having the FBI instruct at least one flight-tracking website to stop sharing public data about his jet. And then, on Sunday, he took to X to lash out at his critics, claiming that his girlfriend Alexis Wilkins is a “country music sensation who has done more for this nation than most will in ten lifetimes.”
This was a lot. But, apparently, not enough to satiate the masses.Even right-wingers were taking shots at him, with podcaster Candace Owens declaring him “the most embarrassing human in the United States” and nicknaming him “Krashout Patel.”
And so Patel did what many men would do in a moment of great personal stress: He left town to lay low. On Friday, he flew to Fort Lauderdale, where his stay overlapped with the Great Gatsby–themed party hosted at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. (It’s not clear if Patel attended.) Then, having already been dinged for taking his government jet to visit his girlfriend in Nashville, Patel did it once more, with public flight data showing
that his FBI jet touched down in the Music City yet again on Saturday, November 1 before departing two days later.
The day he flew out of Nashville happened to be a big one for Patel: It was Wilkins’s birthday.
The FBI director, like the attorney general, is legally mandated to travel with a government jet to handle communications and security issues, as his team has pointed out. But Patel had previously criticized his immediate predecessor for what he described as profligate personal use of the jet. “You ground Chris Wray’s private jet that he pays for with taxpayer dollars to hop around the country,” Patel said.
Patel’s critics argue that he is a flaming hypocrite for now doing the same.
What could help settle this debate is a fuller understanding of just how often Patel is using the jet and for what purposes. But the scale of Patel’s jet use is not entirely clear. My review of flight-tracking data shows that Patel’s jet has been used to make at least eight trips to Nashville since he became FBI director in February. Patel’s jet has also traveled six times from the Washington region to Las Vegas, where he lives while serving in the government.
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment. FBI spokesman Ben Williamson has called criticism of Patel’s jet use as “disingenuous and dumb.”
The trips Patel is making could, in theory, overlap with professional responsibilities. But if they do not, Patel is required to reimburse the government for the price of a similar commercial fare for himself and any dependents who travel with him—a small portion of the actual cost to run the jet.
According to a Government Accountability Office report on personal use of Justice Department jets published in 2013, operating a Gulfstream in 2010 cost roughly $5,000 per hour. A flight between the Manassas, Virginia airport Patel frequently uses and Nashville’s airport would take about four hours for a round trip. That means each round trip would cost at least about $20,000—and that’s likely an underestimate, since operating costs have gone up in the fifteen years since that GAO estimate was made.
What’s fairly clear is that Patel has been using the jet for events that have no real overlap with the actual responsibilities of the FBI. It’s an issue that came up in a September Senate hearing. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) showed blown-up pictures of Patel hobnobbing ringside with celebrities at UFC matches in Las Vegas and Miami, and chatting with hockey legend Wayne Gretzky at a New York hockey game—all trips Patel took on the government jet.
“Congress made it mandatory,” Patel said in his defense.
“We didn’t make it mandatory that you go to UFC games with Mel Gibson!” Welch said.
Patel’s jet first traveled to Nashville during his term on February 24, three days after he was sworn in as director. The jet again went from Manassas, a regional airport near Washington, to Nashville for round trips on both March 14 and March 16. Then the jet returned to Nashville for a fourth time in less than a month on March 21. (During that trip, at least, Patel appeared to bring in some professional responsibilities by visiting the local FBI office.)
Curiously, according to flight-tracking website Flightradar24, the first three of those trips lasted just a few hours, before the jet flew back to the Washington area. On February 24, for example, the jet was only on the tarmac for a little over an hour, landing at 9:40 a.m. and departing again for Manassas at 10:50 a.m.
On March 14, the jet landed in Nashville at 6:40 p.m., then took off again less than two hours later at 8:28 p.m. On March 16, the jet flew from Manassas to Nashville, landed at 8:16 a.m., then was back in the air by 10:55 a.m. Considering how close those two dates are, it’s possible that the jet went to Nashville, dropped Patel off, came back without him, and then went back to Nashville to pick him up and return him to D.C. But, again, we don’t know, and the FBI didn’t respond to a request for comment to explain the short durations of those trips.
The New York Times reported on three of those Nashville trips in April, in a story on Patel’s unusual public visibility as FBI director. Patel’s trips to Nashville cooled off after that, with no visits reported for several months. But they kicked off again in August, with the jet traveling from Washington to Nashville on August 15. Patel and Wilkins visited a bull-riding competition during that visit, according to pictures Wilkins posted on Instagram, which show the pair close to the action and posing with Kid Rock.
(Photos via Alexis Wilkins’s Instagram account.)
The trips resumed in October, with the jet flying to Nashville on October 10 and leaving again on October 12. Then there was the notorious wrestling match trip on October 25 that had, over the course of a single day, the jet going from Manassas to State College, Pennsylvania and then Nashville. The jet’s most recent trip to Nashville was last weekend, with the plane landing on November 1 and flying out of the city on November 3.
Patel is in a bit of a unique circumstance here, as it’s not clear how many recent FBI directors were also involved in long-distance relationships (the kind that are publicly acknowledged, at least) during their tenures. The topic—and the difficulties it could cause—came up in a June interview Wilkins did with conservative comedian Alex Stein.
“We go back and forth between, you know, D.C.—he’s in D.C., I spend half-and-half D.C. and Nashville,” Wilkins said. “And we’ve always been traveling the entire time we’ve been together, though. So it’s really just more of that.”
Despite Patel’s defense of his personal use of the jet on the grounds that the law requires it, not all FBI directors have found near-constant personal use of the jet to be necessary. Between 2007 and 2011, then–FBI director and future Trumpworld nemesis Robert Mueller used the jet only 7 times for personal business, which accounted for just 2 percent of all the flights he took using the plane; he made 284 trips for business purposes, and 2 trips that combined business and personal, according to the GAO investigation.
The GAO report doesn’t reveal, however, how many of those trips were to UFC fights.