It’s been a week since the tragic on-campus shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in Utah, and so far, there are still more questions than answers about the alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, and his motive. This is to be expected: Murder investigations don’t wrap up in an hour like an episode of Law & Order, and people who are disturbed enough to kill high-profile figures are often social outliers whose motives may be more complicated than they seem at first glance (consider John Hinkley, who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan to impress his crush, movie star Jodie Foster). But in this case, there is another person whose motives are questionable: FBI director Kash Patel. Some of the erratic steps Patel has taken so far in the investigation suggest there may be priorities in play other than seeking justice for Kirk, which undercuts public trust in the information the Bureau is putting out.

Because it got quickly eclipsed by the shooting, it’s worth highlighting that on the same day Kirk was shot, three senior FBI officials filed a 68-page lawsuit against Patel and the FBI (as well as the Attorney General, the Justice Department, and the Office of the President), alleging that Patel violated the constitutional and statutory rights of three senior FBI officials: former Acting Deputy Director Brian Driscoll; former Assistant Director in Charge of the Washington Field Office Steven Jensen; and former Special Agent in Charge of the Las Vegas Field Office. The complaint paints a picture of an FBI led by a director and his deputy, Dan Bongino, more preoccupied with posting to their social media and validating conspiracy theories floated by random followers than in ensuring that the FBI is equipped to respond to the current threat landscape. Indeed, all three agents, who were highly respected and decorated within the Bureau, were summarily fired without cause, leaving gaps not only  in leadership but also in institutional knowledge based on their decades’ long investigative experiences combating terrorism and violent crimes.

The lawsuit provides an important backdrop to what unfolded in the aftermath of Kirk’s murder because the Salt Lake City field office was also recovering from a leadership gap caused by the sudden and unexplained termination of a career agent. Mehtab Syed, a Pakistani-American and the former Special Agent in Charge of the Salt Lake City field office, has been described as a “legendary” counterterrorism agent by former senior Bureau officials. She was asked to step down from her post in August by Patel and to take a lower-level position in Huntsville, Alabama. (She declined and instead resigned.) That means that important relationships between the field office and local law enforcement in Salt Lake City that had been built over the course of the last six months are currently being reestablished by Syed’s replacement, Robert Bohl. 

This kind of transition isn’t necessarily unusual – and by all accounts Bohl is a respected agent – but Patel’s behavior since the investigation began certainly doesn’t seem to have made it easier. On Wednesday night, Patel prematurely tweeted on X that a suspect was “now in custody.” Well, it turns out that wasn’t true; law enforcement had a person of interest whom they interviewed and let go, requiring Patel to retract and correct his initial tweet an hour and a half later. News reports indicate that based on the time stamp, Patel sent the tweet while dining at an upscale New York restaurant, Rao’s – not, you know, from an FBI field office where one might expect the director to be on an ongoing video conference call in the aftermath of such a high-profile crime. In fact, if Patel were acting the way we’d expect an FBI director to, he wouldn’t have tweeted at all. (Did former FBI director Christopher Wray even have a Twitter account?)