Keystone Kash Fires FBI Veteran Over $60M Jet Date Debacle [View all]

Source: Daily Beast

Updated Nov. 2 2025 3:16AM EST
Published Nov. 2 2025 1:56AM EDT


The FBI has reportedly fired an official who had been at the bureau for 27 years, after stories of Kash Patel using an FBI jet to go on a date broke on Wednesday. Steven Palmer, who joined the bureau in 1998, was deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG) and charged with overseeing its aviation units. His exit was made official on Friday, making him the third CIRG boss to be fired during Patel’s brief tenure, Bloomberg reported.

According to three people familiar with the situation who spoke to Bloomberg, Patel was outraged by articles and social media posts that highlighted his private jet use. The articles and posts proliferated after a self-styled FBI whistleblower drew attention to his flight logs.

“We’re in the middle of government shutdown where they’re not even gonna pay all of the employees that work for the agency that this guy heads. And this guy is jetting off to hang out with his girlfriend in Nashville on our dime?” Kyle Seraphin, a former FBI agent said on his podcast. “He flew a $60 million aircraft to go hang out there. Is that gross to anybody else?”

Publicly available data for Patel’s plane shows the plane landing near Penn State on Oct. 25 before flying to Nashville later that evening. A now-deleted photo posted to Instagram by Patel’s girlfriend, country musician Alexis Wilkins, shows the couple attending a Real American Freestyle event at Penn State that evening.



Alexis Wilkins / Instagram

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/keystone-kash-patel-fires-fbi-veteran-over-60m-jet-date-debacle/