Rhode Island’s congressional delegates want to know more after the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday asked the congressional watchdog office to investigate FBI Director Kash Patel’s alleged misuse of government aircraft.
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and Senate Democratic Whip, accused Patel of delaying the arrival of a specialized FBI team to Providence the morning after the Dec. 13 mass shooting at Brown University, which killed two students and injured nine others. Durbin sent a letter grounded in whistleblower disclosures to the Government Accountability Office and the Justice Department’s inspector general demanding a probe of whether Patel’s travel flouted rules regarding non-governmental use.
MS Now broke the story on Durbin’s letter Tuesday, reporting that an FBI evidence analysis team was forced to drive through the night from Quantico, Virginia, to Providence because Patel was in South Florida, leaving them with “no FBI plane available to take them to Rhode Island.”
“Kash Patel has seemingly engaged in what amounts to irresponsible joyriding on DOJ and FBI-operated aircraft at the expense of the American taxpayer and to the detriment of ongoing Bureau operations,” Durbin wrote in his letter.
Durbin also noted Patel’s appearance Sunday in post-game footage from the U.S. Men’s Hockey Team locker room after their gold-medal victory over Canada in the 2026 Winter Olympics, which “occurred on the same weekend an armed intruder attempted to breach President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.”
When asked for comment on Durbin’s letter or its claims Wednesday, both the FBI’s regional Boston office and its national outfit referred to X posts by Ben Williamson, the assistant director for public affairs for the FBI.
Williamson wrote on X Tuesday, “The Brown U thing is totally false,” before going on to address similar claims in Durbin’s letter regarding the FBI response to Charlie Kirk’s murder.
“Durbin and whoever he’s speaking to are full of it,” Williamson wrote.
But those allegations also undergirded MS NOW’s reporting, which cited three sources and a whistleblower account received by Durbin’s office, one which claims Patel was in Florida on Dec. 13 and did not fly back until the afternoon of Dec. 14, leaving planes unavailable for the needed FBI team.
Both the MS NOW account and Durbin’s letter state that Patel ordered the bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team — a specialized counterterrorism unit — placed on standby, thereby freezing use of the second plane by any other FBI team.
As a result, Durbin’s letter stated, “[T]he team had to drive from Quantico, Virginia to Providence, Rhode Island overnight during a winter storm to reach the scene by 9:00 a.m. the following morning to immediately process evidence.”
FBI spokesperson Williamson was quoted in the MS NOW story, “This was not immediately a case with federal nexus. It was a state-led homicide investigation. FBI was in an assisting role until later.”
Williamson reiterated on X that FBI agents were on scene about two hours after the shooting happened. He added that the media outlet had “conveniently” left out that the investigation was state-led and that, “If the Director happens to be out of town, he always offers the plane if needed anyway – and he did so here.”
“It wasn’t needed,” Williamson wrote. “Again, MS NOW was given this context and left this out.”
Kristy dosReis, a spokesperson for the Providence Police Department, said via email Wednesday that the investigation “began immediately.”
“Local agents from the FBI in Boston were on scene with PPD personnel from the outset and assisted throughout the response and subsequent investigation,” dosReis said. “We have no information indicating any delays in the FBI’s response.”
Chorus of condemnation
Durbin’s letter quickly led to a congressional pile on from Rhode Island’s all-Democratic delegation.
U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse — often the most acerbic of the four delegates in his public assessments of President Donald Trump’s administration — did not stray from his usual tone.
“Mr. Patel has neither the experience nor the judgment to lead the primary agency tasked with keeping Americans safe,” Whitehouse said in a statement. “The man is a clown.”
“It is completely unacceptable that Rhode Islanders’ lives may have been placed in greater danger after the Brown University shooting because Kash Patel used a taxpayer funded FBI aircraft to go on vacation instead of making it available to investigators needed to respond to the Brown shooting,” Rep. Seth Magaziner said in a statement.
Patel’s “potential misuse of an FBI jet during a time when it should have been all hands on deck reflects a troubling pattern of abusing taxpayer funds and poor judgment that has real consequences,” Rep. Gabe Amo said in his statement.
A statement from Rhode Island’s eldermost statesman, Sen. Jack Reed, began with a note of caution: “If this whistleblower report is accurate,” Reed wrote. “then Director Patel needs to be held accountable.”
Reed called on Patel to “immediately disclose the details of his flight to Florida, weekend activities, and the administrative decisions that made other FBI aircraft unavailable for the evidence response team to use the day of the Brown shooting.”
Reed promised he would also “work on a parallel track through the Appropriations Subcommittee” to further dig into the FBI’s budget and “get to the bottom of this.”
On Wednesday morning, Williamson quote-tweeted a Boston Globe reporter’s post which partially quoted the delegation’s remarks, and responded to two claims contained therein.
Responding to Reed’s demand for knowledge on Patel’s Florida trip, Williamson wrote that the director “was visiting his elderly parents in Florida.”
As for the aircraft issue raised by Durbin, Williamson wrote, “The ‘unavailable aircraft’ thing is made up, not how it works, and did not affect the FBI’s Brown U assistance – as we’ve explained in detail already.”
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
