Former FBI Deputy Director Rips Kash Patel’s ‘Patently Ridiculous’ Trip to Olympics: ‘Horrible Message to the FBI Rank and File’

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe shredded FBI Director Kash Patel for traveling to the Olympics on the bureau’s jet and guzzling beer with the U.S. men’s hockey team.

After Team U.S.A. defeated Canada 2-1 in the gold medal game in Milan on Sunday, Patel drank beer with the players in their raucous locker room. Clips of the moment went viral on social media one day after FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson slammed NBC’s Ken Dilanian for reporting that Patel had flown to the Olympics on the taxpayers’ dime and denied the report was true, which it was.

The FBI maintains that Patel was attending security meetings in Milan.

On Monday’s edition of The Lead on CNN, Jake Tapper said he knows for a fact “that Republicans on Capitol Hill are embarrassed about this,” and then asked McCabe if he found Patel’s behavior “appropriate.”

“I mean, the video is ridiculous, and it was completely inappropriate for him to be engaging, to go at all,” McCabe replied. “Let’s be honest. The excuse that he had to go for security meetings the day before the games are over is patently ridiculous. [Former FBI] Director [Robert] Mueller once traveled to Greece to consult with partners on the security arrangements for the Greek Olympics eight months before the games began. That’s when the sort of details and arrangements are made that an FBI director needs to weigh in on to make sure that others understand the role of the bureau and those sorts of things. It’s not the day of the final hockey game.”

McCabe went on to say Patel had sent a “horrible message to the FBI rank and file,” especially amid the FBI’s ongoing search for Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of Today show host Savannah Guthrie, as well as a potential bombing campaign against Iran.

“Now, I can tell you from having been in that position before, when you are on the brink of hostilities with a country that is a sponsor of terrorism, the FBI is right now using a microscope – or they should be – to go through all of their records to find Iranian sleeper agents in the United States,” McCabe said.

“It’s impossible to imagine the former FBI director, Chris Wray, ever doing something like this, even though he was forced out by Trump,” Tapper responded.

Watch above via CNN.

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