Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe said he was “at a loss to understand” why FBI Director Kash Patel visited Utah amid the ongoing search for Charlie Kirk’s killer.
Kirk was shot and killed on Wednesday while speaking at Utah Valley University. The suspect remains at large. On Thursday night, officials held a brief press conference and shared surveillance footage showing a suspect in the case. Patel was at the presser but did not speak.
Patel has taken heat for some tweets he posted shortly after the killing, in which he suggested the suspect had been caught. On Thursday, Patel and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino traveled to Utah, where they toured the crime scene and visited the local FBI field office.
McCabe appeared on Thursday’s CNN NewsNight, where he said Patel’s trip to Utah was a head-scratcher:
That one’s really hard to figure out. There are many good reasons why you wouldn’t go if you’re the director. You would not go out to the scene of an ongoing crisis, post-crisis investigation. I think that’s many of the reasons why, you know, typically, directors don’t do that.One of the reasons not to do that is because the presence of the director imposes a huge burden on the field office. There’s all kinds of arrangements that have to be made. There’s all kinds of security concerns
that arise. Transportation becomes very complicated. And that’s the last thing you wanna do to the field office while they’re in the middle of investigating a critical incident.So, again, strange to go out there under those circumstances. Why he went and then did not say anything at the at the press conference, I really, I really don’t know. I’m a bit at a loss to understand, like, what was the purpose of going out there. If you’re there, you know, you probably want to at least make very perfunctory comments about appreciating the hard work of the men and women that are doing the investigation. And of course, thanking your partners for the sort of access and the relationship that you have. So, I don’t know even know how to kind of guess at this point.
Former Secret Service Agent Jonathan Wackrow agreed.
“It is odd,” he said. “You announced that both the deputy director and the director were there. They came out. They walked the site. They assessed it. Now you’re sitting at a press conference in front of the nation, and there’s silence.”
Watch above via CNN.