A top FBI official with 27 years standing has reportedly been fired by the bureau after its director, Kash Patel, became enraged by press stories revealing he had used a government jet to travel to see his girlfriend sing the national anthem at a wrestling match.
Steven Palmer, who had worked at the bureau since 1998, was fired as head of the FBI’s critical incident response group which is responsible for handling major security threats as well as overseeing the agency’s fleet of jets. He was the third head of the unit to be dismissed since Patel became the second Trump administration’s FBI director in February.
Bloomberg Law, which broke the story, said that three unnamed sources had expressed astonishment at the sacking given that Patel’s flight schedules were fully public and trackable on websites. A day after her performance, Patel himself had reposted photos showing him together with his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, on his X account.
According to Bloomberg, Patel had become furious over stories published after the event about his use of the FBI jet to go on the date with Wilkins. Soon after, Palmer had been told he could resign instantly or be fired.
The dismissal was made official on Friday.
Flight logs publicly trackable on Flight Aware for Patel’s plane, N708JH, show that the jet landed at an airport near Penn State on 25 October. That evening Wilkins performed at a Real American Freestyle wrestling event, and the flight logs show Patel’s FBI plane later flying to Nashville.
Records for the movements of the jet N708JH were blocked on Flight Aware as of Sunday. A search for the government jet generates a message saying that it is “not available for public tracking per request from the owner/operator”.
Patel himself has not responded to Bloomberg’s report on the dismissal of Palmer. But earlier his spokesman, Ben Williamson, did post a lengthy statement on X in which he called criticism of Patel’s jet travel “disingenuous and dumb” and “bad faith whining”.
Williamson pointed out that the director is required under government rules to pay some reimbursement for the travel and claimed Patel had “significantly limited” personal travel compared with his predecessors Chris Wray and James Comey. “He’s allowed to take personal time on occasion to see family, friends or his longtime girlfriend,” the spokesman said.
As the Daily Beast has noted, Patel was highly critical of Wray’s use of government jets for personal use when Wray was director of the bureau. In 2023, Patel scathingly dubbed Wray “#GovernmentGangster” and accused him of “jetting off on out (sic) tax payer dollars while dodging accountability for the implosion of the FBI on his watch”.
Palmer’s dismissal makes him the third head of the FBI critical incident response group to be ditched under Patel. Wes Wheeler was fired in March, and Brian Driscoll in August.
Driscoll is now suing the Trump administration for unfair dismissal claiming he was targeted for showing lack of loyalty to the president.
Patel’s travel on a government jet for a date night was first spotted by Kyle Seraphin, a former FBI agent who has become a thorn in the side of the Trump administration. His podcast is caustically critical of the current leadership of the FBI.
“We’re in the middle of government shutdown … and this guy is jetting off to hang out with his girlfriend in Nashville on our dime?” Seraphin said in a recent podcast.
The government shutdown to which Seraphin alluded had entered its 32nd day.
In a separate unflattering development for him, Patel is facing heat from a defense lawyer in Michigan who is objecting to the FBI director’s allegations Friday that five young men had been arrested as they planned a Halloween terror attack. The lawyer, Amir Makled, who represents one of the five individuals, said that having reviewed the case he was convinced no such terror event had been in the pipeline.
Makled told Associated Press that the FBI director’s claims were “hysteria and fearmongering”. The five men were aged 16 to 20 – and were US citizens and gamers.
“I don’t believe that there’s anything illegal about any of the activity they were doing,” he said.
