Two years ago, Kash Patel emerged as a vocal critic of then-FBI Director Christopher Wray for his use of the government’s fleet of private aircraft for personal travel.
The FBI should “ground Chris Wray’s private jet that he pays for with taxpayer dollars to hop around the country,” Patel said during his “Kash’s Corner” podcast in 2023.
Now, Patel himself is the director, and questions have begun circulating inside the FBI about the degree to which Patel is using governmental airplanes for his personal travels.
The FBI declined to share Patel’s flight schedule and would not confirm his presence on a number of flights to destinations where he later appeared. During the first weekend in April, for instance, a Boeing 757 owned by the Department of Justice made two round trip flights from Washington to New York.
On Saturday, April 5, the narrow-body jet took a 57-minute flight to Stewart International Airport, a short drive from West Point, where Patel made an appearance at a charity hockey event hosted by the FBI. The next day, the jet was back in the air to JFK Airport, landing just hours before Patel resurfaced in box seats next to hockey legend Wayne Gretzky and watched Capitals star Alex Ovechkin break the NHL scoring record.
Andrew Mordzynski/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images 
The New York Times first reported on Patel’s use of FBI aircraft on Sunday.
It’s unclear if Patel was on these flights — and if he was, whether they were purely personal, work related, or both. But on Monday, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee told CBS News in a statement that he wants the answer to those questions.
“The Judiciary Committee must investigate Director Patel’s apparent misuse of taxpayer dollars,” said U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois. “The American people expect an FBI Director who focuses on the security and safety of the nation, not someone wrapped up in the trappings of the spotlight.”
FBI directors are required by executive branch policy to use government aircraft for air travel, whether official or personal. That enables them to maintain access to secure communications wherever they travel. And it gives the director the ability to move quickly in an emergency.
If the travel is personal, the director must reimburse the government the cost of a commercial coach airfare. When traveling for personal reasons, the director may bring family or friends, but guest travel must be reimbursed to the government as well. Friends or family members are never allowed to fly on FBI aircraft unaccompanied by the director. It is unclear whether Patel has brought friends or family aboard government jets.
But Durbin said the use of the plane still has limits and questioned whether the use of the aircraft cut against the Trump administration’s professed commitment to rooting out government waste.
Patel’s use of Gulfstream jets operated by the FBI appears to extend to his frequent trips to Las Vegas, where he has a home, and to Nashville, where Patel’s girlfriend, who is a country singer, lives. Sources familiar with Patel’s travel confirmed to CBS News that the director was on the plane for several trips captured by FlightRadar24, including a weekend dash to Las Vegas on March 7 and a weekend in Nashville on March 14.
L.E. Baskow/Las Vegas Review-Journal) @Left_Eye_Images 
It is unclear if he was aboard on Feb. 24, when one of the FBI’s Gulfstream 5 jets flew from Manassas, Virginia, where the plane is based, to Nashville, stayed on the ground for an hour and 27 minutes before returning to Manassas.
On some occasions, Patel may have traveled for both pleasure and business. An FBI jet flew on March 21 from Washington to Nashville. That day, Patel attended a roundtable meeting with state and local law enforcement officials in Tennessee, and also visited the FBI field office in Nashville. The plane returned to Washington later that afternoon. It is unclear whether he saw Alexis Wilkins, his girlfriend, while he was there.
In a statement to CBS News, the FBI said it “does not comment on travel arrangements for security purposes. All ethical guidelines are followed rigorously.”
Some bureau veterans told CBS News they have been troubled by the frequent use of government aircraft by FBI executives, making the aircraft less available to support operations in line with the primary mission of investigating crimes, chasing spies and preventing terrorist attacks.
“Those aircraft have been procured or leased specifically to support operational needs,” said Christopher O’Leary, a former senior counterterrorism official at the FBI who has used the planes dozens of times for sensitive missions and critical response. “The concern is that the routine use of them by the director and deputy director for personal travel could take a critical resource offline when they are sometimes needed at a moment’s notice.”
O’Leary and others said they also worry that the use of the planes sets the wrong tone.
“It’s a bad leadership example,” he told CBS News. “All agents are provided an FBI vehicle, and they cannot be used for personal use. They can only be used for going to and from work, for official duties or to respond to a crisis and that is strictly enforced.”
Congressional watchdog advised limits on personal jet travel
In 2013, the Government Accountability Office probed the Justice Department’s and the FBI’s use of the FBI G5 jets for “non-mission purposes.” The report that followed laid out how often and for what reasons the planes were used by the attorney general and the FBI director, the costs associated with the flights and the rules and regulations governing them. At the time, the GAO did not find any specific instances of wrongdoing, although it did emphasize the importance of officials being responsible stewards of taxpayer funds when using the planes.
Diana Maurer, a director at GAO and author of the 2013 report, told CBS News that the same principles that were at play when the congressional watchdog agency did its review remain relevant today.
“I don’t know what the current FBI director did or didn’t do, and we haven’t updated our 2013 report,” Mauer said in an interview. “But just because you’re allowed to do something doesn’t necessarily mean you should.”
Maurer noted that government officials should not abuse their privileges at the expense of the taxpayer.
“Using government aircraft, as FBI Directors are required to do for security reasons, costs significantly more than commercial flights. I hope the FBI and the Department of Justice are considering the implications for taxpayers when the Director uses government aircraft for non-mission purposes.”
Past FBI directors faced scrutiny
During the years that Wray ran the FBI, his personal use of the jet became a touchstone for conservative critics. Wray occasionally flew from Washington to his hometown of Atlanta, where his family maintained its residence. He drew criticism from Republicans in Congress and some former FBI agents for summoning the G5s to Reagan National Airport from Manassas, a 15-minute flight, rather than being driven 30 miles to the Virginia airport where it maintains a hangar.
FBI whistleblower Steven Friend, a close ally of Patel’s who was suspended by the bureau over concerns that his views on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol affected his work, criticized Wray in more than a dozen social media posts for his use of the jets. “Chris Wray abuses his @FBI jet privileges because he doesn’t like to sit in traffic,” Friend wrote in a Dec. 14, 2023, tweet.
Wray was also raked over the coals by Republican lawmakers for cutting short a Senate oversight hearing in 2023 to fly on an FBI aircraft to a family vacation in the Adirondacks. (Wray at the time pointed out that he had negotiated the length of the hearing with committee staff.) The chairman of the committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley, later questioned Wray’s use of the FBI jets and whether it amounted to an abuse of taxpayer money, a suggestion that Wray rejected, noting that he was a “required use traveler,” and that he reimbursed the government in every instance he used the planes for personal purposes.
A spokesperson for Grassley said the senator is “still waiting on the FBI” for records regarding Wray’s use of the jets and criticized Democrats and the media, claiming they never showed “any interest in scrutinizing FBI Directors’ travel logs until Kash Patel came on the scene.” Grassley’s office did not respond to a question about whether the senator would continue his oversight of FBI directors’ government jet travel while Patel is director.
FBI directors have also at times been sensitive about the potential misuses of the FBI’s fleet. In at least one case, a former FBI director went to extraordinary lengths to save the taxpayer money for his air travel.
Soon after he became FBI director in 2013, James Comey traveled back and forth to Connecticut where his family was still living. At the time, Washington was in the midst of a heated budget battle with the possibility that government workers would be furloughed and have their paychecks withheld. So, according to two former law enforcement officials, Comey asked President Barack Obama for a special dispensation from the “required use” rule so that he could fly commercial at a much lower cost to the government.
