Newly released government records reveal FBI Director Kash Patel directed his public affairs team to track down social media accounts criticizing him and respond with the bureau's accomplishments, a directive his own aide tried to talk him out of.
A text exchange dated February 5, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act release tied to the government's review of Jeffrey Epstein-related materials, shows Patel instructing the FBI's assistant director for public affairs to locate online critics and push back with agency statistics. The records surfaced publicly on September 11, 2026, after journalist Seth Hettena flagged them and CNN's Andrew Kaczynski amplified the documents on X.
The exchange is narrow, a handful of text messages between the FBI director and a senior communications aide, but it raises a pointed question: why was the head of the nation's premier law enforcement agency spending time managing his social media reputation?
The FOIA records, first reported by the Daily Caller, capture Patel sharing a social media account with the assistant director for public affairs and pressing the aide to act. The aide tried to defuse the situation, characterizing the account as an "Epstein didn't kill himself bot account" and offering context: "if you are wondering where it's coming from."
Patel was not persuaded. He cited 277,000 responses as evidence the engagement was genuine:
"277k responses are not bots."
The aide pushed back with a distinction Patel apparently missed. That 277,000 figure represented views, not actual replies. The real response count was far smaller:
"That's views, it's 400 responses; a real visible tweet gets 5x that."
Patel did not appear to accept the correction. Instead, he escalated his directive, making clear this was not a new request but a standing order he expected the team to execute:
"What I asked you and your team to do is find them, and post our record year results back at them all, continuously."
He then asked whether the aide had "been doing that", whether the team had actually carried out the instruction. The records do not show the aide's answer to that question.
One detail in the exchange stands out for its sheer awkwardness. The aide warned Patel that one of the accounts he wanted the FBI to engage was called "RetardFinder", and that the bureau's official account replying to it would "look bad on you."
That warning captures the dynamic running through the entire exchange. A career communications professional tried, repeatedly, to steer the FBI director away from a public relations misfire. Patel kept pressing.
When Patel explained his rationale, he framed the effort as a visibility play rather than a personal grudge:
"it's not about them, it is about the number of views, because people see it and need to be seeing our stats."
That framing, "it's not about them", sits uneasily beside the directive itself, which was specifically to find accounts criticizing him and respond to them. Promoting the FBI's record is one thing. Ordering staff to hunt down individual critics and reply to each one "continuously" is something different.
The text exchange was not released in response to a FOIA request about Patel's social media habits. It surfaced as part of the latest tranche of government records tied to the review of materials related to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who died in federal custody in 2019.
Patel has his own history with the Epstein file. At a September 2025 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana pressed the FBI director on whether Epstein had trafficked women to anyone besides himself. Kennedy noted Patel had reviewed most of the Epstein files. Patel responded that the information available to the bureau was "limited" and that there was "no credible information" indicating Epstein trafficked women to anyone other than himself.
That testimony drew scrutiny at the time. The February 5 text exchange, now public, arrived bundled with those same Epstein-related materials, an unrelated directive about social media critics tucked inside a document release about one of the most high-profile criminal cases in recent memory.
The Daily Caller reached out to the FBI for a response. The bureau offered no comment.
Kaczynski, who posted the records on X, did not hide his reaction. "I can't believe this is real," he wrote, summarizing the exchange and noting the aide's warning about the "RetardFinder" account. Whether the FOIA records reflect a one-off exchange or a broader pattern of Patel directing staff resources toward reputation management remains unclear. The records do not show whether the public affairs team ever executed the directive.
Several basic questions remain unanswered. The specific year of the February 5 directive is not stated in the released records. The full name of the assistant director for public affairs is not disclosed. And the precise date the FOIA tranche was released, along with who requested it, has not been publicly detailed.
Conservatives have rightly demanded accountability and focus from the FBI for years. The bureau spent the better part of a decade mired in politicized investigations, institutional credibility problems, and leadership failures that eroded public trust. Patel was confirmed to fix that, to restore the FBI's focus on crime, counterterrorism, and the rule of law.
Directing staff to scour social media for personal critics and clap back at them is not that mission. Promoting the bureau's results is legitimate public affairs work. Ordering aides to find individual accounts criticizing the director and respond to "them all, continuously" crosses into something else, a use of institutional staff time for personal reputation management.
The aide in the exchange understood the problem immediately. The director did not.
An FBI director who wants the public to see the bureau's results should let the results speak. The moment you start chasing critics on social media, you have already lost the argument you were trying to win.
