Whistleblower Says FBI Mass Shooting Response Delayed By Kash Patel Jet Use: MS Now

PROVIDENCE, RI — A whistleblower claims agents with the FBI’s elite evidence response team were delayed in reaching the scene of the Brown University mass shooting because there was no FBI plane available to take them to Rhode Island, MS Now reported.

"FBI Director Kash Patel was in south Florida at the time with one of the FBI’s two available jets and had given an order to hold the other for another team that would not normally respond to the scene, according to the whistleblower and (three) sources," per the MS Now story. "The evidence response team instead had to drive through the night amid a snowstorm to reach the university in Providence, Rhode Island, by 9 o’clock the next morning, according to the whistleblower’s account."

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An FBI spokesperson disputed the allegation, according to MS Now.

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-IL, provided information from the whistleblower in a letter to the Government Accountability Office, according to a media release from the senator's office.

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"These disclosures were provided after Patel was spotted celebrating with the U.S. Men’s Olympic Hockey Team shortly after their win over Canada in the gold medal game," the release said

"Since his confirmation as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Kash Patel has seemingly engaged in what amounts to irresponsible joyriding on DOJ and FBI-operated aircraft at the expense of the American taxpayer and to the detriment of ongoing Bureau operations," Durbin wrote, according to the release. "I request that the GAO’s ongoing review address the new information outlined below and that the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (DOJ OIG) investigate Director Patel’s misuse or mismanagement of government resources.”

Related: Providence Releases Body Camera Footage Of Brown University Mass Shooting Aftermath

A gunman fired at least 44 shots in the Barus & Holley engineering and physics building, killing two and wounding eight others the afternoon of Dec. 13. The Providence police and the FBI identified the shooter as Claudio Neves Valente, a 48-year-old former Brown student and Portuguese national living in Miami.

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Neves Valente was also linked to the shooting death of Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno Loureiro, who was found mortally wounded in his Brookline home Dec. 15, with the feds calling the connection a certainty.

Five days after the Brown University mass shooting, Neves Valente was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a Salem, New Hampshire, storage unit.

Read the full MS Now story here.

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