The Empty Suit

[Celerity]

How FBI Director Kash Patel undermines the FBI’s performance and credibility.

https://prospect.org/2025/12/23/kash-patel-fbi-director-brown-university-shooting/


Credit: Photo illustration by The American Prospect. Sources: Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo; Sunlight_s/iStock.

Shortly after the mass shootings at Brown University, an admired MIT professor was murdered not 50 miles away. Were the incidents connected? That question immediately screamed out to me, as a retired FBI agent whose long career was centered on the supervision and evaluation of such investigations. Now the question is sharper: Could the murder of Professor Nuno Loureiro have been avoided?

If I were an after-the-fact supervisor assigned to evaluate the FBI’s performance in this case, that would be my overriding question. I’d start by asking: What did FBI managers know, and when did they know it? On the late afternoon of December 13, after the murders of Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and the shooting of nine others in Providence, Rhode Island, the authorities were on notice that a killer was at large. We now know that two days later the same killer was responsible for the murder of Professor Loureiro. We also know that in the early morning hours of December 14, FBI agents raided a motel not far from Brown and detained a person that FBI Director Kash Patel soon identified, with a post on his personal X account, as a prime “person of interest.” The impression was clear: Rhode Island residents could breathe a little easier. Whether residents did so or not, the FBI’s law enforcement partners seemed ready to believe that the legendary Bureau had its man. The pressure eased.

It was not true. The motel suspect was quickly cleared and released, never having been charged. Patel’s intrusive announcement, by any measure, was premature. It very likely gave the actual shooter the reassurance he needed to lie in wait and make his escape to the scene of his next murder. The director of the FBI had made a crucial mistake. It is not certain that this early FBI-orchestrated misdirection led directly to the subsequent murder, but any supervising evaluator of this investigation would be bound to ask if it did. And to ask, therefore, if the fatal error emanated from FBI headquarters itself—or from Patel.

I retired in 1996 as the associate special agent in charge of the Chicago FBI Office, the culmination of a 27-year career that made me an expert in major case management. I was often an on-the-scene commander of such cases, and eventually, at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, I closely examined the records of many significant FBI investigations, inquiries that formed the basis for courses I taught to current and up-and-coming FBI managers. I emphasized again and again what I came to call the five simple rules of major case management. How would they apply in the case of the murders at Brown and Brookline? How would they apply, in particular, to the performance of Director Patel?

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[canetoad]

1. Good article

Thanks for posting.