FBI Director Kash Patel is accused of using taxpayer money to fly his 26-year-old country singer girlfriend around the country.
Patel, 45, was seen at the Bryce Jordan Center at Penn State University where his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, performed at a Real American Freestyle (RAF) pro-wrestling event on Saturday. Wilkins posted a picture of herself with Patel, sporting an FBI-branded hoodie, at the event to her Instagram account on Sunday, the morning after the event.
Public flight logs for Patel’s plane, N708JH, reveal the plane landing at Pennsylvania’s State College Airport on Oct. 25—the day of the RAF event—at 5:40 PM EST. It took off from the same airport at 8:03 PM EST and landed in Nashville at 8:28 PM CDT. It left the next morning at 9:37 AM CDT for San Angelo, Texas for unknown reasons.
Patel’s date night was first spotted by Kyle Seraphin, a conservative former FBI agent turned FBI-critical podcaster.
“We’re in the middle of government shutdown where they’re not even gonna pay all of the employees that work for the agency that this guy heads,” said Seraphin on his Monday episode of The Kyle Seraphin Show. “And this guy is jetting off to hang out with his girlfriend in Nashville on our dime?”
Seraphin accused the couple of “grifting off the American public.”
“He flew a $60 million aircraft to go hang out there. Is that gross to anybody else?” he said.
The FBI and Alexis Wilkins did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
FBI directors must use government planes to ensure secure travel. For personal trips, they repay only the price of a commercial coach ticket—in the case of Patel’s trip, a flight from State College to Nashville is $239, according to an estimate from Expedia. This leaves taxpayers on the hook for the rest of the bill, which when taking into account the jet fuel and landing fees, can total thousands of dollars per flight.
Former FBI directors James Comey and Chris Wray both faced criticism for improper use of the government plane for personal reasons. In fact, Kash Patel was a particularly vocal critic of Wray in 2022.
In a 2023 Truth Social post, Kash dubbed Wray “#GovernmentGangster” and criticized him for “jetting off out on tax payer dollars while dodging accountability for the implosion of the FBI on his watch.”
Patel’s alleged joyride on a government plane is not the first time he’s been caught enjoying some taxpayer-funded personal trips. In April of 2025, two months after he got the job as FBI director, he reportedly took multiple trips out to Nashville to see Wilkins. He also flew her around to hockey games.
Seraphin has run afoul of Patel and Wilkins before. Wilkins is suing Seraphin for $5 million on defamation charges, stemming from Seraphin suggesting Wilkins was a “former Mossad agent” sent by the Israelis as a “honeypot” to compromise Patel.
Seraphin joined the FBI in 2016, working in surveillance and counterintelligence, but was sidelined in 2022 after clashing with the bureau over its COVID policies. He later made headlines as a right-wing whistleblower, raising concerns to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) that the FBI was targeting parents at school-board meetings.
