The New Yorker:

In his press conference announcing the capture of Charlie Kirk’s killer, the F.B.I. director revealed himself.

By Vinson Cunningham

There’s little worse than watching a nervous actor onstage—especially when the poor guy isn’t just skittish but seems genuinely unprepared for the role that he’s playing. Incompetence has a way of unnerving its witnesses. An insecure performer robs an audience of its belief in both the character and the entire enterprise.

Take, for instance, Friday morning’s bizarre and disorienting appearance by Kash Patel, the manifestly unqualified F.B.I. director installed by Donald Trump. He was in Utah, alongside that state’s governor, Spencer Cox, having been given the grave duty to announce the arrest of Tyler Robinson, the young man who, on Wednesday, allegedly shot and killed the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In its way, this was a high occasion of state, an opportunity for the government to make a display of its brisk, sober ability to act, and to quell the unrest that this horrific and very public murder had aroused.

It was a chance, too, for Patel to paper over some big blunders and rescue his reputation. On Wednesday night, he’d prematurely posted on X that Kirk’s shooter was “in custody,” only to tweetagain, a little more than an hour and a half later, that the “subject in custody” had been “released after an interrogation by law enforcement.” There was some speculation that he’d sent the latter tweet while dining at Rao’s, an Italian restaurant in East Harlem famous for its red sauce and louche history. No matter where he was tweeting from, Patel seemed to have forgotten that the aftermath of an assassination might not conform to the rapid incentives—dopamine, constant attention—of live-tweeting.

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