Kash Patel’s Slap Shot
The F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, faced an icy Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing last month, in which both parties pressed him on a string of blunders—taxpayer-funded travel, mishandling of the Epstein files, loosened hiring rules involving bestiality, the boozy photo op he’d had with the gold-winning United States men’s Olympic hockey team in Milan. As Senator Mazie Hirono phrased it, “You have wasted untold taxpayer dollars driving around in foreign luxury cars, partying in Italy, and flying a private jet to play golf and watch hockey.”
Incomplete statement—he also spends a lot of time playing hockey. Earlier this year, in a locker room in Virginia, Patel, who is forty-six, laced his skates before a beer-league championship game at the MedStar Capitals Iceplex, in Arlington. He slipped on his red-white-and-blue jersey for his team, the Dons; a patch on it reads “Don’t Tread on Me”; another bears the logo “K$H.”
Patel, though young for an F.B.I. director, is old for the league. Regarded by his fellow-players as somewhat clumsy on the ice, he makes up for his lack of speed with a decent slap shot and a willingness to throw himself down, spread-eagled, to block pucks. He tore a biceps this way in a championship three years ago. (He joked that he’d hurt it “kicking the shit out of the deep state.”)
The Dons went unbeaten over multiple seasons in a lesser division, but they hadn’t won the crown since moving up to the top division, two years before. The opposition: a team called the Hat Trick Swayzes, whose jerseys bear the image of “Point Break”-era Patrick Swayze. One of the Swayzes’ defensemen is the thirty-eight-year-old Karl Alzner, a first-round N.H.L. draft pick in 2007, who spent most of his career with the Washington Capitals. Alzner reminisced about watching his dad’s beer-league games as a kid, “coming to the rink early in the morning and seeing a garbage can full of beer cans.”
After suiting up, a conservative member of the Swayzes, who used to wear faux jean-short shells, offered a rousing pre-game speech. “There are tens of millions of people across the country who, if they knew this game was happening tonight, would be rooting for the Swayzes to beat Kash Patel and the Dons. Tonight, we are all libs!” His teammates roared.
Patel had surpassed Alzner as the most famous person at the rink. A relative unknown when he joined the Dons, in 2014, he’s now a household name, the butt of jokes on late-night television. These days, a pack of F.B.I. agents with earpieces are posted by the locker room, and armored BMWs sit outside. The opposition tends to be respectful, although once, when Patel chased a puck into a corner, an opponent yelled out, “Epstein didn’t kill himself!” (“You know a suicide when you see one,” Patel has said.)
Typically, the F.B.I. agents guarding the director outnumber the spectators at ten-thirty on a Sunday night, but this time there were about twenty civilians in the stands. Within a minute of the puck hitting the ice, the Dons surrendered the first breakaway. Patel was no help. In the third period, with his team trailing, his ice time was limited, but, during one of his few shifts, a pass came from behind the net and went through his legs for a Swayzes goal. The Swayzes were victorious.
Just after Patel’s Senate grilling, the Dons faced off against the Swayzes in the championship again. Things kicked off hot in the first period. Patel whiffed a shot attempt at the blue line, swinging his stick wildly. Somehow, he had enough time to recalibrate and fire off one of his unruly slap shots, hurling it way off target. Dom Gurshman, a former pro for a Finnish team who now plays defense for the Swayzes, recalled, “After Kash’s whiffed shot, I thought we’d get a signature rim down the wall. I was standing seven feet wide of the net, almost facing the corner, and the shot clipped my shin pads and went in. I was shocked.” Patel had scored.
The Dons took the lead, and by the end of the night their victory was assured. But, with seconds left on the clock, Patel wanted to get in one last slap shot. He gathered the puck behind his own net. His teammates hooted from the bench. He fired it off and it ricocheted around the boards. The horns sounded; the Dons had won.
During the handshake, the director wore a wide, toothy grin that had not been seen in public since he partied with the Olympians in Italy. Though a shakeup in the midterms might well mess with the routines of loyal Trump appointees like Patel, on this night, chugging beers on the rooftop at the rink, Kash was king. The F.B.I. agents waited patiently. ♦
An earlier version of this article inaccurately described the inspiration of the Dons’ name.