Some stories write themselves. Others are written by “two people familiar with the matter” and fall apart before the coffee gets cold. Recently, MS NOW, the network formerly known as MSNBC, interrupted its programming with breaking news that FBI Director Kash Patel had touched down in Russia. Anchor Peter Alexander told viewers, “MS NOW has learned that Patel has landed in Russia for a meeting scheduled to take place there.” There was only one problem. Director Patel was in Virginia.
Not Moscow. Not St. Petersburg. Lynchburg, Virginia, at Liberty University, honoring the men and women of law enforcement. You could hardly invent a setting further from the Lubyanka if you tried. And yet, the network’s crack justice and intelligence correspondent, Ken Dilanian, was summoned to the set to explain what it all meant. According to Fox News, Dilanian fretted that his FBI sources were worried because they didn’t know why Patel was in Russia, and suggested the trip would “raise a lot of eyebrows,” given that his hosts might be the FSB.
The FBI’s Rapid Response account was quick to the draw. “MS Now’s ‘sources’ are ‘familiar’ with NOTHING,” it wrote. Director Patel answered with three words: “Facts over clickbait.” Then he followed up, noting that MS NOW “just reported I had ‘landed in Russia’ for meetings with the FSB,” and laying out the numbers the network would rather not discuss — more than 53,969 violent crime arrests, up 90 percent, a nearly 20 percent drop in the nationwide murder rate, and 11,081 child victims located and identified.
Later that day came the walk-back. Dilanian told viewers, “We’ve since learned that Patel did not, in fact, land in Russia today and remains in the U.S.” But he couldn’t resist a parting shot: “The FBI did not answer our questions when they asked them about it.” Then the coup de grâce of legacy media self-regard. “Again, we regret this error, and we are transparent about when we make errors.”
Transparency is not the virtue of confessing your blunder after the FBI tells the whole country the Director is standing in Virginia. That’s not transparency. That’s getting caught. And the sly insinuation that the Bureau’s silence somehow shares the blame is a tell. The burden of verification rests on the reporter, not the subject. Anyone who has ever sat across a table from a source knows that.
And speaking of sources, Dilanian continues to rely on sources that have provided absolutely no insight into FBI operations or current culture. A small group of discredited and self-styled FBI “whistleblowers” have been feeding Dilanian tripe in an effort to claw back some semblance of relevance.
As a retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent, I spent a career learning how to weigh information. Every source has a motive, and every report gets corroborated before anyone acts on it. In the Bureau, a source who tells you the subject is in Moscow when he’s actually in Lynchburg doesn’t get a second chance. He gets closed. You don’t stand in front of a camera at the top of the hour and beclown yourself in front of your entire audience. That is the elementary discipline of the craft, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to apply it.
Director Patel put it plainly in a recent X post. “This was a basic verification failure,” he wrote. “If a network cannot confirm where I was before putting it on air, how can the public trust its reporting on the work our agents and officers do every day?” Precisely. The physical location of the Director of the FBI is not a state secret. It is perhaps the single most checkable fact in Washington.
But the Russia gaffe didn’t happen in a vacuum. Earlier the same day, Dilanian and MS NOW had published a piece questioning whether the FBI deserved credit for its violent crime numbers, given how many arrests were carried out alongside state and local police. Dan Bongino fired back that “Working with state and local law enforcement WAS OUR STRATEGY.” He’s right. Breaking down the turf walls between the Hoover Building and the cop on the beat is not a bug in the Patel FBI. It’s the whole point.
Even a cursory understanding of how task forces operate puts this silly notion to bed.
None of this should surprise anyone who remembers Dilanian’s long résumé on the Russia beat. Bongino, who has rechristened him “Fusion Ken,” told him to “stop humiliating yourself, as you did during your Russia hoax promotional tour.” For years, the legacy media complex treated every anonymous whisper about Trump and Moscow as gospel. Collusion, the Steele dossier, the pee tape, the whole tawdry fan-dance. The common thread was always the same: unnamed sources, breathless delivery, and a quiet correction long after the damage was done.
The phrase “Russia” is still a dog whistle in that newsroom, and the producers came running. That there may have been a planned trip, which Politico reported back in July, only makes it worse. A reporter sitting on a known story has every reason to confirm the timing before announcing a landing. Instead, they ran with the version that would do the most damage to the man and the Bureau they have tried to discredit since day one.
And, here’s the part that should trouble every American, regardless of party. When a network that carries water for the Democrat Party gets the simplest fact wrong, it isn’t just Kash Patel who pays. As Director Patel wrote, “The men and women of law enforcement deserve accurate reporting while they protect communities and take violent criminals off our streets.” The agents and officers doing that work are the ones whose record gets smeared.
Director Patel says three apologies are owed: “to this FBI, to the law enforcement community, and to the American People.” I wouldn’t hold my breath. The legacy media complex doesn’t apologize. It simply denies real responsibility, makes veiled counter-accusations, then moves on to the next anonymous source.