There’s Actually One Conspiracy Theory FBI Head Kash Patel Doesn’t Support

However, there’s one that he declined to support when Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) questioned him about it during a Thursday appropriations meeting: the idea that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein did not die by suicide.

The multimillionaire financier was found dead in his jail cell of “apparent suicide” in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking underage girls.

“Did Jeffrey Epstein hang himself or did somebody kill him?” Kennedy asked the FBI director on Thursday.

Patel responded that he believed that Epstein “hung himself in a cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center.”

Patel’s declaration that he agreed with the official report was a bit of a shocker. Before his appointment as FBI director, he not only accused the FBI of slow-boating the release of Epstein’s client list but declared he’d release the files on the first day of Trump’s second term.

In January 2023, a Justice Department watchdog blamed Epstein’s death on a “combination of negligence and misconduct,” including the federal Bureau of Prisons’ failure to assign the financier a new cellmate after the departure of his previous one, as well as issues with surveillance cameras.

Still, that didn’t stop “Epstein didn’t kill himself” from becoming a popular theory.

Back in 2019, Kennedy himself joked in a Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing that “Christmas ornaments, drywall and [Jeffrey] Epstein ― name three things that don’t hang themselves,” and added: “That’s what the American people think … and they deserve some answers.”

Although Patel previously said he’d push to release the Epstein files on Trump’s first day of office, that hasn’t happened yet. The information the FBI released in late February turned out to be information that was already largely public.

During Thursday’s hearing, Kennedy tried to pin down Patel on his progress.

“Are you going to release all the information about that?” he asked.

“Senator, we are working through that right now with the Department of Justice,” Patel said.

“When you think you’ll have it done, Kash?” Kennedy asked.

“I think in the, in the near future, sir,” Patel answered.

“Like, before I die?” Kennedy pressed snarkily.

“Senator, we’ve been working on that, and we’re doing it in a way that protects victims, and also doesn’t put out into the ether information that is irrelevant for a production of the public such as CSAM [child sex abuse material],” Patel said.

You can see the whole exchange below starting around the 4:45 mark.