During one of the most sensitive document releases in the FBI’s recent history, Director Kash Patel was texting his public affairs chief about a troll account. Not about messaging strategy for the Epstein files. Not about how to answer legitimate public questions.
About hunting down a crude anonymous X account that had mocked his official portrait, and posting FBI performance statistics at it, continuously. That is not a communications strategy. That is what happens when institutional resources get redirected toward personal reputation management, and FOIA-released FBI records show exactly how it unfolded.
What the Texts Show
The February 5, 2026 exchange reads like a cautionary tale about leadership priorities under pressure.
An X account called @IfindRetards posted Patel’s official FBI portrait alongside a caption announcing that his “retard rating just went to all time highs. Congratulations Kash.” Patel wanted to fight back. He instructed Ben Williamson, the FBI’s Assistant Director for Public Affairs, to find accounts posting critical content and “post the FBI’s record year results back at them all, continuously.”
Williamson did not comply. His response was direct: “We’re not responding to ‘ifindr*tards.’ That would look bad on you.” That line, drawn from FOIA-released FBI documents and reported by Mediaite, captures a public affairs professional doing exactly what the role requires: protecting the institution from decisions its own leadership is about to make.
The Metrics Problem
Patel’s justification for engaging rested on a number he had misread entirely.
Patel pointed to 277,000 as evidence of massive organic public engagement, arguing that “277k responses are not bots” and that the scale of the audience justified aggressive counter-messaging. Williamson corrected him: that figure represented views, not replies. The post had drawn roughly 400 replies, and a post with genuine viral reach would typically generate about five times that volume, according to Williamson’s account of the exchange as reflected in the FOIA records.
Patel’s reply, as reported by The New Republic from those same records, did not concede the point: “It’s not about them, it is about the number of views, because people see it and need to be seeing our stats.” The argument shifted, but the underlying problem did not. A director setting communications strategy based on a misread metric is not a minor error; it is an institutional failure dressed up as media instinct.
The Broader Problem
The Epstein files release gave the FBI a real communications job to do. This was not it.
Williamson correctly identified @IfindRetards as an “Epstein didn’t kill himself” bot account, part of the conspiratorial online environment that had built up around the document release. That context matters. The FBI was operating in a space saturated with suspicion, where the public had legitimate questions about what the files contained and what the bureau’s record on the case actually showed.
Instead, the director’s attention landed on a since-deleted post from an offensive troll handle. The people most directly affected by that misalignment include the public tracking the Epstein process and FBI communications staff being asked to execute directives their own judgment tells them are wrong. Oversight bodies trying to assess whether the bureau’s resources are being appropriately directed are equally shortchanged.
The episode also raises a structural question that goes beyond Patel personally. The FBI has not publicly detailed specific guidelines about when, whether, or how its accounts engage hostile or conspiratorial content on social media. Individual directors end up setting the terms unilaterally. In this case, those terms were set mid-argument over a metric the director did not understand.
What Better Looks Like
The fix is not complicated, but it requires leadership willing to hear “no” from its own staff.
Clear internal policies on social media engagement would help. Specific guidance distinguishing legitimate public criticism from trolling that does not warrant a response would give communications professionals something concrete to point to when the director’s instinct and the bureau’s interest diverge. That distinction gives staff like Williamson a policy to cite, not just a personal judgment to defend.
Williamson had the right instinct. He should not have needed to rely on that instinct alone to stop a bad call. Congressional or inspector-general scrutiny of FBI social media practices is a reasonable next step, particularly on the question of whether agency communications resources are being used for public information or personal reputation management.
These records are public because FOIA worked. The texts exist in the Epstein files release precisely because transparency mechanisms functioned as designed. Whether the FBI uses that exposure as a reason to examine its own standards, or treats it as a news cycle to outlast, is the more consequential question now.
