Kash Patel’s critics have turned the guards around his inner circle into a running joke.
Newspapers rounded up former agents to call that protection unprecedented.
And one new federal case just showed Patel exactly what those guards are up against.
Prosecutors Say One Facebook Message Set the Whole Thing in Motion
Federal prosecutors have charged Anthony Daniel Palazzolo, a 42-year-old man from Chesterfield Township, Michigan, with threatening to kill FBI Director Kash Patel and an unnamed associate of the director.
The criminal complaint lays out an ugly little timeline. In October 2026, Palazzolo allegedly sent a Facebook message to a person prosecutors identify only as “Victim-1,” talking about putting “a hit out” on that person. The same message allegedly called Patel a dead man too, in language no family newspaper would print.
That kind of message usually earns somebody a knock on the door. And that’s exactly what Palazzolo got when FBI agents sat him down for an interview.
But the interview didn’t end it, according to the bureau.
Prosecutors say Palazzolo kept calling and harassing a Detroit FBI agent afterward. In one alleged threat, he said he would come up to the field office and “use deadly force against every single one of you government officials.” He allegedly added that the FBI and the Secret Service would all end up dead.
Palazzolo appeared in federal court, and a judge ordered him temporarily detained, according to the Justice Department. The court set a detention hearing for November 2.
These remain accusations, and Palazzolo will get his day in court. Prosecutors haven’t said what set him off or whether politics played any part, and nothing in the public record answers that question yet.
The Story Everybody Laughed At Had a Second Act
Rewind to the end of February 2026. The New York Times reported that Patel had assigned FBI SWAT agents to protect his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, at her performances, her personal engagements, and even while she ran errands. Former agents told the paper the arrangement was “unprecedented.”
Patel’s detractors ran with it. The detail became Exhibit A for anyone who wanted to argue the director treats the bureau like a personal valet service.
But somebody else read that story too.
According to an FBI affidavit, an anonymized email reached Wilkins while she was in Arizona. Prosecutors say the writer told her “Watch your back” and said he would be “happy” when her face is “canoed by an assault rifle.”
Agents traced the email to a Cambridge, Massachusetts man named Alden Welch Ruml. According to the affidavit, Ruml admitted he wrote it after reading that Patel had put SWAT agents on Wilkins’ detail. Reuters reported that Ruml didn’t care for the conservative views Patel and Wilkins share or for their ties to the Make America Great Again movement.
Wilkins told agents the email frightened her, and she changed her travel plans. Ruml pleaded not guilty and faces up to five years in prison if a jury convicts him.
So a news story sneering at the guards allegedly gave a stranger the spark to threaten the very woman those guards protect. Hollywood couldn’t script irony that tidy.
The Threat Board Inside the Secret Service Keeps Getting Longer
Patel isn’t the only official with a target on his back. Not even close.
Secret Service Director Sean Curran recently told 60 Minutes that his agency has chased roughly 10,000 threats in 2026 against the people it protects. “The threats on our full-time protectees are up just over 40% than they were last year. That’s a massive increase,” Curran said.
Curran pinned a big share of it on the internet. “You know, social media changes people,” he said.
During the fall of 2026, suspicious letters turned up in the mail of at least 36 lawmakers and at election offices in at least 10 states, some of them carrying an unidentified powder. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Flores told CNN that the substance sent to his office tested negative for toxicity. The FBI says agents are still working to identify whoever mailed them.
And in Kansas, authorities arrested 24-year-old Jaden J Read on charges of posting online threats against President Trump ahead of a Trump campaign rally in Wichita. Investigators allege Read wrote, “Let’s shoot Trump, honestly, where’s our shooter? I’m tired of living this money life.” A Crime Stoppers tip led police straight to him.
What Patel’s Critics Never Bother to Count
Curran told CBS his agency doesn’t sort threats by left or right. “We don’t weigh it that way,” he said.
That’s his job, and it makes sense for a man running protective details. But the rest of the country doesn’t have to pretend the record is blank.
That record includes a sniper’s bullets at Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024 and a gunman lurking in the shrubbery at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course two months later. It includes the armed man police arrested near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home in 2022. And it includes the assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025.
Nobody should pin Palazzolo on any political camp until prosecutors say more. Secret Service officials have said many of the threats their agents chase involve people battling mental illness, and this case could turn out to be one of those.
But the Ruml case doesn’t leave much mystery. The man accused of threatening Wilkins reportedly disliked her politics and her MAGA connections. And he allegedly got the idea from a story about her bodyguards.
That’s the part the security scolds never weigh. Every column grumbling about SWAT agents at a country music gig treats the danger as hypothetical, something a sensible director would wave off. It stopped being hypothetical before the ink dried.
Funny how the outrage over protection costs only seems to flare up when a Trump appointee is the one getting protected.
Democrats are already promising a pile of investigations if they win a gavel in November. Don’t be shocked if the director’s security bills land somewhere near the top of the subpoena stack.
If that hearing ever happens, somebody up on the dais might want to read the affidavit first.
The New York Times story about Wilkins’ SWAT detail ran on February 28, 2026. According to prosecutors, the email telling her to watch her back arrived the very same day.
Sources: Mediaite, “Michigan Man Charged With Threatening To Kill FBI Director Kash Patel”; The Boston Globe, “Cambridge man charged with threatening girlfriend of FBI Director Kash Patel”; Reuters reporting via Fox Television Stations, “Massachusetts man charged with allegedly threatening girlfriend of FBI Director Kash Patel”; Fox News, “Secret Service leadership warn of ‘massive increase’ in threats against the president”; Mediaite, “Secret Service Boss Tells 60 Minutes About ‘Massive Increase’ in Violent Threats During Trump Era”; ABC News, “‘Off the charts’: Secret Service director says threat environment challenging”