Kash Patel said the FBI was kept out of the search for Nancy Guthrie for the first four days after she went missing, sharpening a public dispute over how the case was handled. He made the comments on Sean Hannity’s podcast as he pressed his argument that the bureau should have been involved from the start.
“For four days we were kept out of the investigation,” Patel said, adding that “The first 48 hours of anyone’s disappearance are the most critical.” Guthrie has been missing since Feb. 1, and authorities in Pima County have said they believe she was taken from her Tucson, Arizona, home.
Patel’s criticism centered on evidence handling. He faulted Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos for sending DNA samples to a private lab in Florida rather than to the FBI forensic lab in Quantico, Virginia, and said he had an aircraft “ready to move it immediately through the night.” He also said, “We have Quantico, best lab in the world.”
The sheriff’s office pushed back, saying there was no delay in coordination with the FBI and that decisions about processing evidence were made on scene based on operational needs. It said, “Sheriff Nanos responded to the scene the night of the incident, providing immediate local leadership and oversight,” and that “A member of the FBI Task Force was also notified and present at that scene working alongside our personnel.” The office added that “The FBI was promptly notified by both our department and the Guthrie family” and that coordination with the bureau began without delay.
The dispute has widened as the handling of a hair sample tied to the case has come under scrutiny. The FBI said last month that it had received a hair sample collected in February, and an FBI official said the bureau requested it more than two months ago. That official said the sheriff’s office sent the sample to a private lab in Florida, which transferred an original hair sample to the FBI Laboratory for testing eleven weeks later.
Patel also described direct involvement with the digital side of the search, saying he called Google leadership and asked to access cache and deep data before it was deleted. He said the FBI worked with Google to produce the first image of the suspect captured tampering with the camera at Guthrie’s front door on the morning she disappeared. “That’s why you have that image, because the FBI worked with Google to put that image out,” he said.
Guthrie is the mother of Today host Savannah Guthrie, which has kept the case in the public eye far beyond Tucson. The fight now is not only over what happened on Feb. 1, but over whether the most important early window in a missing-person investigation was used the way it should have been.
