FBI Director Kash Patel allegedly pressed his public-affairs team to repeatedly answer social-media accounts criticizing him with the bureau’s performance statistics, including an X account called “Retard Finder,” according to an internal text exchange buried inside an FBI release concerning its review of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
The February 5 exchange shows Patel focused not only on the criticism but on how many people were seeing it. His own public-affairs chief pushed back, ultimately telling the director that responding to the account would “look bad on you.”
The records are contained in Part 06 of an FBI Vault collection covering the bureau’s review of its Epstein investigative holdings. The FBI listed that installment as released on July 24, meaning the documents themselves have been public for weeks. The link to the website has apparently been removed.
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The conversation began after Patel sent Benjamin Williamson, then the FBI’s public-affairs chief, a link to a February 4 post showing Patel’s official portrait alongside an insult.
“His retard rating just went to all time highs. Congratulations Kash,” the account wrote.
Williamson responded that it was an “Epstein didn’t kill himself” bot account and indicated that was the source of some of the criticism.
Patel was not persuaded. “277k responses are not bots,” he wrote.
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Williamson corrected the metric. The number Patel was looking at represented views, not replies. According to Williamson, the post had roughly 400 responses.
Patel then broadened his instruction beyond the single account.
“What i asked you and your team to do is find them, and post our record year results back at them all, continuously,” Patel wrote, before asking whether the team had been doing so.
Williamson’s answer was no. “We’re not responding to ‘findretards,’” he wrote, adding that doing so “would look bad on you.”
“It is about the number of views,” Patel replied, arguing that people encountering the posts also needed to see the FBI’s statistics.
The exchange provides an unusually direct look at how personally the FBI director was tracking hostile social-media traffic and how he wanted the bureau’s communications operation to counter it. It also shows Williamson resisting that strategy on reputational grounds rather than simply executing Patel’s request.
Raw Story reported on the messages Friday, describing Williamson as refusing Patel’s instruction to engage the account.
The account was not new to the Epstein fight. Gizmodo reported in July 2025 that Retard Finder had mocked both Patel and then-Deputy Director Dan Bongino amid anger on the political right over the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files.
The irony is difficult to miss. A collection of government records created during the FBI’s review of one of the most politically explosive investigations in the country also preserved the FBI director debating with his communications chief over whether the bureau should spend its time replying to an account named “Retard Finder.”
And, according to the texts, Patel’s concern was straightforward. People were seeing the post; he wanted them seeing his stats too.
