You may never have heard of Alexis Wilkins, but she is one of the best-protected “country music singers” in the United States. F.B.I. tactical agents have ferried her to a resort in Britain before a dinner at Windsor Castle and to an appointment at a hair salon in Nashville. Last April, agents in two SUVs stood guard outside a senior center in Ronald Reagan’s boyhood home of Dixon, Ill., while she sang for a few dozen young conservatives.
Ms. Wilkins, 27, is the girlfriend of Kash Patel, President Trump’s 46-year-old F.B.I. director, whose personal use of government jets and F.B.I. agents for himself and Ms. Wilkins has led to growing questions even inside the Trump administration.
“When Kash got confirmed, life changed for her,” said Dianna Muller, the founder of the group Women for Gun Rights, which briefly employed Ms. Wilkins as a spokeswoman.
To an extent not previously reported, Ms. Wilkins is escorted in her travels by Special Weapons and Tactics team members drawn from F.B.I. field offices around the country. SWAT teams are chiefly trained to arrest violent criminals, free hostages and thwart terrorists. But Mr. Patel’s demand that rotating SWAT teams provide his girlfriend with security for singing appearances, personal engagements and errands is unprecedented in the F.B.I., former agents said.
Christopher O’Leary, a former senior executive in the F.B.I.’s counterterrorism division, said that while threats could temporarily change that posture, it was unheard-of for the F.B.I. to provide open-ended, around-the-clock SWAT coverage for a girlfriend living in another city. “If you want to be a celebrity or a social media star, get your own security,” he said in an interview. “The inappropriateness of this cannot be overstated.”
Even more so than the public valet service, though, this is my favorite part of the story:
Ms. Wilkins, the daughter of a financial specialist in the aerospace industry (her mother) and a global consumer products executive for Gillette (her father), had lived in London and Switzerland, and for a time attended elementary school at Collège du Léman in Geneva. She is originally from the Boston suburb of Weymouth, but likes to emphasize her time living in Arkansas.
COMMENT
She is originally from Boston, has lived in London and Switzerland, attended a private girls; school in Geneva and she’s a COUNTRY MUSIC SINGER?
Just when you think Trump and the people around him can’t get any more fake, along comes something like this.
