FBI director Kash Patel was in St. Louis today, but he was a no-show at a press conference at the bureau’s local field office, despite some journalists saying they were led to believe Patel would attend. Many reporters turned up—and grumbled their discontent when Patel didn’t.
When asked about Patel’s absence, a spokesperson for U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt, who co-led the press conference on local crime initiatives, said they weren’t sure what leadership would be present at the conference, and that the director’s schedule was out of their control. An FBI public affairs official told some reporters after the conference that their office wasn’t the one that told the media Patel would be there.
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But reporters did see the homecoming of the FBI’s co-deputy director, Andrew Bailey, who left a job as the state’s attorney general to join the bureau under Patel two months ago. He is co-deputy with Dan Bongino. Bailey and Schmitt met with Patel in St. Louis earlier in the day, along with local FBI agents and law enforcement agencies, a Schmitt spokesperson said.
The pair briefed local media on a St. Louis area-focused mission called “Summer Heat,” started under Patel’s tenure and tasked with “crushing violent crime” in St. Louis. While they were unsure on the exact timeline, Bailey said that mission covered “the past 90 days, at least.” (An FBI spokesperson later clarified it ran from May to September of this year.)
“The arrest is just one part of the operation,” Bailey said. “There’s an intelligence-gathering phase, there’s a deconfliction that goes on with our local partners, so a lot of the front-end work would’ve occurred outside of that amount of time.”
Summer Heat coincided, at least in part, with an unspecified double-digit percent increase in the number of FBI agents in St. Louis, which began in August. Schmitt, not mentioning specific numbers, said that was “the largest number of permanent agents per capita” in the U.S.
A slide behind Bailey and Schmitt, both once attorneys general for the state, showed the numbers they reported from the “Summer Heat” initiative: 276 arrests, 111 “weapons retrieved,” 204 new investigations, and 102 “operations.” The slide also showed 259,699 grams of methamphetamine and 2,604 grams of fentanyl reportedly seized by the FBI.
Overall, the local FBI office saw a 71 percent year-to-year increase in fiscal year 2025 violent crime arrests, Bailey said, 545 total. The St. Louis’ field office is also making more arrests than similar “peer” offices in the FBI, he said.
