US Politics
Kash Patel went on secret trip to China last week amid criticism of his private jet usage
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FBI Director Kash Patel flew to China in secret over the weekend to meet with Chinese officials and discuss its role in the illicit fentanyl trade, according to a report.
Patel flew into Beijing on Friday and met with officials on Saturday, Reuters reports, noting that neither China’s Foreign Ministry nor the U.S. embassy in the Chinese capital has acknowledged the fly-in visit.
The Independent has contacted the bureau for further comment.
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The development comes after Patel’s use of FBI jets for personal business came under the spotlight when he was accused of using a bureau plane to travel to watch his country singer girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, perform at a wrestling event at Pennsylvania State University.
The director reacted angrily to reporting about the incident, interpreting it as an attack on his partner, whom he defended on social media and insisted was a “true patriot” and a “rock-solid conservative.”
President Donald Trump has vowed to crack down on fentanyl, a synthetic drug used in pain relief that has been widely blamed for deaths associated with the opioid epidemic in North America. According to the CDC, 48,000 Americans died by overdosing on drug mixtures that contained fentanyl in 2024.
Earlier this year, the president imposed stiff tariffs on Canada and Mexico after accusing them of not doing enough to prevent cross-border smuggling of opioids into the U.S. and on China for failing to stop its corporations from supplying its chemical components, known as precursor chemicals, to gangs who trade in them, notably Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels.
China has defended its efforts to combat the problem over the years of on-off cooperation with the U.S., but argues that it has strong drug laws and no equivalent crisis among its own population, so it does not see it as a priority, according to Zongyuan Zoe Liu, a senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The superpower classified fentanyl as a controlled narcotic in 2019 and added some of the ingredients used to concoct it to its catalogue of controlled chemicals.
On Monday, following Patel’s reported visit, China’s Commerce Ministry announced that it would be making adjustments to the list and introducing a new export license requirement for individuals seeking to send specific chemical components to the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
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The authority also said in its notice that it would tighten oversight of the production and export of drug-making chemicals not currently on its control list to ensure that they too are placed out of reach of criminal channels, repeating a warning to traffickers against shipping ingredients to “high risk” countries like the U.S.
Trump met with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea, in late October during his tour of the Far East and told reporters subsequently that his counterpart had agreed during their two-hour summit to work “very hard to stop the flow” of fentanyl, triumphantly pronouncing their meeting a “12 out of 10” session.
Xi was rewarded for his willingness to cooperate with the president’s effort to stamp out the black market for the drug by securing a 10 percent discount on U.S. tariffs on Chinese products, down from 57 percent to 47 percent.
The two parties also agreed that China would resume the purchase of American soybeans and pause its latest rare earth export curbs for a year.
