Kash Patel said the FBI was kept out of the investigation into the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie for the first four days after she went missing, sharpening a public dispute with Pima County authorities over how quickly the case was handled. In a new interview on Sean Hannity’s podcast, Patel said the first 48 hours of any disappearance are the most critical and argued the FBI should have been involved sooner.
Patel said he had an aircraft ready to move evidence through the night and criticized Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos for sending DNA material to a private lab in Florida instead of the FBI forensic lab in Quantico, Virginia. He said, “We have Quantico, best lab in the world,” and added that he understood people’s frustration, but insisted the bureau was not brought in promptly enough.
The stakes in the case are high because Nancy 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 also said the first images of a suspect were obtained after the FBI worked with Google to reach data before it was deleted, a move he described as crucial to the investigation.
The sheriff’s office pushed back hard on Patel’s account. It said Nanos responded to the scene the night of the incident and that a member of the FBI Task Force was there working alongside local personnel. The office also said the FBI was promptly notified by both the department and the Guthrie family, and that coordination with the bureau began without delay. The FBI has separately said it received a hair sample tied to the case that was collected in February, more than two months ago, but that the Pima County Sheriff’s Office sent it to a private lab in Florida, which transferred an original hair sample to the FBI Laboratory 11 weeks later.
That gap matters because this case has become as much about evidence handling as about the search for Nancy Guthrie. The conflicting accounts from the sheriff’s office and the FBI leave one central point unresolved: whether the lost time at the start of the case slowed the hunt for her, or whether the agencies were working together from the beginning as local authorities say. For now, the family’s case sits at the center of a familiar law-enforcement fight over who moved fast enough when every hour counted.