Episode Details

Last August, in the warm Pacific waters of Pearl Harbor, the Director of the FBI of the United States of America put on a mask and a snorkel and went for a swim. Navy SEALs led the excursion with two boats, while Kash Patel and nine other people were in the water for a thirty-minute sightseeing swim. The Defense Department, in its own internal emails, called it a "VIP Snorkel." Because approximately forty feet below him lay hundreds of American sailors and Marines in their final resting place, where they have been since the morning of December 7, 1941.

Based on the events of 5-16-2026

The Breakdown:

• FBI Director Kash Patel snorkeled directly above the USS Arizona, a war grave with the same legal status as Arlington National Cemetery
• Sailors, officers, and Marines are still entombed inside the wreck after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941
• The Arizona still leaks oil over 80 years later, called the "Black Tears of the Arizona," and the Park Service has chosen not to drain the tanks because doing so would disturb the dead
• Snorkeling and diving are prohibited at the memorial. Visitors are not even allowed to wear swimwear
• The only people normally permitted in the water are National Park Service and Navy divers, or Navy divers placing the urns of Arizona survivors into the wreck
• Not even family members of the men who died aboard the USS Arizona are allowed into that water
• Navy veteran William McBride called it "as disrespectful as playing kickball on top of the graves at Arlington"
• Marine veteran Hack Albertson, one of the few trained to dive on the Arizona: "It's like having a bachelor party at a church"
• The FBI never disclosed Patel's two extra days in Hawaii. It only came out through reporters pulling government emails
• Navy spokesperson claims the Navy "was not able to track down who initiated" the excursion
• How this connects to a long pattern of Patel scandals: taxpayer-funded planes, his girlfriend, allegations of heavy drinking and disappearing from work
• Trump in 2018 calling fallen American soldiers "losers" and "suckers" at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery
• Trump at Arlington on Memorial Day 2017, standing among the graves of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking John Kelly: "I don't get it. What was in it for them?"
• Why this is not a series of unrelated scandals but a worldview
• Thousands marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma today and continued to the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery
• They came in response to the Supreme Court's April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act
• Kirk Carrington, 75, who was a teenager chased through Selma streets on Bloody Sunday in 1965, was there again today
• Evan Milligan, lead plaintiff in the Alabama redistricting case: "We have to accept that this is the new reality. We don't have to accept that this will be the reality for the next 10 years or two years or forever"

That water is hallowed ground. A military cemetery. To those who have lost a loved one defending our country, those who sacrificed years of time with spouses, parents, children, and siblings, those who still carry the grief of someone who never made it home: you and your loved ones deserve better. Our country deserves better.

*This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.

More on my daily Substack at: https://heatherdelaneyreese.substack.com/