FBI Director Kash Patel has claimed that his agents were kept out of the Nancy Guthrie investigation in Pima County, Arizona, for several days at the start of the case, telling a US podcast on 5 May 2026 that the sheriff's department did not initially cooperate with the bureau's efforts to assist.
After more than three months of often opaque progress in the hunt for answers over what happened to Guthrie, a case that has gripped US true-crime followers and drawn intense scrutiny of local law enforcement, the Pima County Sheriff's Department has formally led the investigation, with the FBI brought in as a supporting agency rather than the primary authority. That structure has fed weeks of speculation about whether information and evidence were being shared effectively between local and federal teams.
