FBI Director Kash Patel publicly accused the Pima County Sheriff's Department of shutting federal investigators out of the Nancy Guthrie disappearance for the first four days, a window he called the most important stretch in any missing-persons case. Patel made the claim during an interview with Sean Hannity released Tuesday, laying out a detailed account of what he described as a local department that refused help while the 84-year-old mother of Today show co-host Savannah Guthrie remained missing.
The investigation has now stretched past three months with no arrest, no confirmed suspect identification, and no public accounting of Nancy Guthrie's whereabouts. What began as a missing-persons report on February 1 has turned into a case defined as much by the friction between local and federal law enforcement as by the disappearance itself.
Patel's criticism landed hard. He told Hannity that the FBI offered its resources immediately and was rebuffed by Sheriff Chris Nanos, as reported by The U.S. Sun:
"Here's how these cases work: it is a state matter, it's a state and local law enforcement matter. What we, the FBI do is say, 'Hey, we're here to help. What do you need? What can we do?'"
For four days, Patel said, the answer from Pima County was effectively: nothing.
Nancy Guthrie was last seen the night of January 31, when her daughter Annie Guthrie and son-in-law Tommaso Cioni dropped her off at her Arizona home. By February 1, she was reported missing. Authorities later revealed that her doorbell camera and pacemaker app had been disconnected in the middle of the night, details that pointed early on toward something far worse than a voluntary departure.
Patel stressed the stakes of those opening hours. "The first 48 hours of anyone's disappearance are the most critical," he said. Yet the FBI, by his account, spent those hours, and two more days beyond them, waiting for an invitation that did not come.
He said he deployed substantial federal resources anyway. "I launched hundreds of agents and intel staff to Phoenix and Tucson just for this case, just to be on standby, just to do the canvassing and we said we'll take the DNA," Patel told Hannity. He added that he had an aircraft on the ground ready to ship evidence to the FBI's Quantico lab immediately.
None of that happened on the timeline Patel wanted. The sheriff's department chose instead to send DNA evidence found outside Guthrie's home to a private lab in Florida, a decision that drew pointed questioning from Hannity and open frustration from Patel.
The evidence trail tells its own story. Investigators found blood, a glove containing a DNA profile, and a propped-open back door at Guthrie's home. Security camera footage was obtained once the FBI became involved. But the physical evidence, the kind that can identify or eliminate suspects, went to a private Florida laboratory rather than the FBI's own forensic operation at Quantico.
Fox News reported that Patel argued the FBI could have processed the DNA within days and potentially generated better or more complete results. "Our lab's just better than any other private lab out there," Patel said.
Patel acknowledged the legal reality, DNA routing was the local department's call. "Again, it's a state and local matter so it's their call on where to send the DNA," he said. But his tone left little doubt about what he thought of that call.
The FBI did eventually receive a hair sample from the scene, 11 weeks into the investigation. By then, the private lab in Florida had shipped its DNA samples to the bureau as well. Days after that handoff, the Pima County Sheriff's Department renewed its public appeal for anyone with information to come forward.
Patel was direct about the cost of the delay. "We would have analyzed it in within days and maybe gotten better information or more information," he said. "And we didn't get a chance to do that. I understand everybody's frustration."
Patel is not the only voice raising concerns about how the case was handled in its earliest days. An unnamed whistleblower recently told NewsNation that the investigators initially assigned to the scene lacked the experience the case demanded.
"From what I understand, that the people that were there on the scene were not tenured homicide detectives. They didn't have a lot of experience in homicide at that point, to include the supervisor who, from my understanding, never investigated a homicide before being installed as the supervisor for the homicide unit."
If accurate, that account raises a separate but related question: even setting aside the FBI dispute, did the Pima County Sheriff's Department assign its best people to one of the highest-profile disappearances in the state's recent history?
Patel's willingness to go public with his criticism is itself notable. The FBI director has faced intense political scrutiny since taking office, and his public posture on this case, naming the sheriff, describing the timeline, detailing what the FBI offered and what was refused, represents a level of operational transparency unusual for the bureau.
The Pima County Sheriff's Department has pushed back, though its public statements have been measured. A department spokesperson told The U.S. Sun on Friday:
"The Pima County Sheriff's Department continues to work closely with the FBI as investigators follow up on leads, review information, and pursue the facts surrounding this case."
Officials also told The U.S. Sun that the search for Guthrie remains "active and ongoing." Earlier in the investigation, Newsmax reported that Sheriff Nanos himself stated publicly: "We do believe that Nancy was taken from her home against her will, and that's where we're at."
Annie Guthrie and Tommaso Cioni have been ruled out as suspects. Beyond that, the department has offered little public detail about who might be responsible.
That silence has not stopped the case from generating noise elsewhere. Two ransom notes were sent to TMZ in early April. It remained unclear whether the claims in those letters had any merit. The FBI, meanwhile, worked with Google to recover and release doorbell-camera imagery. The Washington Examiner reported that the recovered footage showed a masked, possibly armed suspect wearing gloves and a backpack near Guthrie's home, someone who appeared to tamper with the camera, covering it and placing branches over it.
Patel described that image release as a direct product of FBI involvement. "That's why you have that image, because the FBI worked with Google to put that image out," he said.
The Nancy Guthrie case arrives at a moment when Patel himself has been the target of adversarial attention from multiple directions. Iran-linked hackers breached his personal emails and published private photos online. Before that, revelations emerged that the Biden-era FBI swept up two years of his calls, texts, and financial records under the Jack Smith probe.
None of that context diminishes the substance of what Patel said about the Guthrie investigation. If anything, it makes his decision to speak publicly, and to name a specific sheriff, all the more deliberate. Patel is not a man who lacks awareness of how public statements can be used against him.
President Trump weighed in early in the case as well. Newsmax reported that Trump wrote: "I am directing ALL Federal Law Enforcement to be at the family's, and Local Law Enforcement's, complete disposal, IMMEDIATELY." That directive, combined with Patel's deployment of hundreds of agents and intelligence staff, suggests the federal government treated this case with maximum seriousness from the outset, and was told, at least initially, to stand down.
Sheriff Nanos also faces separate institutional pressure. He was hit with a $1 million lawsuit in March from an inmate alleging negligence, a detail that, while unrelated to the Guthrie case, adds to the picture of a department under strain.
The open questions in this case remain large. Who took Nancy Guthrie? What did the DNA evidence ultimately reveal? Why did the sheriff's department send that evidence to a private lab in Florida instead of accepting the FBI's offer to process it at Quantico? And what, if anything, was lost in those first four days when the FBI says it was locked out?
Patel offered no definitive answers. But he made one thing clear: the FBI was ready, willing, and resourced, and the local department chose a different path.
When an 84-year-old woman vanishes from her home in the middle of the night and the clock is ticking, the last thing any family needs is a turf war. The first thing they need is every available resource, deployed without hesitation. By Patel's account, that is exactly what was refused.
