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WASHINGTON — The White House directed FBI Director Kash Patel to oversee a leak investigation into reporting by the New York Times about security issues with the new Air Force One, leading to a flurry of subpoenas to several Times reporters Friday night, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

Patel scuttled a planned trip to Chicago and spent roughly eight hours at the White House on Friday, running the investigation from there rather than FBI headquarters — a major departure from historical practice. Patel also briefed senior administration officials on the investigation, two people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal discussions.

The White House’s deep involvement in the case came after officials said President Donald Trump was enraged about the coverage of the Qatari-donated plane, which the Times reported Thursday lacks the same defensive countermeasures of the previous Air Force One.

Trump flew on the new jet to a NATO meeting in Turkey this past week but was forced to change to the old plane when he departed because of Secret Service concerns, as the Times reported Wednesday.

Patel’s role in the investigation, in close coordination with top administration officials, reflects a further dismantling of the wall that had separated the White House and the FBI in previous administrations. The government’s effort to immediately seek information from journalists, when such cases are typically centered first on identifying potential internal wrongdoing by officials, comes as the Trump administration has intensified pressure on news organizations.

In response to a request for comment, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said, “President Trump is laser focused on helping the American people and keeping them safe. That will always be his priority.”

Emily Covington, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs, sought to downplay the unusual nature of the subpoenas, some of which were delivered late Friday directly to the doors of the reporters’ homes.

“Every administration has addressed the crime of leaking national security information,” she said in a statement. “To the extent that we have to investigate breaches of national security, that’s something that we will continue to do.”

She added: “To be clear, reporters are not the targets. Those leaking classified information are.”

Ben Williamson, an FBI spokesperson, said in a statement: “Director Patel and White House officials agreed to meet on Friday at the White House to brief an ongoing matter. While we would not comment further, other speculative reporting regarding the nature of the meeting is absolutely false.”

One person briefed on the conversations said that Patel had his own concerns about the type of information publicly disclosed about the plane. Another person said that Patel went to the White House of his own volition to oversee the investigation.

Trump had sought the rapid retrofitting of the Qatari-donated 747 after he learned that two new Boeing planes that were supposed to replace the aging ones used as presidential aircraft would be delayed for years.

Trump has basked in the luxury of the new plane, which is more than a decade old but has the kind of opulent furnishings the president prefers. He has repeatedly described the Qatari jet as cost free to the United States. But in reality, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were spent to upgrade its security systems. Officials have said that he plans to take the plane with him as a donation to his presidential library when he leaves office.

While Trump has said the Qatari plane was upgraded with the necessary security “bells and whistles,” the Times reported Thursday that it lacks the defensive countermeasures that were security features of the old model, including its advanced antimissile capabilities.

Experts said the absence of the capabilities creates a potential risk when Air Force One is flying overseas, not only for the president but for the large entourage of White House staff members, Secret Service officials, journalists, and guests who fly aboard.

After the Secret Service urged him to fly the old Air Force One out of Ankara, Turkey, Trump announced that he was making a swap in aircraft. In a post on social media, he claimed that he was taking the older plane to the United Kingdom for “old time’s sake” and that he wanted to show the new jet to U.S. troops on a military base there.

Once he landed at Mildenhall Air Force Base in England, he walked from the older plane to the Qatari-donated jet, which transported him back to the United States.

When the Times and other news organizations began reporting this past week on the security issues with the new plane, the president was livid, according to an official with knowledge of his comments who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Before the Times’ first article was published, a senior official at the FBI contacted a reporter and a senior editor to ask that the article be held, calling it an issue of national security. The FBI official declined to explain the security issue. The official also asked the Times to disclose its sources for the article. The newspaper refused to do so.

On Friday, after Patel left the White House, he posted a message on social media confirming that he had been there, and said that “the fake news will find out why soon.”

That night, 48 hours after the Times had published the first article on the new plane, its reporters were served with subpoenas demanding that they provide evidence before a grand jury Wednesday.

In a statement, David McCraw, the Times’ top newsroom lawyer, said: “This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”

The rapid escalation of the case is a sharp departure from past national security leak investigations. Typically, officials first seek to establish how many people have had access to the information that was made public. Depending on the size of that group, prosecutors then attempt to determine ways to eliminate potential suspects from the list. In past leak cases, such efforts have often been abandoned if the pool of potential leakers is simply too large to scrutinize.

Historically, the Justice Department has sought to subpoena reporters only as a last resort after other reasonable options have been exhausted.

The Trump administration has pushed for a number of leak investigations, several of which have been conducted by federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia. Those efforts, which included subpoenas to reporters from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, foundered in the face of resistance from a federal judge, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. Federal prosecutors withdrew them last month.

The subpoenas issued to Times reporters Friday were from a different jurisdiction, the Southern District of New York, and were sought by Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, who was recently nominated by Trump to serve as the director of national intelligence.

The subpoenas seek the reporters’ testimony on the same day Clayton is set to face a Senate confirmation hearing for his new post. The same day, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, is set to take part in a confirmation hearing to serve as attorney general on a permanent basis.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

As the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts prepares for major renovations, former project managers there have sent Congress internal documents that they say show how the institution bypassed government contracting norms in work carried out under President Donald Trump.

The documents — sent to a Senate and a House committee last month by lawyers for unidentified clients referred to as whistleblowers — detail how vendors were selected for work without competitive bidding under rationales that are depicted as flawed.

In one case, a center official described a company chosen for flooring work as the “only identified firm on the mid-Atlantic seaboard that maintains a fully vertically integrated model, vital for acoustic continuity, architectural uniformity, and operational agility.”

In a letter to the committees, lawyers for the former project managers say their clients question whether the business, located in South Carolina, was the only one available that was qualified to do the flooring work.

The letter says the center’s decision to skip bidding in another case was designed to help meet deadlines important to the president, such as the Kennedy Center Honors in December, which he hosted.

“Renovations were rushed to meet the deadlines driven by the president’s desire to host official events at the center,” the letter says. “Federal contracting laws and regulations were ignored.”

A statement from the Kennedy Center defended its practices, saying that the institution operates with rigorous financial oversight and that the assertions by the whistleblowers that contracting standards had been bypassed were incorrect.

“As America’s cultural center, the institution makes every decision guided by responsible stewardship and an unwavering commitment to its patrons and the nation it proudly serves,” Roma Daravi, a spokesperson, said in a statement. “We remain fully committed to transparency and to delivering the critical improvements that will preserve this institution for generations to come.”

Liz Huston, a White House spokesperson, responded to the allegations by accusing past management of allowing the center to fall into disrepair.

“President Trump did what Democrats wouldn’t,” she said in a statement. “After decades of neglect, he committed the bold leadership and proper resources to fix the Kennedy Center and start the renovations of the finest performing arts facility in the world.”

Trump, a developer by trade, has taken an intense interest in remaking the center, helping to secure $257 million from Congress last year for renovations. In one case cited in the letter, a new bathroom floor in one of the center’s three presidential boxes was ordered torn up last year and redone after the White House complained about the beige color of the tiles. (The email’s subject line was “tile emergency,” alongside a red siren emoji.)

“This is a big undertaking for my department to remove the floor tile that was just installed,” the Kennedy Center’s operations and maintenance director replied in a March 2025 email, noting that the beige tiles had been approved by a White House designer.

In a response email, a White House official confirmed the directive to replace the beige tile with white. (The work was unrelated to the South Carolina flooring company.)

The center said in a statement that the changes were a standard design adjustment that caused “zero unnecessary burden on the taxpayer.”

The White House decided to remodel the presidential boxes days after Trump took over as chairperson of the center’s board, according to the documents sent to Congress. The plans included gold plumbing fixtures in the bathrooms, gold covers for electric outlets, marble baseboards, and the tile flooring paid for by the White House, with much of the labor provided by the center.

The 82-page submission to Congress was made under a law designed to protect federal employees who disclose allegations of wrongdoing from retaliation. The lawyers who sent it, David Seide and Dana Gold, work for a nonprofit that represents government whistleblowers.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.), the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, which received the submission, wrote to the Kennedy Center on Thursday demanding information related to the renovations. Whitehouse, an ex officio member of the center’s board, said the submission raised “serious questions” about whether public funds were being spent properly.

Nothing in the submission suggests that the firms selected without bidding have any personal ties to Trump or his family, or that the vendors played any role in the decision-making process under which work was awarded.

Reached by phone, Kent Rogerson, who runs the South Carolina flooring company, declined to comment, citing a nondisclosure agreement.

Although the Kennedy Center is run as a nonprofit, it has, like Smithsonian museums, traditionally followed federal contracting rules because its building is federal property. But the documents include a new policy, adopted in November, that states the center was exempt from federal rules and replaces them with new procedures.

Compared with federal contracting regulations, the new policy relaxes the requirements under which sole-source contracts can be awarded, according to several government procurement experts, by adding to the rationales for when it is permissible. Under the policy, contracts can be awarded without bidding when “circumstances beyond the center’s control require an immediate award” or “the requirement is unique or has a compelling business interest.”

The center said in its statement that it had confirmed with the Office of Management and Budget that, as an independent entity, it was not bound by federal contracting regulations and that it had updated its procurement policy to be both fair and agile when making renovations.

Trump announced that the center would be shuttered for two years for the project, starting around Independence Day. But a federal judge temporarily blocked the closure after finding that the center’s board, composed largely of the president’s aides and allies, had not properly scrutinized his plan before approving it. The White House statement on Friday accused the judge of being “radical” and allowing the center to remain in disrepair.

Kennedy Center officials have described renovations to address problems such as water leaks and outdated equipment as urgently needed. The president has said the work would elevate a “dilapidated” building to the “highest level of Success, Beauty, and Grandeur.”

The administration’s contracting practices have been under scrutiny. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool project, for example, has been carried out through multiple no-bid contracts. To exempt the project from competitive bidding, administration officials said it needed to be finished in time for the country’s 250th birthday celebrations.

One contract cited by the former Kennedy Center managers was valued at $4.4 million and awarded last fall for work that included painting the building’s exterior gold columns. Trump has taken issue with their “fake gold color,” and internal documents said they should be repainted white before the Kennedy Center Honors.

The painting was done by Cypress Painting Systems, a company in Maryland that has done work under prior administrations. But lawyers for the former project managers reported that the work began before any contract had been awarded.

The contract was later awarded, they said, to a company that primarily works as a furniture dealership, Washington Office Interiors, which used Cypress as its subcontractor.

The interiors company had been hired through a Small Business Administration program that enables “socially and economically disadvantaged” companies to receive sole-source contracts in some settings. Whitehouse, in his letter, said it appeared that the contract was configured this way because Cypress did not have the same certification that would enable it to receive a sole-source contract through that program.

In its statement, the Kennedy Center said the contractual arrangement had fully complied with all Small Business Administration guidelines.

Barbara Barry, who runs Washington Office Interiors, said in an email that she was not authorized to discuss the contract but that her company had been providing construction and furniture services to federal agencies since long before Trump was elected.

Robin Mertz, president of Cypress Painting, deferred questions to the Kennedy Center.

Cypress Painting also installed Trump’s name on the building’s marble facade, under a separate arrangement. The name was removed in June by order of a federal judge, and the center is in the process of appealing.

Matt Floca, the center’s executive director, has denied that the columns were painted simply to satisfy the president. He has said that the center’s leaders had long wanted to address structural degradation and “mismatched paint jobs,” and that hiring subcontractors is standard practice.

“This is not just a random action,” Floca testified at a court hearing this year. “It was something that we had been planning for before this leadership was in place.”

Floca has also attested to the special qualifications of Low Country Flooring of Pawleys Island, S.C., the flooring company that was selected without competition to provide services to the Kennedy Center for five years, according to the documents provided to the committees.

The purchase agreement, not a formal contract, outlined work worth up to $8 million in restoring and replacing hardwood flooring.

The business has assisted on high-profile projects in Washington, including work on the Supreme Court and the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium near the National Mall, a federal building used for galas and conferences.

The center said that the company was selected after what it described as exhaustive market research and that it was capable of purchasing directly from timber mills to avoid markups on materials.

Last year, on a trip to Washington before the company was selected, its representatives posted photos of themselves and Trump at the Kennedy Center on Facebook.

In one photo, Jamie Lambert, who helps run the company, is shown praying with Trump inside the center’s concert hall. His colleague, Rogerson, commented on the image online.

“He asked,” Rogerson wrote, “and the president said of course.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.