FBI Director Kash Patel is planning a trip to Russia later this year, likely in mid-October, according to a report.

Two insiders cited by Politico said Patel is scheduled to visit on October 14 and 15, a matter of weeks before the midterm elections at home, and will make appearances in both Moscow and St Petersburg.

It is unclear whether he will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin or his entourage during his stay, the insiders said, but he is expected to be hosted by the FSB, the main successor organization to the Soviet Union’s KGB. Patel has yet to respond to the report, and the FBI and DOJ have been contacted for comment.

The reported plans emerge at a tense moment for U.S.-Russia relations, with the two sides once more at odds over the Ukraine war as lawmakers on Capitol Hill push for tougher sanctions as punishment for Putin’s invasion of the country’s western neighbor in February 2022.

President Donald Trump’s top negotiators Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have made regular trips to Russia to try to draw a line under the conflict over the last 18 months and the president himself met with Putin in Alaska last August, all to no avail.

Patel is already facing criticism over the reported trip, with MAGA influencer Laura Loomer posting on X: “Our FBI Director, who was an unregistered lobbyist for Qatar, is heading to Russia as the White House prepares to impose more sanctions on Russia, which is supplying Iran with weapons to murder U.S. soldiers. Nothing to see here.”

Former Democratic strategist Jon Cooper wrote on the same platform: “Can ANYONE think of a legitimate reason for him to visit Putin’s playground? I wonder if ‘consulting with his handlers’ will be on the official itinerary?”

The Occupy Democrats campaign group meanwhile labelled Patel’s visit a “traitorous boondoggle” and claimed he was planning to “cozy up with the very security apparatus his own agency is supposed to be defending America against.”

The Politico report comes days after Trump delivered a primetime televised address in which he again claimed that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him with the help of foreign interference, singling out China for particular criticism while offering little by way of concrete evidence.

When the White House posted declassified documents on its website to support the president’s case, one turned out to be an assessment from the National Intelligence Council that concluded that Russia had indeed attempted to meddle in the vote six years ago – but to Trump’s advantage, not Joe Biden’s.

The last FBI director known to have traveled to Russia was Robert Mueller in 2013, who was later appointed special counsel to investigate the current president’s alleged ties to the Kremlin amid accusations it had intervened to help him beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Like Trump, Patel has long denounced the affair as the “Russiagate hoax” and even written a trilogy of children’s books about it entitled The Plot Against the King, having risen to prominence as a staffer on the House Intelligence Committee when it investigated the matter in 2017 and 2018.

Republicans on the panel ultimately found that Russia had mounted an influence campaign to “undermine the U.S. liberal democratic order” but broke with the intelligence community’s opinion that it had sought to boost Trump.

When Patel was nominated to lead the bureau early last year, it was reported that he had once received a $25,000 payment from Igor Lopatonok, a Russian filmmaker with ties to Putin, after contributing to the latter’s documentary on the existence of the “deep state” in Washington, D.C.

Since being confirmed, Patel’s travel arrangements have consistently come under scrutiny, from his appearance at the Winter Olympics spraying beer around the locker room with the gold medal-winning U.S. men’s hockey team to his being accused of using government jets to fly his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, to singing engagements around the country.