John Boozman

It was a big Saturday at the Arkansas Capitol, where FBI Director Kash Patel rolled in for meetings with Sens. Tom Cotton and John Boozman, state law enforcement bigwigs and Republican elected officials including Attorney General Tim Griffin and Secretary of State Cole Jester.

Select media was allowed into the Old Supreme Court chamber for a round table discussion with Patel at noon. The Arkansas Times did not make the invite list, but KARK did the good work of livestreaming it, and you can watch here.

It was more fun out in the marble hallways and on the front sidewalk with the protesting riffraff, anyway. A respectable turnout of 40 or so Arkansans whipped up some pretty decent hand-lettered signs, donned their cold-weather layers and came out to lay their eyes on the petite Patel and his weekend entourage. How often do Arkansans who aren’t wealthy donors get to see their U.S. senators? Not often! So even for the people who drove in from Hot Springs, it was worth the field trip.

Why is the director of the FBI in Little Rock? State Sen. Breanne Davis (R-Russellville) said immediately after the round table that Patel had fielded some questions about threats from China and talked about the Trump administration’s plans to fan out more federal agents beyond Washington, D.C., and station them more evenly across the country.

Worries that Patel, Cotton and Boozman might be in town to prep Arkansas officials for a Minnesota-like occupation are not founded, Davis said.

“I don’t think it had anything to do with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement],” Davis said. “I think it had to do with the role of the FBI, and what different people are seeing who are on the ground doing the work.”

There’s also a personal reason for Patel to take an interest in Arkansas. Alexis Wilkins, his girlfriend, is a country singer and political commentator who apparently spent many of her formative years here.

Security was extra-tight at the Capitol Saturday, with a very cute police dog sniffing bags at the door and a roughly 1:1 ratio of police officers to protesters.

Nobody got arrested, but that doesn’t mean the protesters weren’t assertive about what brought them out on a frigid weekend day. Loud and prolonged booing followed Patel and the senators down the marble steps, and protest music blared from speakers in the bed of a pickup parked out front.