You would be hard-pressed to find someone in the Trump administration enjoying their job more than FBI Director Kash Patel. Despite holding one of the most high-pressure roles in the federal government, he’s managed to find plenty of time for leisure to balance out the stress. And having ridden President Donald Trump’s coattails this far, Patel seems to believe that nothing can knock him off his stride.

A letter sent from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, first reported by MS NOW, could help disabuse Patel of that notion. The chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has long had the director’s back in public, has questions about the lavish lifestyle he seems to be enjoying at least in part on the taxpayer’s dime. Common sense should tell Patel this would be a perfect opportunity to lay low — but the odds that he’ll heed this flashing warning light are slim.

You would be hard-pressed to find someone in the Trump administration enjoying their job more than FBI Director Kash Patel.

The letter from Grassley came after months of concerns that Patel has been using his perch as an excuse to play jet-setter. Granted, per FBI policy, the director does have to use the FBI’s jet even when traveling for personal reasons — but he’s still supposed to reimburse the government for the latter. And Patel has mixed his personal excursions in alongside trips taken as part of his official duties. (Or is it the other way around?)

During a trip to Milan that just happened to be scheduled during the Winter Olympics, Patel turned up in the U.S. men’s hockey team locker room celebrating their gold medal win. When traveling to Hawaii last year on his way back from a trip to New Zealand, despite his staff insisting he wasn’t on vacation, he found time to take a “VIP snorkel” tour of the shipwrecked USS Arizona near Pearl Harbor. Patel has also carefully managed his schedule to pair official trips with visits to see his country singer girlfriend perform.

FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson told MS NOW in an emailed statement that Patel’s travel has been “fully consistent with Executive Branch requirements and policies that extend over decades across all Administrations. FBI Director Patel has reimbursed ALL personal travel and expenses, strictly following the Office of Management and Budget rules, in the exact same manner as all previous FBI Directors — and is fully compliant.”

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That may well be the case, but it still requires FBI staffers working with Patel to parse out exactly which flights counted as personal and which were part of his job. (It sounds like a headache even without the various mixed-use trips he’s taken.) Grassley’s letter asks for the FBI to turn over documents showing that those trips have all been covered as part of an “independent and objective review.”

Grassley’s letter also requested more information about why Patel has been cruising around the Washington area in an armored BMW instead of the usual Chevrolet Suburban. (MS NOW first reported on the swap in December.) At the time, Williamson told MS NOW that the FBI had been planning on buying updated vehicles, and this choice was less expensive than others it considered. When responding to Thursday’s report, the FBI spokesperson added a new detail: Apparently the BMWs had previously been purchased by the State Department and were “sitting idle and unused in their warehouse.” In neither case did the bureau provide any documents to back up its claims.

Grassley’s interest in the director living it up doesn’t spell Patel’s immediate downfall. It does, however, open the door to the kind of scrutiny he’s managed to avoid from Republicans despite multiple screwups. He’s repeatedly jumped the gun posting about active cases on social media and had to walk back his comments. Patel has also failed to transform the so-called grand conspiracy case — which would tie together multiple strands of anti-Trump Deep State conspiracies — into the arrests and prosecutions Trump craves.

If Patel thinks that anything less than total cooperation with Grassley and other Republicans who have questions for him is a good idea, he’s even more of a fool than he already seemed.

Patel owes his position to Trump. He knows it, Trump knows it, everyone around him likely knows it, too. But it would be a mistake to assume that the umbra of invincibility that covers the president reaches the FBI director as well. As CT Insider columnist Philip Bump said during an MS NOW appearance Thursday morning, Patel is fair game for any Republicans who might take issue with the influencer-worthy lifestyle he’s been living.

If Patel thinks that anything less than total cooperation with Grassley and other Republicans who have questions for him is a good idea, he’s even more of a fool than he already seemed. Trump has proved time and again that no amount of previous loyalty can make him stick his own neck out to protect his inner circle. If Patel tries to test this for himself, he runs the risk of becoming a lightning rod, drawing down the wrath of every frustrated Republican who knows it’s much easier to savage the people around Trump than aiming at the president himself.