Nancy Guthrie Case: Trump Attorney General Todd Blanche Shuts Down 'Reports of Friction' Between FBI and Local Law Enforcement

Todd Blanche attempted to squash reports of "friction" between the FBI and local investigators handling the investigation into Nancy Guthrie's disappearance.

In an episode of Bradley on the Border, NewsNation's Ali Bradley asked the Donald Trump-appointed attorney general how the Department of Justice (DOJ) is "resolving the apparent breakdown in coordination between the FBI and the Pima County Sheriff's Department regarding the handling of the 'critical' DNA evidence."

Blanche, 51, responded by saying the Bureau "has worked closely since the day that this happened with the local law enforcement," before adding, "There's been reports of friction. I’ve seen those reports. We are here to help."

"President Trump authorized and directed us to do everything we can to help in that investigation," he continued. "This is at its heart a local investigation because of the nature of this type of potential crime, but the FBI remains able to help as much as as we can."

Blanche then admitted, "We don't like interagency squabbles. Nobody likes that. That's doesn't help the investigation. Um, but we are in a complete cooperative mode with the local law enforcement."

The former prosecutor added that "any investigation like this should be done by a coordinated approach" and the authorities should be "working together to solve the crime."

Blanche's remarks came days after FBI Director Kash Patel accused the local sheriff of preventing the Bureau from getting involved in the "critical" first days after Today star Savannah Guthrie's mom vanished from her Tucson, Ariz., home on February 1.

While Patel admitted the case is a "local law enforcement matter," he told Sean Hannity on his Fox News podcast that "for four days, we were kept out of the investigation."

He also slammed the police force's decision to send key evidence recovered from the crime scene to a private lab instead of the FBI's.

"It's their call on where to send the DNA; we have Quantico, the best lab in the world, I had a fixed-wing aircraft on the ground ready to move it immediately," he explained. "They said we're sending it to Florida."

"We would have analyzed it within days and maybe gotten better information or more information," the FBI chief insisted. "Our lab's just better than any other private lab out there and we didn't get a chance to do that."

It was recently revealed that the DNA evidence, believed to be a hair sample, is now undergoing analysis at Quantico.

Patel also expressed frustration that they weren't able to release the shocking footage of a masked suspect on Nancy's front porch sooner. The security video was initially thought to be unavailable.

"We said, 'Hey, is anyone talking to leadership at Google?' We know that there was not a subscription service to capture all of the data ... but can we go into the cache, can we go into the data before it's deleted and see what we can find?" he explained.

"That's why you have that image, because the FBI worked with Google to put that image out," Patel told Hannity.