President Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel, will have a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
The panel plans to vote on Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi on the same day.
The leading Democrat on the committee, Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, has stated that he will not support the nominee, but Patel is not up against any opposition from the Republican senators who hold a 53–47 majority in the upper chamber.
“The person who is in charge of our nation’s leading law enforcement organization — the FBI — should be someone who is nonpartisan, solid, reliable, with demonstrated skill in law enforcement. We were reminded of this on 9/11 — that the FBI is the leading agency that we, in America, rely upon to keep us safe. The 30,000 professionals at the FBI have the skills and resources to do the job. They deserve a leader who understands the gravity of their mission. After meeting with Kash Patel, I have grave concerns about his fitness for the role of FBI director. Mr. Patel has neither the experience, the temperament nor the judgment to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Durbin said on the Senate floor.
Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee, a member of the committee, responded to Durbin on X by posting, “If you want a guy to perpetuate the status quo at FBI, Kash Patel is not your guy. But if you want aggressive reform, Kash is exactly what you’ve been looking for.”
The head of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, has long opposed the FBI’s leadership and what he perceives to be corruption.
Reports of FBI power abuse, retaliation against whistleblowers, election meddling, sexual misconduct, manipulation of crime statistics, bureau discrimination based on political and religious beliefs, deliberate withholding or slow-walking of requested documents, and intimidation of private citizens who attended school board meetings have all prompted inquiries about the bureau.
Patel got another boost last week from a top Republican.
Former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and GOP lawmaker from California Devin Nunes hailed Trump’s pick of national security expert Kash Patel to head up the FBI during an interview with Fox News host Mark Levin.
Nunes, the current CEO of Truth Social, Trump’s social media company, said that Patel is well aware of how the upper echelons of the FBI and broader Department of Justice, under which the bureau falls, have been politicized and corrupted over the last decade.
“Kash Patel is a reformer who will do things at the FBI that the entrenched ruling class does not want him to do,” Levin said before swinging it over to Nunes.
“Yes, and I think most importantly with that, he knows how they do it. He knows how the DOJ and how the FBI corrupted the whole damn place. That’s the advantage he has, and that’s why they don’t want him in there,” Nunes said.
“And I will just go furthermore, I think this brings an important component that I don’t think we’ve in an FBI director before,” he added. “Kash served at the beginning of his career on the other side. He served as a public defender, defending criminals against the FBI, against, you know, the law enforcement agencies.
“So he transferred from a public defender, then into the DOJ as a prosecutor. And at a time [when] we need people that understand both sides of the issues if we’re going to restore the FBI and the Department of Justice, where we truly get a situation in this country, again, where justice should be blind, that’s how it was set up by the founders of this country,” the former California lawmaker continued.
“And if you don’t have a solid, reliable justice system, your whole damn country falls apart,” he said. “And look, and if it wasn’t for President Trump winning, the country just about fell apart. So what started with the Russia hoax back in the day, campaign gimmick to try to falsely accuse Trump of dealing with Russia and Republicans dealing with Russia ended up.”
Nunes added: “You talk about it all the time, but we need to talk about how they targeted Supreme Court justices, targeted Catholics, targeted President Trump, went through Mar-a-Lago, did multiple going — targeting Republicans across the board, and still never leaving the Russia hoax alone, including getting involved in the last election in 2020 with the whole hoax on the 51 spies who lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop was just Russian disinformation. That’s what has to be cleaned up permanently.”
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