Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s controversial pick for FBI director, will have his day before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday — and Senate Democrats have been battle-testing their message in hopes it might break through.
It started a few weeks ago, when Democrats turned attorney general nominee Pam Bondi’s confirmation hearing into a practice round for Patel’s grilling. There, Democrats brought up the FBI nominee repeatedly, asking Bondi to respond to a variety of incendiary statements Patel had made over the years, including about his plans to go after members of the “Executive Branch Deep State.”
Now, it’s Patel’s turn in the hot seat.
“There’s immense amounts of material for him to explain,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee. “He’s dangerously unqualified … and he’s dangerously partisan by his own terms.”
A staunch Trump loyalist, Patel served as chief of staff at the Department of Defense and as a senior National Security Council staffer during the first Trump administration. As an aide with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Patel maneuvered to discredit the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
When Patel was floated as a possibility for deputy FBI director during Trump’s first term, then-attorney general Bill Barr said Patel would fill the role “over my dead body.” Barr is now among a number of former Trump administration officials in the national security and intelligence arena who have since come out against Patel’s nomination to lead the agency.
Patel will invariably be faced with tough questions about some of his social media postings, including potentially his peddling of so-called vaccine detoxification supplements. Senate Judiciary Democrats have already honed in on one image where Kash Patel is seen throwing an object with Sen. Adam Schiff’s face on it out of a catapult. Schiff, a California Democrat who led the first impeachment inquiry into Trump while a member of the House, now sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In the committee meeting Wednesday to advance Bondi’s nomination, Whitehouse pointed to a video reposted by Patel of an AI-generated version of himself taking a chainsaw to the likenesses of Schiff and former Rep. Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who served as one of two GOP members on the now-disbanded House committee charged with investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the Capitol.
Senate Judiciary Democrats have also asked the acting attorney general, James R. McHenry III, to hand over relevant materials on Patel contained in a report from former special counsel Jack Smith detailing Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.
Patel had been called to testify in the investigation and was granted immunity.
“The Committee cannot adequately fulfill its constitutional duty without reviewing details in the report of Mr. Patel’s testimony under oath, which is necessary to evaluate Mr. Patel’s truthfulness, trustworthiness, and regard for the protection of classified information,” the Democratic senators wrote in a letter to McHenry.
