By ERIC TUCKER Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate on Thursday narrowly voted to confirm Kash Patel as director of the FBI, moving to place him atop the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency despite doubts from Democrats about his qualifications and concerns he will do Donald Trump’s bidding and go after the Republican president’s adversaries.
“I cannot imagine a worse choice,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told colleagues before the 51-49 vote by the GOP-controlled Senate. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska were the lone Republican holdouts.
A Trump loyalist who has fiercely criticized the agency, Patel will inherit an FBI gripped by turmoil as the Justice Department over the past month has forced out a group of senior bureau officials and made a highly unusual demand for the names of thousands of agents who participated in investigations related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Patel has spoken of his desire to implement major changes at the FBI, including a reduced footprint at headquarters in Washington and a renewed emphasis on the bureau’s traditional crime-fighting duties rather than the intelligence-gathering and national security work that has come to define its mandate over the past two decades. But he also echoed Trump’s desire for retribution. Patel raised alarm among Democrats for saying before he was nominated that he would “come after” anti-Trump “conspirators” in the federal government and the media.
Republicans angry over what they see as law enforcement bias against conservatives during the Democratic Biden administration, as well as criminal investigations into Trump, have rallied behind Patel as the right person for the job.
“Mr. Patel wants to make the FBI accountable once again -– get back the reputation that the FBI has had historically for law enforcement,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said before Patel was confirmed. “He wants to hold the FBI accountable to Congress, to the president and, most importantly, to the people they serve — the American taxpayer.”
Democrats complained about Patel’s lack of management experience compared with previous FBI directors and they highlighted incendiary past statements that they said called his judgment into question.
“I am absolutely sure of this one thing: this vote will haunt anyone who votes for him. They will rue the day they did it,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat.
He added: “To my Republican colleagues, think about what you will tell your constituents” and family “about why you became voted for this person who will so completely and utterly disgrace this office and do such grave damage to our nation’s justice system.”
About a half-dozen Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee gathered outside FBI headquarters earlier Thursday in a last-ditch plea to derail his confirmation.
“This is someone we cannot trust,” said Sen. Adam Schiff of California. “This is someone who lacks the character to do this job, someone who lacks the integrity to do this job. We know that, our Republican colleagues know that.”
Patel’s eyebrow-raising remarks on hundreds of podcasts and in other interviews over the past four years include referring to law enforcement officials who investigated Trump as “criminal gangsters,” saying some Jan. 6 rioters were “political prisoners” and proposing to shut down the FBI headquarters and turning it into a museum for the so-called deep state.
At his Senate hearing in January, Patel said Democrats were taking some of his comments out of context or misunderstanding the broader point that he was trying to make. Patel has also denied the idea that a list in book he authored of government officials who he said were part of a “deep state” amounted to an “enemies list,” calling that a “total mischaracterization.”
FBI directors are given 10-year terms as a way to insulate them from political influence and keep them from becoming beholden to a particular president or administration. Patel was selected in November to replace Christopher Wray, who was picked by Trump in 2017 and served for more than seven years but who repeatedly angered the president and was seen by him as insufficiently loyal. He resigned before Trump took office.
Since Wray’s resignation, the FBI has been led by interim leaders, who have clashed with the Justice Department over its demands for details about the agents who investigated the Capitol riot — a move seen as a possible prelude to broader firings. Patel denied having any knowledge of discussions about potential firings, but a letter from Durbin last week that cited information that he said had come from insiders suggested that Patel may have been covertly involved in that process.
Trump has said that he expects some of those agents will be fired.
Patel is a former federal defender and Justice Department counterterrorism prosecutor. He attracted Trump’s attention during the president’s first term when, as a staffer on the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee, Patel helped write a memo with pointed criticism of the FBI’s investigation into ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Patel later joined Trump’s administration, both as a counterterrorism official at the National Security Council and as chief of staff to the defense secretary.