Dems Worry Kash Patel Could Weaponize FBI Against Political Enemies Like They Did
In a Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday, feckless Democrat senators grilled Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI director, trying to paint him as a Trump henchman hellbent on seeking revenge for all the crap the FBI put Trump and American citizens through.
It’s no wonder they are worried; the nation has seen how the FBI has been turned into a political weapon, and Democrats don’t want it pointed at them.
The Federalist has written extensively about corruption within the FBI under Democrats’ watch, including the Russia collusion hoax that Patel helped disprove; the gun-toting dawn raids on the homes of nonviolent citizens; the overreaching invasion of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home; and the tampering in the federal election by concealing the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop.
Democrats called Patel a conspiracy theorist and a Trump loyalist. They asked him many times whom he intended to go after on Trump’s behalf and whether he would ever tell Trump he would not pursue a case, implying that it is both Trump’s and Patel’s plan to misuse the FBI.
“Any accusations leveled against me that I would somehow put political bias before the Constitution are grotesquely unfair,” Patel said. “I will have you reminded that I have been endorsed by over 300,000 law enforcement officers to become the next director of the FBI.”
They could not stomach this much-repeated answer.
Democrat senators pressured Patel to give assurances he would protect the jobs of FBI employees involved with the attempted Trump take-down, no matter what.
For example, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., asked for special protections for those involved in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents case, which was behind the Mar-a-Lago raid.
“You’ve committed that the FBI will not be politicized, so here’s your first test. Will you commit that you will not tolerate the firing of the FBI agents who worked with the special counsel’s office on these investigations?”
“Every FBI employee will be held to the absolute same standard, and no one will be terminated for case assignments,” Patel started to say.
Blumenthal sharply interrupted in a tough-guy show he surely hoped would be picked up in social media clips.
“I’m not going to accept that answer, because if you can’t commit that those FBI agents will be protected from political retribution, we can’t accept you as FBI director.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Md., went three minutes over her allotted time, reading Patel’s words — often out-of-context — from social media posts, his book, and media appearances, becoming increasingly agitated and apparently close to angry tears.
Fully showboating, Klobuchar insisted on extra time, claiming her question was of great importance.
“Could he just answer the question?” Klobuchar said. “If he said that the FBI headquarters, where they investigate cybercrime and terrorism, should shut down and open as a deep state — as a museum. Did he say that the headquarters should be shut down? I deserve an answer to that question. He is asking to be head of the FBI, and he said that their headquarters should be shut down.”
In later testimony, Patel was able to put this ridiculous claim about his statement into context.
“It was to highlight the significantly greater point that I was actually making in that interview — which is well documented over and over again. 38,000 FBI employees. 7,500 FBI employees work in the Washington Field Office in Hoover Building alone. If you increase that aperture just slightly to encompass the national capital region, that is 11,000 FBI employees work in the national capital region,” Patel said.
“A third of the workforce for the FBI works in Washington, D.C.,” Patel continued. “I am fully committed to having that workforce go out into the interior of the country, where I live, west of the Mississippi, and work with sheriff’s departments and local officers. And having one agent prevent one homicide, and having one agent in Washington prevent one rape, and I will do that over and over and over again, because the American people deserve the resources, not in Washington, D.C., but in the rest of the country.”
Time and again, Patel answered questions and was immediately met with retorts along the lines of “You are not answering the question!”
Senators, among the highest elected officials in the nation (some with law degrees and a grasp of the language), trotted out false statements and shady “facts” and refused to accept the answers of a sworn witness. They wasted the resources of the American people by using this time for their desperate attempts to flex their suddenly muted political power.
Maybe they can do some real work tomorrow.
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