Senate Democrats pushed back a key vote to advance the nomination of Kash Patel Thursday, forcing consideration of President Trump’s pick to lead the FBI to be postponed until next week.
Shortly after convening Thursday morning, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee moved to place a hold on Patel, with Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) acknowledging that “the minority has exercised their right and my right under the committee rules to hold over the nomination of Kash Patel to lead the FBI.”
“This is an unusual nomination, and it’s a 10-year nomination,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the ranking member on the panel, noting that the lengthier term was adopted “to make sure that we took politics out of the equation.”
“Ten years is a long time and merits review,” added Durbin, claiming that Patel had made a “direct contradiction under oath” about his involvement in producing a song recording of jailed Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol rioters.
Durbin also claimed that Patel “was part of this lionization of these thugs who took over the Capitol.”
During Patel’s confirmation hearing last week, the FBI director-designate vowed to restore public trust in law enforcement by cutting in half US drug deaths, homicides and rapes, saying he would “make sure we don’t have 100,000 rapes in this country next year, make sure we don’t have 100,000 drug overdoses from Chinese fentanyl and Mexican heroin, and make sure we don’t have 17,000 homicides.”
Democrats in the hearing argued the 44-year-old Trump appointee was far too radical to lead the bureau — pointing to Patel’s past statements and writings on the need to overhaul US intelligence agencies by firing their “top ranks” and prosecuting “to the fullest extent of the law” anyone who “in any way abused their authority for political ends.”
Patel, a Long Island native, also wrote in his 2023 book “Government Gangsters” about an enemies list to be pursued in a second Trump administration.
“I read his book start to finish, and I can tell you he doesn’t have the temperament for the job,” Durbin said Thursday.
Patel told senators last week that he was not planning to use the bureau’s resources to investigate Democrats — while pointing out FBI abuses during its Trump-Russia collusion probe after the 2016 election.
In contrast to other cabinet officials, like White House budget director nominee Russ Vought, Patel did not state that the FBI should be “abolished” and insisted that “98% of the FBI is courageous, apolitical warriors of justice.”
“They just need better leadership,” he told members of the Judiciary panel.
Pressed by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) whether Patel would stand by remarks he made that FBI headquarters “should be shut down and reopened as a Museum of the Deep State,” Patel accused Democrats of “false accusations and grotesque mischaracterizations.”
“The only thing this body is doing is defeating the credibility of the men and women at the FBI,” the nominee added.
“I stood with them here in this country. In every theater of war we have, I was on the ground in service to this nation. And any accusations leveled against me that I would somehow put political bias before the Constitution are grotesquely unfair.”
Before working in the first Trump administration, Patel served as a public defender in Florida for 12 years and as a trial attorney at the Justice Department from 2014 to 2017.
