WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON (AP) — Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, will encounter deeply skeptical questioning from Democratic senators Thursday about his loyalty to the president and stated desire to overhaul the bureau as he faces a high-stakes hearing that will help determine his path toward confirmation.
Patel, a Trump loyalist who has railed against the FBI over its investigations into the president and claimed that Jan. 6 rioters were mistreated by the Justice Department, was picked in November to replace Christopher Wray, who led the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency for more than seven years.
A former aide to the House Intelligence Committee and an ex-federal prosecutor who served in Trump’s first administration, Patel has alarmed critics with rhetoric — in dozens of podcasts and books he has authored — in which he has demonstrated fealty to Trump, lambasted the decision-making of the agency he’s now been asked to lead and identified by name officials he believes should be investigated.
In one such podcast interview last year, he said that if he were in charge of the FBI, he would “shut down” the bureau’s headquarters building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., and “reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state.’”
“And I’d take the seven thousand employees that work in that building and send them across America to go chase down criminals. Go be cops,” he added.
Patel has for years been a loyal ally to Trump, finding common cause over their shared skepticism of government surveillance and the “deep state” — a pejorative catchall used by Trump to refer to government bureaucracy.
He was part of a small group of supporters during Trump’s recent criminal trial in New York who accompanied him to the courthouse, where he told reporters that Trump was the victim of an “unconstitutional circus.”
That close bond would depart from the modern-day precedent of FBI directors looking to keep presidents at arm’s length.
Several Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee who have met with Patel, including Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, have issued statements sounding the alarm and signaling their opposition to the pick. The lawmakers foreshadowed their interest in Patel by directing numerous questions about him to Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney general, when she had her own confirmation hearing earlier this month.
“I’m deeply concerned about his fitness to serve as FBI Director. He has neither the experience, the judgment, nor the temperament to head this critical agency,” Durbin said in a statement.
Republican allies of Trump, who share the president’s belief that the FBI has become politicized, have rallied around Patel and pledged to support him, seeing him as someone who can shake up the bureau and provide needed change.
Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who will introduce Patel on Thursday, said that he had spent hours with him “pinning down every single thing I expect to see in the hearing.”
“So much so,” he added, “that I’ve created a bingo card for all the things that I know the Democrats are going to say about him that I believe are unfair, and I think he’s ready to respond to.”
Tillis said that Patel is ready to respond to questions about his book, including the enemies list and the people mentioned in its glossary.