Kash Patel’s confirmation to become the next director of the FBI moved forward in the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate on Tuesday in a first procedural vote.
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Republicans said they were happy that President Donald Trump’s choice “has the votes” and will be confirmed later this week.
Along party lines, the Senate voted 48–45 to begin debating the nominee. This means that there will be 30 hours of debate before Patel is given final approval on Thursday, according to people familiar with the process who spoke to the New York Post.
GOP senators have praised Patel, 44, from Long Island for his experience as a prosecutor and as a national security aide in the first Trump administration. They have also praised his strong desire to get the FBI back to its core law enforcement duties and stop “weaponizing” politics at the agency.
In his confirmation hearing, Patel pledged to “cut in half” the number of offenses committed across broad categories of crimes, including the “100,000 rapes … 100,000 drug overdoses from Chinese fentanyl and Mexican heroin, and … 17,000 homicides.”
If confirmed as one of the nation’s top law enforcement officers, the nominee, who has praised rank-and-file FBI agents as “courageous, apolitical warriors of justice,” will serve a 10-year term.
“Mr. Patel has undergone a rigorous vetting. He produced more than a thousand pages of records and disclosed over a thousand interviews. He underwent an FBI background investigation, produced a financial disclosure, and worked with ethics officials to identify and resolve potential conflicts of interest,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a hearing last week.
“At his hearing, he answered questions for more than five hours and provided 147 pages of responses to written questions. We’ve examined every detail of his life, and he’s been subjected to relentless attacks on his character the whole time,” Grassley added.
“Mr. Patel was instrumental in exposing Crossfire Hurricane,” Grassley said last week. “He showed that the Democratic National Committee funded false allegations against President Trump, that the DOJ and FBI hid information from the FISA court to wiretap a presidential campaign, and that an FBI lawyer lied in the process.”
Every single Democrat on the Judiciary panel was against Patel. They pushed back the initial approval vote by a week, saying the nominee lied in his confirmation hearing, and when it came time for the committee vote, they all voted against him.
Patel started his career as a public defender in Florida. He then worked as a federal prosecutor in the Obama Justice Department, an aide to Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and as a national security official in the first Trump administration.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary panel, and others have said that Patel lied to the committee about how he helped get senior FBI officials fired after Trump took office and how he produced a song sung by federal prisoners convicted of crimes during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
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Patel said he did not agree with Trump completely, especially regarding the mass pardoning of Jan. 6 rioters, which includes those who attacked Capitol Police while blocking Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in January 2021.
“I do not agree with the commutation of any sentence of any individual who committed violence against law enforcement,” he told Judiciary panel members in his confirmation hearing earlier this month.
Trump announced in November that he chose his nominee to “end the growing crime epidemic in America, dismantle the migrant criminal gangs, and stop the evil scourge of human and drug trafficking across the Border.”
“Kash will work under our great Attorney General, Pam Bondi, to bring back Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity to the FBI,” Trump added at the time.
