Kash Patel Thursday won a key Senate committee vote, putting the right-wing hardliner on a smooth path for confirmation as President Trump’s new FBI director.
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12-10 to approve Patel’s nomination in a party-line vote that signals he is on track to win final confirmation.
If approved, Patel will take the helm of the leading federal law enforcement agency that he has often harshly criticized as Trump cleans house and seeks retribution against his perceived enemies.
The top Democrat on the committee, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), accused Patel of engineering a purge of several top Justice Department officials in the first days of the new Trump administration.
But Republicans, who hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate, have shrugged off the claims, saying Trump should be given a chance to pick his own leadership team.
The committee vote came just minutes before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won final confirmation as secretary of health and human services as Trump continues to rack up big cabinet wins.
Patel was once considered a tough sell for confirmation due to his lack of management experience and a litany of incendiary past statements, like calling investigators who scrutinized Trump “government gangsters” and calling convicted Jan. 6 heroic “political prisoners.”
At his confirmation hearing last month, Patel fended off accusations that a list of government officials in one of his books, who he said were part of a “deep state,” amounted to an improper enemies list or targets for retribution.
Patel was picked by Trump in November to replace Christopher Wray as FBI director, who quit after Trump told him to leave.
He would inherit an agency in turmoil amid the recent forced departures of a group of senior executives and a highly unusual Justice Department demand for the names of all agents who participated in investigations related to the Jan. investigation.
A former Justice Department prosecutor, Patel attracted the attention of Trump loyalists when he helped author a congressional committee memo that slammed the FBI’s investigation into ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Patel later was tapped to join Trump’s first administration, both as a counterterrorism official at the National Security Council and as chief of staff to the Defense Department.