Kash Patel won Senate confirmation as FBI director by a 51-49 vote, putting a fierce loyalist of President Trump at the helm of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency amid major questions about his qualifications and fitness for the post.
The MAGA hardliner scored a near party-line vote, with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) joining all Democrats who voted in opposing his bid.
With the win, Patel becomes the latest appointee to get the backing of the GOP-held Senate after initially being seen as a long shot for confirmation.
Trump has steamrolled his way to a near clean sheet of cabinet wins after stumbling out of the gate with his initial nomination of scandal-tarred ex-Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general.
Patel, who has spent years harshly attacking the FBI for supposed bias against Trump and his right-wing supporters, inherits an FBI gripped by intense internal turmoil.
Since Trump returned to the White House last month, the Justice Department has forced out several senior FBI officials seen as less than sufficiently loyal to him. It also is seeking the names of thousands of FBI agents who did their jobs by participating in investigations of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Those actions amount to a huge shift in the traditional stance that the FBI should be apolitical and independent of any president’s goals, a position Trump has openly rejected.
Trump says he wants some or all of the agents who probed Jan. 6 fired along with any who participated in the court-ordered search of his Mar-a-Lago home for classified documents he improperly took when he left the White House after his first term
Republicans have mostly brushed off concerns about Patel, saying they back Trump’s plan to roll back what they see as law enforcement bias against conservatives and Trump under former President Biden.
“Mr. Patel wants to make the FBI accountable once again,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told colleagues on Wednesday. “He wants to hold the FBI accountable.”
Democrats have complained about Patel’s lack of management experience compared with others who have held the director’s job and they have highlighted incendiary past statements that they say call his judgment into question.
A half-dozen Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee gathered outside FBI headquarters before the vote to speak out against Patel and make a last-ditch plea to derail his confirmation.
“This is someone we cannot trust,” said Sen. Adam Schiff of California. “The only qualification Kash Patel has to be FBI director is that when everyone else in the first Trump administration said, ‘No, I won’t do that, that crosses moral, ethical and legal lines,’ Kash Patel said, ‘Sign me up.’”
Patel’s eyebrow-raising remarks on hundreds of podcasts over the past four years include referring to law enforcement officials who investigated Trump as “criminal gangsters,” saying some Jan. 6 rioters were “political prisoners” and pledging to “come after” anti-Trump “conspirators” in the government and media.
At his Senate hearing in January, Patel said Democrats were taking some of his comments out of context.
FBI directors are given 10-year terms as a way to insulate them from political influence and keep them from becoming beholden to a particular president or administration.
But that rule has effectively been scrapped. Patel was tapped by Trump after the incoming president warned Christopher Wray, who was picked by Trump in 2017, to step down or be fired.