Kash Patel appears near confirmation. California’s Schiff calls that a ‘tragedy for the FBI’
Kash Patel is now well on his way to being confirmed as FBI director, despite unanimous opposition Thursday from California’s two U.S. senators and their Democratic colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“It is just a tragedy for the FBI that it comes to this. I can’t imagine the demoralization at the FBI and the Department of Justice. The damage will be long, long standing,” said Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
Republicans countered that Patel will run an agency devoted to fighting crime and stay away from political involvement.
“The Trump administration is cleaning house at the FBI because the FBI is and has been for many years infected with political bias and whistleblower retaliation,” said Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.
Schiff and Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., are committee members. The Republican-led panel voted 12 to 10 along party lines to support Patel’s nomination. The full Senate is expected to vote on his confirmation next week.
Schiff and Padilla have been aggressively critical of Patel since President Donald Trump nominated him. The senators have charged he’s a conspiracy theorist, and Schiff was named in Patel’s 2023 book as one of Washington’s “corrupt actors of the first order.”
Republicans argued that too often the Biden administration’s FBI undertook politically motivated investigations, aimed at Trump as well as those involved in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Republicans have criticized the FBI’s 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents Trump took when he left the White House in 2021. Trump was indicted in 2023 on charges related to the findings. The case was dismissed after he was re-elected president last year.
“Mr. Patel should be our next FBI director because the FBI has been infected by political bias and weaponized against the American people,” Grassley said.
Schiff vs. Patel
Schiff is familiar with the FBI and Patel. Schiff worked with the FBI as a federal prosecutor early in his career. He was House Intelligence Committee chairman from 2019-23 and top Democrat from 2015-19.
He recalled how Patel was a top aide to Chairman Devin Nunes, a Republican, at the committee when investigations were underway into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Patel “as a staffer played a key role in helping Republicans discredit the Russia probe,” Politico reported at the time.
Patel also held positions in the first Trump administration as chief of staff to the acting Pentagon secretary and a top official at the National Security Council and a top assistant to the acting national intelligence director.
Patel, Schiff told the committee Thursday, is “not someone you would ever think of when you think of fidelity, bravery, integrity. Not when he was a staffer, not when he was in the Trump administration.”
The senator addressed FBI agents. “To all those FBI agents I worked with over the years, to all that are there now that I’ve not had the privilege of working with, my heart breaks for what you’re about to go through.”
Patel, he said, brings “leadership you cannot respect, who has not earned your respect, who will not earn your respect.”
Padilla has repeatedly criticized Patel, saying he has “repeatedly promoted conspiracy theories about a hostile ‘deep-state’ within the very agency he’s been nominated to lead.”
Republicans weren’t buying any of these claims.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., recalled speaking to Patel about why Democrats fear him.
“I think the answer is so very apparent,” she said, listing some reasons. Among them: “They fear him because he’s going to return the FBI to its core mission — investigating violent crime and keeping our nation safe.”
Patel is expected to encounter little or no resistance next week when the Senate takes up the nomination. Republicans control 53 of the Senate’s 100 seats, and it takes 51 for confirmation.
This story was originally published February 13, 2025 at 10:24 AM.
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