By Sarah N. Lynch
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI director, will face probing questions from U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats on Thursday about his credentials and history of making false claims about the agency he’s been tapped to lead.
Members of the panel’s Democratic minority, led by Senator Dick Durbin, are expected to grill the 44-year-old nominee about his accusation that the FBI is filled with members of a “deep state” trying to block Trump’s policies and his call to shutter the bureau’s Washington headquarters.
Democrats on their own will not be able to block Patel from being confirmed. Trump has so far succeeded in securing confirmation for one highly controversial nominee, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a 51-50 vote after Vice President JD Vance broke a tie caused by three Republican no votes.
Patel has falsely insisted that the FBI used undercover operatives to entrap rioters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 – a claim that was debunked by a recent Justice Department inspector general report.
He said in a September 2022 interview that he agreed with “a lot” of the QAnon movement, a far-right fringe movement that believes a cabal of cannibalistic child molesters inside the U.S. government have conspired against Trump.
A spokesperson for Patel said his comments on the Jan.6, 2021, attack were taken out of context and denied that he had supported QAnon.
And when the Justice Department was investigating Trump for his retention of classified records, Patel claimed without evidence that Trump had declassified them all.
To this day, no one else has come forward to corroborate Patel’s statement.
A former aide to then-House Intelligence Committee Republican Chairman Devin Nunes, Patel helped spearhead the congressional probe into the FBI’s handling of its investigation into contacts between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.
A Justice Department internal watchdog report later concluded the FBI made errors in the warrant application to conduct surveillance on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, but found no evidence of political bias.
Patel started his career as a public defender in Miami, first on local cases and later on federal ones.
Before going to work on Capitol Hill, he worked a little more than three years in counterterrorism at the Justice Department.
Later, he also briefly worked for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Council and finally, as chief of staff to the Defense Secretary.
Since then, however, Patel has exaggerated some of his prior experience.
In his book “Government Gangsters,” for example, he claims he led the Justice Department’s case against Islamic militant Ahmed Abu Khatallah, who was charged with helping organize the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
In reality, however, he did not play a leading role and only briefly provided a supporting role for the National Security Division, according to a person familiar with the matter.
He said in the same book that the Justice Department “threw out one of the biggest drug prosecutions in history” after it came to light that prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence against his client.
Court filings and his sworn Senate disclosures, however, show that his client ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 36 months in prison.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Scott Malone and Deepa Babington)
