Soon, we’ll begin voting on the nomination of Kash Patel to serve as the Director of the FBI. I’ve spoken on his nomination within the last couple days, but I wanted to spend a few more minutes urging my colleagues to vote for Mr. Patel’s confirmation.
Mr. Patel’s career shows that he’s a man who’ll fight to defend the Constitution and fight to expose corruption. This is exactly the kind of experience the FBI Director needs.
For almost a decade, Mr. Patel served as a public defender, defending the constitutional rights of the least popular people in America.
After serving as a public defender, Mr. Patel joined the Department of Justice under Democrat President Obama as a counterterrorism prosecutor in the National Security Division. In this role, he investigated and prosecuted many important cases, including the World Cup bombing in Uganda in 2010, for which he received the Award for Excellence.
In 2017, Representative Devin Nunes asked Mr. Patel to join the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to uncover the truth about Russiagate. And Mr. Patel did uncover the truth.
Through tireless work, in regard to that investigation, Mr. Patel showed that Crossfire Hurricane was based on fraudulent, even discredited, information, actually paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton Campaign.
After exposing the Russiagate scandal in Congress, Mr. Patel then went on to serve in senior national security positions on the National Security Council, then as the Deputy Director of National Intelligence and as Chief of Staff to the Acting Secretary of Defense.
Mr. Patel managed large intelligence and defense bureaucracies, identified and countered national security threats and prosecuted and defended the accused.
He’s done this while fighting for transparency and accountability in the government.
We all know that, if things are transparent, the people that are connected with them are going to be more accountable.
We also know that the public’s business in this great democracy of ours ought to be public.
Mr. Patel’s experience and vision is why he’s been endorsed by organizations representing more than 680,000 law enforcement officers and by dozens of former and current FBI agents, state attorneys general and U.S. attorneys.
These people understand law enforcement, these people understand the rule of law and these people, that have endorsed Mr. Patel, trust that he will do the right thing. We should do [the right thing] as well today by voting for Mr. Patel.
I want to speak now to those who have viciously opposed Mr. Patel’s nomination. At the heart of their opposition is a fear that he’ll act like Democrats did when Democrats were in power.
These Democrats are afraid the FBI, under Mr. Patel’s leadership, will use lawfare against political opponents, like the FBI used lawfare against President Trump and others.
These Democrats are afraid he’ll use subpoena power and coordinate with the media to target those seeking accountability, just like Democrats did against Mr. Patel and also against my own investigative staff.
These Democrats are afraid he’ll deploy the FBI to conduct investigations and engage in surveillance against those who disagree, like they did with Catholic families and parents expressing concerns at school board meetings.
These Democrats are afraid he’ll retaliate against whistleblowers, like the Biden administration did against FBI and IRS agents who blew the whistle.
After reviewing Mr. Patel’s record and listening to his testimony at his hearing, I’m convinced these fears that the Democrats have are unfounded.
Mr. Patel’s leadership will not be business as usual at the FBI, as it has been in previous administrations when the FBI – the people on the seventh floor, not the local agents – were used for political weaponization.
Mr. Patel told us, at our hearing, he wants to reduce FBI involvement in politics and domestic surveillance.
Mr. Patel wants to end political investigations and strengthen protections for whistleblowers.
Mr. Patel wants to make the FBI accountable once again – get back the reputation that the FBI has had historically for law enforcement.
He wants to hold the FBI accountable to Congress, to the President and, most importantly, to the people they serve – the American taxpayer.
My Democratic colleagues often lament that Mr. Patel won’t protect the independence of the FBI, but there’s a fine line between independent judgment and being unaccountable.
The FBI has been unaccountable for all too long.
My Democratic colleagues decry the recent firings of FBI agents and somehow want to blame Mr. Patel for those personnel decisions. This isn’t fair, obviously, because he’s not running the FBI.
As my oversight has shown, many of those fired agents were behind the retaliation against multiple FBI whistleblowers – they ruined lives and careers for their own political ends. They should be held accountable – and yes, they should’ve been, and have been fired.
The FBI has also kept too many secrets.
It has hid[den], from the duly elected members of Congress, the origins of the lawfare against President Trump – which we all know, and which I’ve shown in my exposure of a lot of emails, was in large part from the anti-Trump [Special] Agent Timothy Thibault.
And now, based on testimony from soon-to-be Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, we know that the Biden DOJ and FBI violated process by not sharing evidence with Trump’s defense team that could have helped Trump’s case against the government.
Now just think, if that happened on the Democrat side, you wouldn’t hear the end of it. Yet, you can’t hear a peep today from my Democratic colleagues.
The government hid its investigations into those who dared to question the Democratic Party line.
But then when it’s convenient for political reasons, the FBI would leak or coordinate with the media to hide the truth and to smear people.
We need to restore transparency, we need to restore oversight and we need to restore accountability at the FBI, particularly on that top floor of the Hoover Building.
Mr. Patel is exactly the man that can do that.
And it’s why those who benefit from the status quo have come so forcefully against him with a relentless smear campaign.
Mr. Patel is a reformer, and we need a reformer in the FBI. We need to restore the public trust and we need to return the FBI to its core mission, which is to keep people on our streets safe.
Bottom line, it’s the everyday work at the FBI – enforcing the law, solving crimes – that the people on the seventh floor of the Hoover Building should be doing, instead of thinking, “How can we get at our political enemies?”
I’ll be voting to confirm Mr. Patel, and I urge my colleagues to do the same.
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