WASHINGTON — FBI director nominee Kash Patel told lawmakers during his Thursday confirmation hearing that the number of US drug deaths, homicides and rapes should be halved — while brushing off Democratic critics by saying that “ticking off some people” was evidence of a job well done.
The Long Island native pledged to “make sure we don’t have 100,000 rapes in this country next year, make sure we don’t have 100,000 drug overdoses from Chinese fentanyl and Mexican heroin, and make sure we don’t have 17,000 homicides.”
Patel, 44, said “those numbers need to be cut in half immediately, and the public will regain trust in the FBI and law enforcement.”
The nominee largely avoided taking the bait of political opponents on the Senate Judiciary Committee, while making a candid assessment of his foes to Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.)
“You’ve made a lot of people mad, haven’t you?” Kennedy asked Patel, a former congressional, defense and intelligence official known for propagating the theory of “deep state” bias against President Trump during his first term.
“It seems so, senator,” Patel concurred.
“You think maybe you made the right people mad?” Kennedy followed up, to chuckles in the audience.
“As my FBI agents, the brick agents told me, when I was running cases with them across this country and around the world, if you’re not ticking off some people, you’re not doing your job right,” Patel said.
Kennedy then pushed back on Democrats who had branded Patel a “conspiracy theorist.”
“Sounds to me like we need to get some new conspiracy theories because all the old ones turned out to be true” the senator said. “Conspiracy theorists are up something like 37-0.”
Patel pledged to Kennedy that he would not use the FBI to go after Democrats — after Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence was raided in 2022 to recover national security documents and after since-departed bureau leaders were caught swapping anti-Trump messages during a leaky probe of whether the Republican illegally colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
“When reforming the FBI and Justice Department, ‘two wrongs don’t make a right, but they do make it even’ is the wrong approach, isn’t it?” Kennedy asked.
“That’s correct,” Patel replied.
Some of Trump’s supporters, including White House budget director nominee Russ Vought, have advocated for the FBI to be “abolished,” but Patel insisted “98% of the FBI is courageous, apolitical warriors of justice.
“They just need better leadership,” he added.
Patel fended off Democratic attacks largely without fireworks — distancing himself from his connection to circulating a recording of jailed Capitol riot participants singing together and referring senators to his financial disclosures without delving into them.
Patel, who worked 12 years as a public defender in Florida before serving in the Justice Department as a trial attorney from 2014 to 2017, received praise from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) for his views on Fourth Amendment protections for American records.
He slammed congressional Democrats for unleashing a barrage of abuse against him, including a message that called him “a detestable sand n—– who had no right being in this country.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) attempted to lean into Patel for at one point saying that the FBI headquarters “should be shut down and reopened as a Museum of the Deep State.”
“If the best attacks on me are going to be false accusations and grotesque mischaracterizations, the only thing this body is doing is defeating the credibility of the men and women at the FBI,” he fired back.
“I stood with them, here in this country, in every theater of war we have, I was on the ground in service to this nation. And any accusations leveled against me that I would somehow put political bias before the Constitution are grotesquely unfair.”
