Trump’s FBI Pick Kash Patel Gets Big News After Key Vote
Kash Patel’s path to becoming the next FBI director advanced on Tuesday as the Republican-led U.S. Senate took an initial procedural vote.
Republican senators expressed confidence that President Donald Trump’s nominee “has the votes” and is set for confirmation later this week.
In a vote split along party lines, the Senate decided 48–45 to move forward with debating Patel’s nomination. This sets up 30 hours of deliberation before the final vote on Thursday, according to sources familiar with the process who spoke to the New York Post.
Supporters in the GOP have highlighted Patel’s background as a prosecutor and his service as a national security aide during Trump’s first administration. They also commended his commitment to steering the FBI back to its primary law enforcement mission and halting the “weaponizing” of political influence within the agency.
During his confirmation hearing, Patel vowed to “cut in half” crime rates across various categories, referencing statistics such as “100,000 rapes … 100,000 drug overdoses from Chinese fentanyl and Mexican heroin, and … 17,000 homicides.”
If confirmed, Patel, who has described rank-and-file FBI agents as “courageous, apolitical warriors of justice,” would serve a 10-year term as one of the nation’s top law enforcement officials.
“Mr. Patel has undergone a rigorous vetting. He produced more than a thousand pages of records and disclosed over a thousand interviews. He underwent an FBI background investigation, produced a financial disclosure, and worked with ethics officials to identify and resolve potential conflicts of interest,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) stated in a hearing last week.
“At his hearing, he answered questions for more than five hours and provided 147 pages of responses to written questions. We’ve examined every detail of his life, and he’s been subjected to relentless attacks on his character the whole time,” Grassley continued.
“Mr. Patel was instrumental in exposing Crossfire Hurricane,” Grassley remarked. “He showed that the Democratic National Committee funded false allegations against President Trump, that the DOJ and FBI hid information from the FISA court to wiretap a presidential campaign, and that an FBI lawyer lied in the process.”
All Democrats on the Judiciary Committee opposed Patel’s nomination. They delayed the initial vote for a week, alleging that Patel misled the panel during his testimony. When the committee finally voted, every Democrat rejected his confirmation.
Patel began his legal career as a public defender in Florida before serving as a federal prosecutor under the Obama administration. He later worked for Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) when Nunes chaired the House Intelligence Committee and later became a national security official in Trump’s first administration.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, along with others, accused Patel of misleading the committee about his involvement in the dismissal of senior FBI officials following Trump’s election. They also pointed to his alleged role in producing a song performed by federal inmates convicted for crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Patel has clarified that he does not fully align with Trump’s stance, particularly on the idea of granting mass pardons to Jan. 6 defendants, including those involved in assaults against Capitol Police during Congress’s certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory in 2021.
“I do not agree with the commutation of any sentence of any individual who committed violence against law enforcement,” Patel told Judiciary Committee members during his confirmation hearing earlier this month.
Trump, in a statement from November, highlighted Patel’s nomination as part of his plan to “end the growing crime epidemic in America, dismantle the migrant criminal gangs, and stop the evil scourge of human and drug trafficking across the Border.”
“Kash will work under our great Attorney General, Pam Bondi, to bring back Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity to the FBI,” Trump declared at the time.