Hearing Highlights: Kash Patel Joins Republicans in Attacking the F.B.I. He Seeks to Lead

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Asked if he agreed with Mr. Trump’s broad grant of clemency on the day he was inaugurated, Mr. Patel, a former congressional staff member and national security aide, said he had “repeatedly, often publicly and privately, said there can never be a tolerance for violence against law enforcement.”

The nomination of Mr. Patel, 44, has upended the post-Watergate tradition of picking nonpartisan F.B.I. directors with extensive law enforcement experience. If confirmed, Mr. Patel could provide Mr. Trump with a direct line into the bureau, possibly eliminating guardrails meant to insulate it from White House interference.

While the hearing addressed a range of issues stemming from Mr. Patel’s actions and statements, Democrats time and again accused Mr. Patel of prioritizing his allegiance to Mr. Trump over adherence to the rule of law, a charge the nominee forcefully denied.

When Senator Mazie K. Hirono, a Hawaii Democrat, asked if he planned to investigate the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and others he has attacked publicly, Mr. Patel said he would abide by the law and the Constitution and would scrutinize only those he deemed likely to have committed crimes.

Mr. Patel said he would not go “backwards” when asked if he planned to investigate his immediate predecessor, Christopher A. Wray, who stepped down after Mr. Trump made plain that he would fire him. Mr. Patel has assailed the bureau over its investigations into Mr. Trump.

“Will you lie for the president of the United States? Will you lie for Donald Trump?” asked Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, his voice rising to a shout.

“No,” Mr. Patel answered.

Mr. Patel, who has repeatedly accused the bureau’s leadership of weaponizing its vast powers to target Mr. Trump, told the committee he believed that 98 percent of the F.B.I. was made up of “courageous apolitical warriors for justice” who “just need better leadership.”

He did not explain how he determined that the other 2 percent, about 760 people out of a work force of 38,000 employees, were supposedly partisan.

Mr. Patel said his main goal as director would be to fight violent crime and protect the country from three principal national security threats — terrorism, Chinese espionage and Iranian aggression.

It is unclear whether Mr. Patel has enough G.O.P. votes to be confirmed, although Republicans expressed confidence that he would prevail. When he was named in November, Democrats believed that his unflagging loyalty to Mr. Trump — and past inflammatory comments about the F.B.I. — would incite a popular backlash.

That has not yet happened. And Mr. Patel’s hearing, which coincided with the equally contentious confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, generated a rhetorical heat. But it did not appear to ignite a political conflagration that threatened his nomination by undermining support among the Republican majority.

In part, that was because Mr. Patel, like many Trump nominees, employed a deft duck-and-deny strategy: Mr. Patel said he could not remember details about unflattering episodes or damaging alliances. He answered specific queries with sweeping generalizations. He accused his accusers of distorting his words, even after they were read to him verbatim.

When Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, asked why he appeared on a podcast hosted by Stew Peters, who has often expressed antisemitic and white nationalist views, Mr. Patel claimed he could not remember.

“You made eight separate appearances on his podcast,” Mr. Durbin said.

When Mr. Durbin wanted to know why he has associated with so many extremists and conspiracy theorists, Mr. Patel offered an extraordinary answer that made Democrats guffaw: He said he went on such podcasts to “disavow them of their false impressions and to talk to them about the truth.”

Mr. Patel, alternating between deference and defiance, also said he “rejected outright QAnon baseless conspiracy theories” after previously saying he agreed with “a lot” of what the movement promoted.

During several exchanges, Mr. Patel denied that the 60-person list included as an appendix to his book “Government Gangsters” was an enemies list. The list has incited deep concerns that he would deploy the vast powers of the bureau to punish Mr. Trump’s perceived political opponents or those in government who worked on investigations that ensnared him.

“It’s not an enemies list,” Mr. Patel said. “It’s a total mischaracterization.”

Under questioning from Senator Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, Mr. Patel repeatedly declined to say that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won the 2020 election, indicating only that Mr. Biden had been “certified” as the president.

“The other way to say it is he won,” Mr. Welch said. “What’s so hard about just saying Biden won the 2020 election?”

The most bitter exchange of the day took place when Senator Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat who clashed with Mr. Patel repeatedly over the years, accused him of disrespecting the service of Capitol Police officers injured in the Jan. 6 attack by collaborating on a song written to raise money for the families of people imprisoned for ransacking the building.

Mr. Schiff urged Mr. Patel to turn around in his chair to look at officers providing security for the hearing.

“Have the courage to look them in the eye,” Mr. Schiff said, urging Mr. Patel to address the officers.

Mr. Patel did not.

Nonetheless, Mr. Patel seemed to relish the spotlight and became more relaxed and confident as the hearing dragged on. He parried a tough question from Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, by reminding her that she had only a few minutes left to interrogate him under committee rules.

The Judiciary Committee’s leaders set the partisan tone of the hearing in their opening statements. Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who is the panel’s chairman, painted a portrait of a politicized F.B.I. that he said was “in crisis,” a characterization that many of the committee’s Republicans embraced in their questioning. Democrats singled out caustic past statements by Mr. Patel about the agency he seeks to lead.

Mr. Durbin said Mr. Patel “does not meet the standard” to lead the F.B.I., citing his relative lack of law enforcement experience and unflinching loyalty to Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump’s choice to run the Justice Department, Pam Bondi, already assured senators that there would be no such list of perceived rivals if she were confirmed as attorney general. But the abrupt firings of prosecutors who investigated Mr. Trump raises the question of whether Mr. Patel will carry out a campaign of retribution, as both he and the president have long promised.

In particular, former and current agents are concerned that Mr. Patel will target investigators who worked on the inquiry into Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia given that he and the president have repeatedly denounced it as hoax. The department’s top watchdog and a special counsel examining the origins of the inquiry have concluded its genesis was a legitimate matter to investigate.

Mr. Patel has vowed to drastically reshape the F.B.I., but whether that threat is real or just bombast remains unknown.

Mr. Trump’s selection of Mr. Patel was unusual in many ways — not the least of which is the fact that he asserted his Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate himself.

He invoked the right before a grand jury examining whether Mr. Trump had mishandled national security secrets by repeatedly refusing to return classified documents. Mr. Patel is believed to have been questioned about his public claim that Mr. Trump had declassified all the government documents he kept after leaving office.

At first, Mr. Patel refused to answer, citing the Fifth Amendment, according to people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe grand jury issues. Prosecutors eventually granted Mr. Patel limited immunity, to find out what defense, if any, he might be able to offer for his former boss.

Democrats repeatedly pressured Mr. Patel to publicly release his testimony, but he refused.

Heading into the hearing, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, one of the most senior Republicans in the chamber, predicted that Mr. Patel would eventually be confirmed, after some sparring, “on a party-line vote.”

True to form, Republicans rallied around Mr. Patel, brushing aside questions about his qualifications and overall fitness to air familiar grievances about the F.B.I.’s conduct in its investigations into Mr. Trump.

But in private, many Republicans have expressed reservations about his temperament and pressed for assurances he would act responsibly — and independently — if confirmed.

Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, was one of the few members of the committee’s majority to offer a hint of those concerns, giving avuncular but pointed advice to Mr. Patel.

“Don’t go over there and burn that place down; go over there and make it better,” said Mr. Kennedy, who has been a fierce F.B.I. critic.

Alan Feuer contributed reporting.

The Senate confirmation hearing for Patel concluded after about five hours of intense questioning. Patel seemed to grow more confident over time as he deflected contentious statements he had made in interviews, on social media and in a book he wrote. Democrats tried to expose his partisanship and lack of independence while Republicans defended his qualifications. He also managed to downplay threats of retribution and pledged to look forward and not back at the F.B.I. if confirmed.

Patel almost certainly will make it out of the committee for a full vote but is unlikely to draw any Democratic support.

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“I’d shut down the F.B.I. Hoover Building on Day 1 and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state,’” Mr. Patel said on “The Shawn Ryan Show,” a podcast. “Then, I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops — go be cops.”

Former officials say a much small number of agents and support staff members work at the actual building. However, they widely supported the idea of sending more agents into the field to support operations where offices were understaffed.

The bureau has long planned to reduce the footprint of its headquarters and move employees to an expansive campus in Huntsville, Ala. A senior F.B.I. official referred to it in 2023 as the bureau’s “unofficial second headquarters.”

Already 2,000 employees work at the sprawling installation, and the F.B.I. says an additional 3,000 could be there by the end of the decade.

But Mr. Patel’s plans could also clash with President Trump’s desire to build a new headquarters in downtown Washington, rather than in Maryland or Virginia, which have fought for years to have the agency be based there. Last year, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that it should be in Washington and was going to be the “centerpiece of my plan to totally renovate and rebuild our capital city.”

In his book “Government Gangsters,” Mr. Patel said he would slash the general counsel’s office at the F.B.I., which provides critical legal advice to the bureau and the director. That office has “far exceeded its authority,” Mr. Patel said, claiming, with no evidence, that it had taken on “prosecutorial decision-making.”

One of Mr. Patel’s biggest complaints about the F.B.I. and the Justice Department is that it failed to provide documents to congressional oversight committees. Mr. Patel has said Congress should withhold funding if agencies do not comply with such requests.

“When the deep state resists, Congress must force their hand,” Mr. Patel wrote in his book.

It is unclear whether Mr. Patel will hold himself to the same standard if Democrats ask for sensitive documents on his watch.

Mr. Patel has also proposed altering the bureau’s intelligence division that was created after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“The biggest problem the F.B.I. has had has come out of its intel shops,” he said recently. “I’d break that component out of it.”

Intelligence analysts provide both tactical and strategic analysis to help the F.B.I. identify threats, inform decision-making and avoid surprises. The intelligence division also provides key briefings to the director and other bureau leaders, and its information can be included in the president’s daily book of threats to the country.

Hours into the hearing we are getting into the heart of Patel’s role as a witness in the Trump classified documents case.

“I witnessed the president of the United States issue a declassification order for documents,” Patel told Senator Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, adding that he didn’t know if the order related to the documents found at Mar-a-Lago.

“Will you lie for the president of the United States,” Booker pressed him. “Will you lie for Donald Trump?”

“No,” Patel said. As the hearing goes on, some Democrats on the panel keep returning to the question of Patel’s role as a defense witness in the criminal case, and whether he lied or tried to obstruct that investigation.

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Kash Patel Dodges 2020 Election Question

Kash Patel, the nominee for Director of the F.B.I., repeatedly refused to say that former President Biden won the election in 2020.

“But what’s so hard about just saying that Biden won the 2020 election? What’s hard about that?” “Senator, as I’ve said before, that President Biden was certified and sworn in, and he was a president. I don’t know how else to say it.” “Well, the other way to say it is he won.” “He was the president.” “The other way to say it is he won. I can say Trump won. I didn’t vote for him, but he won. You understand what I’m asking you? Can you say the words: Joe Biden won the 2020 election?” “Joe Biden is the — was the president of the United States.” “I’m going to stay on this. There’s a difference. I can say the words: Donald Trump won. I don’t like to say it, but I must say it. And you cannot say that Joe Biden won the election.” “What I can say is the same for both of them, Senator. Both of their elections were certified, and they are both — one was and one now is president.” “OK.”

“Can you say the words ‘Joe Biden won the 2020 election’?” Mr. Welch asked.

Mr. Patel replied, “Joe Biden was the president of the United States.”

Mr. Welch pressed again: “I can say the words ‘Donald Trump won.’ I don’t like to say it. But I must say it. And you cannot say that Joe Biden won the election.”

Mr. Patel declined once more. “What I can say is the same for both of them, senator, both of their elections were certified and they both were — one was and one is now president.”

Mr. Patel’s avoidance of using the “W” word was strikingly similar to how Mr. Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, also dodged the question at her confirmation hearing earlier this month.

Ms. Bondi said Mr. Biden was “duly sworn in” as the president, but like Mr. Patel, she would not explicitly say that he won.

As the hearing resumes after a lunch break, Patel tells Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, that he can’t tell him what he testified before a grand jury in the classified documents case because it’s secret under grand jury rules. Booker (correctly) informs him that as a witness he is not bound to keep what he said secret.

The issue is that after Trump claimed he had declassified all the national security documents found at Mar-a-Lago, Patel publicly said that was true. There is no evidence that Trump did so, and other Trump officials said they had never heard of such an order. Investigators called Patel as a witness to ask him under oath whether what he had said was true. It is not a crime to lie to the public, but it is a crime to lie under oath. Booker was trying to get Patel to say whether, under oath, he recanted his corroboration of Trump’s claim.

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Invoking the Fifth Amendment, however, is not an admission of guilt or wrongdoing, and many lawyers advise clients to assert the right, particularly in instances where it is unclear what investigators are trying to prove. In Mr. Patel’s case, he invoked it before a grand jury examining whether Mr. Trump mishandled national security secrets in repeatedly refusing to return classified documents.

On Wednesday, Democratic senators raised concerns about Mr. Patel’s testimony, including his assertion of the Fifth Amendment, underscoring that his private remarks would be a point of contention during his confirmation hearings.

The lawmakers said they should be told of any relevant information about Mr. Patel contained in a report by Jack Smith, the special counsel who investigated Mr. Trump. Currently, the portion of the report dealing with the classified documents found at Mr. Trump’s Florida resident remains a closely held secret within the Justice Department.

Mr. Patel, a former federal prosecutor, public defender and congressional aide, was questioned in 2022 about his public claims that Mr. Trump had somehow ordered the documents declassified.

At first, Mr. Patel refused to answer, citing his Fifth Amendment rights, according to people familiar with the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe grand jury issues. Prosecutors eventually granted Mr. Patel limited immunity, in order to find out what defense, if any, he might be able to offer for his former boss.

In another era of American politics, invoking the Fifth Amendment might be considered disqualifying for someone seeking the job of F.B.I. director — one of the most powerful and sensitive jobs in the government. But Mr. Patel’s assertion of the privilege came as he was defending Donald J. Trump, in what amounted to a show of loyalty.

Former baseball slugger Mark McGuire essentially took the Fifth when he was questioned by Congress about steroids, and his reputation suffered tremendously. Former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli asserted his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions to Congress, and he was eventually convicted and sent to prison.

Both those men, however, asserted the right to not speak on live television. Mr. Patel invoked it behind closed doors.

Regardless of Mr. Patel’s testimony about the purported declassification, prosecutors eventually indicted Mr. Trump.

In their letter on Wednesday, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee urged the acting attorney general, James R. McHenry, to let them see portions of the still-sealed volume of the Smith report.

“The committee cannot adequately fulfill its constitutional duty without reviewing details in the report of Mr. Patel’s testimony under oath, which is necessary to evaluate Mr. Patel’s truthfulness, trustworthiness and regard for the protection of classified information,” the Democrats wrote. “This is of utmost importance, as Mr. Patel has been nominated to hold one of the nation’s most important law enforcement positions.”

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The memo, leaked in 2023, warned of possible threats posed by “radical-traditionalist” Catholics. Last April, the Justice Department publicly described an internal review of it, concluding that it violated professional standards but showed “no evidence of malicious intent.”

Republicans have seized on the 11-page memo as an example of the agency’s suspicion of conservatives, including religious conservatives. They have pointed to the document to sharply criticize the bureau and suggested, without evidence, that it was part of a broader campaign by the Biden administration to persecute Catholics and conservatives over their beliefs.

The memo was quickly withdrawn after it was leaked, and top law enforcement officials have repeatedly distanced themselves from it. Mr. Hawley extracted a promise from Patel to withdraw the memo, but the prior F.B.I. director already did so.

Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, who often takes a roundabout route to the point of his questions, asked Kash Patel who investigated Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. “The F.B.I.,” Patel answered.

Another correct answer would have been Merrick B. Garland, the recently departed attorney general who years earlier played a key role in the prosecution of the McVeigh case. Kennedy and other Senate Republicans have spent years railing against Garland’s supposed mismanagement of the Justice Department.

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What binds Mr. Trump and Mr. Patel is the shared conviction that the bureau has been weaponized against conservatives, including both of them. They argue it is politicized and the only way to fix it is to empower an outsider willing to faithfully execute the Trump agenda — a sharp divergence from the bureau’s historical norms and the decades-long practice of directors’ limiting contact with presidents.

The issue of Mr. Patel’s independence, or lack thereof, was a flashpoint at a confirmation hearing on Thursday. Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, asked Mr. Patel if he would open an investigation into a political adversary because Mr. Trump asked him to do so, or stop a legitimate investigation if pressed to do so by the president. Mr. Patel said only that he would simply obey the law, but he evaded Mr. Coons’s question of whether he would resign if forced or directed to do otherwise.

In the view of his many critics (and even some who publicly sing his praises), Mr. Patel’s oft-stated loyalty to the president poses one of the most significant challenges to the independence of the F.B.I. in the century since J. Edgar Hoover, its founding director, built an investigative citadel whose autonomy created leverage, and abuses of power.

Devlin Barrett and Jonathan Swan contributed reporting.

Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, is trying to blame the slow response of the National Guard on Jan. 6, 2021, on Democratic politicians like former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington, who, he said, failed to call for troops at the Capitol that day. As Patel knows, having worked as the chief of staff for the Defense Department, top Pentagon officials were adamant that troops should not be deployed at the Capitol.

“There is absolutely no way I was putting U.S. military forces at the Capitol,” the acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, later told investigators. Doing so, he said, could have created “the greatest constitutional crisis probably since the Civil War.”

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Hawley is putting forth a wildly misleading world in which the F.B.I. opened terrorism investigations into everyday people for going to school board meetings and expressing disagreement to pandemic masking policies or the supposed teaching of critical race theory. This is a conspiracy theory pushed by right-wing news media as part of the effort to discredit the F.B.I. amid its investigations into Trump.

An association of school boards sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland expressing concern about violent disruptions and threats to school officials, which used the word “terrorism.” Garland sent a memo to U.S. attorneys and F.B.I. offices asking them to work with local officials around the country about violent threats; his memo did not use the word “terrorism.”

Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, asked whether Patel would open an investigation into a political adversary because Trump asked him to do so, or if he would stop a legitimate investigation into an ally of Trump if pressed. Patel says he will simply obey the law, but evades Coons’s question of whether he would resign if forced or directed to do otherwise.

Pressed over his claims that even the former F.B.I. director Christopher A. Wray should be prosecuted, Patel says he “will not go backwards. There will be no politicization at the F.B.I. There will be no retributive actions taken by any F.B.I. should I be confirmed as F.B.I. director.”

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At his confirmation hearing to be F.B.I. director on Thursday, Mr. Patel forcefully rejected the idea that the group of names was an enemies list.

“It’s not an enemies list,” Mr. Patel told the senators. “It’s a total mischaracterization.”He later added that the F.B.I. “will not go backwards. There will be no politicization at the F.B.I. There will be no retributive actions taken by any F.B.I. should I be confirmed as F.B.I. director.”

Many of the names are familiar. They stand out because of their roles in investigations that ensnared President Trump or because they bucked the president’s authority. Some are obscure but well-known to those who closely followed the various controversies that engulfed the first Trump administration.

Former F.B.I. officials are included, including James B. Comey, whom Mr. Trump fired as the bureau’s director, and his successor, Christopher A. Wray, who resigned this month before the president could oust him, too. There are two current F.B.I. employees on the list.

One is an agent who was involved in an inquiry examining a possible secret communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Russian financial firm with ties to the Kremlin. The other is a veteran analyst involved in the F.B.I.’s investigation, known as “Crossfire Hurricane,” into Russian meddling during the 2016 president election.

The list has generated unease inside the bureau — not just for those on it but even those who are not singled out by name — given the mass firings at the Justice Department in recent days. The dismissals extended to about a dozen federal prosecutors who worked on the criminal prosecutions of Mr. Trump, with the acting attorney general citing a lack of trust.

“Given your significant role in prosecuting the president, I do not believe that the leadership of the department can trust you to assist in implementing the president’s agenda faithfully,” read the memo by the acting attorney general, James McHenry.

Whether that retribution spills over to the bureau is unclear. Mr. Patel has insisted that the list is not a road map.

“My version of accountability is a little different than maybe what most people would think,” Mr. Patel said on the podcast “The Shawn Ryan Show.” He added: “I don’t have a hit list. I don’t have a revenge march I’m on.”

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Mr. Patel’s view of the QAnon conspiracy theory is somewhat selective. While he has endorsed the parts of the theory that align with a pro-Trump view of the president’s past legal entanglements, his public comments about the movement suggest he sees its adherents more as an audience to be courted, rather than an ideology to follow.

“The Q thing is a movement a lot of people attach themselves to,” he said in a 2022 interview. “I disagree with a lot of what that movement says, but I agree with a lot of what that movement says.”

The QAnon phenomenon began in the first Trump administration, when anonymous social media posts, presented as the secret knowledge of someone with a high-level security clearance, fed outlandish theories about a cabal of child molesters among politicians and celebrities. They teased the idea that some day soon, Mr. Trump would wreak destruction on his critics.

In that 2022 interview, Mr. Patel praised the QAnon community for its views on the two impeachment inquiries into Mr. Trump; the mob of Trump supporters who breached the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; and the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.

Such QAnon claims have been “massively absorbed and pushed by the Q community,” Mr. Patel said in the interview. “Good, because that’s the truth, and why not?”

Many current and former F.B.I. agents have cringed at Mr. Patel’s apparent skepticism toward the government and embrace of unfounded theories of government cabals, and what that could mean for an investigative agency that has to sift through vast amounts of rumor, speculation and nonsensical tips to generate the kind of evidence that will win convictions in court.

“From Day 1 at the F.B.I. academy, all agents are taught to follow the facts and to base investigative decisions on evidence,” said Karl Schmae, a former supervisory agent at the bureau. “A director who disregards that foundation will inevitably make poor decisions and ruin the fact-based culture within the F.B.I.”

Mr. Schmae said that, contrary to Mr. Patel’s assertion, investigations deal with coincidences all the time. As a recent example, he cited the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans by a man who had been inspired by Islamic State, followed by a vehicle explosion hours later by a different man in Las Vegas. Investigators have said they see no direct link between the two, but continue to examine the evidence to be sure.

Mr. Patel has long claimed that the F.B.I. has already lost its way, particularly in its investigation of possible links between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and Russia. The Trump administration, he has vowed, will put the F.B.I. back on the right path.