Kash Patel Told the Senate 'You Bet We're There' When Asked About FBI Agents at Michigan Polls, Then Said 'I Don't Know That We Can't Legally Do It.' Booker Called Him an 'Incompetent Lackey.'

FBI Director Kash Patel spent Tuesday in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the most consequential exchange of the day was about seven weeks away. Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont read Patel a comment from John James, the Republican running for governor of Michigan, who had said the director told him "the FBI will have a presence leading up to Election Day in Michigan." Patel did not dispute it. "We have an election crimes community coordinator in all 56 field offices, so you bet we're there," he said.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut then asked for a straightforward pledge that the bureau would not interfere in the November midterms. Patel would not give one. "I don't know that we can't legally do it," he said, when pressed on whether agents could be sent to polling places. Blumenthal told him he had failed to offer "an unequivocal, clear, unambiguous commitment." Patel later said the coordinators exist to prevent election crimes and that he would not rule out deploying agents if problems arose.

It was Patel's first appearance before Congress since a combative session in May, when he was grilled over reports in The Atlantic that he drinks to excess and over management turmoil at the bureau. He came prepared with a defense of his record, describing the FBI's work under his leadership as "the most prolific run of crime reduction in United States history" and citing a 20-year low in the murder rate, fentanyl seizures and the arrest of fugitives from the bureau's most-wanted lists.

Democrats were not persuaded. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the committee's ranking member, called Patel "the least qualified and most partisan FBI director" in the country's history and accused him of steering investigations toward President Trump's political interests. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey went further, calling Patel "an incompetent lackey" who "wouldn't qualify even to be an FBI agent." Patel shot back that the criticism was rich coming from a senator with failed presidential ambitions, and the exchange turned into a three-way clash with Chairman Chuck Grassley.

Much of the hearing turned on a change to FBI hiring standards first reported over the summer. The bureau no longer automatically disqualifies applicants who paid for sex, stole from an employer or engaged in bestiality. Under the revised rules, prostitution is not disqualifying if it happened more than 10 years ago and involved fewer than three instances, theft is forgiven after three years, and bestiality is not a bar if it occurred before the applicant turned 18. "We did not want to punish victims of bestiality, victims who were trafficked," Patel said, adding that every candidate "still has to go through the same rigorous standards and application process." When Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana asked why the bureau would go anywhere near the subject, Patel said some such applicants "would go on to be law enforcement officers, who qualified to be law enforcement officers and later applied to the FBI." Lawmakers from both parties said they found the answer hard to follow.

Sen. Adam Schiff of California returned to the drinking allegations and Patel's $250 million defamation suit against The Atlantic, which the magazine continues to defend as accurate. Blumenthal pressed him on the firing of national-security agents with Iran expertise who had worked on the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case; Patel said the bureau would not be "weaponized" but did not explain the individual terminations, and he asserted that most of the agents on that case had retired rather than been fired. The committee also revisited his trip on a Justice Department jet to Italy during the Winter Olympics, which the FBI has said was work-related and required for security.

Asked about ProPublica's report that Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev paid for part of Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding celebration in the Bahamas, Patel said only, "I'm not sure what public reporting you are referring to." The hearing ended without any of the commitments Democrats had sought, and with the director's answer on polling places likely to follow him into an election that is now 49 days away.