Roundup: Kash Patel Confirmed As FBI Chief; China Sees Opportunity As USAID Gets Cut
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Who is Kash Patel and why is his FBI appointment controversial?
I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department.
And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
Kash Patel was confirmed as the new FBI director yesterday. Despite questions about his qualifications, Ryan, this was a pretty tight vote, even though it seemed like his confirmation was never really in doubt, right?
No, it wasn't really in doubt. Republicans did, for the most part, kind of unite and lockstep behind it. But this vote came out to 51 to 49. There are two Republican senators who voted against confirming Patel. That would be Maine's Susan Collins and Alaska's Lisa Murkowski. And if you look at the three directors immediately before Patel, they all received at least 92 votes in favor. So that gives you a sense of how controversial a nominee Patel is to lead the FBI, which, to remind people, is a really big job. The FBI is responsible for investigating counterterrorism, bank robberies, cybersecurity, all sorts of things across the spectrum. And there's a lot of crime going on. And a lot of this comes down to the FBI to fight. So this is a very big job.
What were the concerns about Kash Patel's confirmation as FBI director?
And there are a lot of people, whether they be Democrats and also former national security officials, who have concerns about Patel, about his qualifications, about his experience, his temperament, and whether he's really the right man for this job.
Yeah. Can you talk to me more about what concerns people had going into his confirmation process?
Well, there are a whole bunch of them. There's the fact that he's a very close ally of President Trump. There are concerns about whether he can be independent from the White House or whether he's somebody who's going to do exactly what President Trump wants him to do. Traditionally, the FBI is independent, and it's something that has been very important historically. There's also just the fact that he's made a lot of inflammatory comments over the years He's talked about wanting to root out the deep state. He's called public servants, law enforcement officials who investigated Trump gangsters. He says that people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, who fought with police, he says that they are political prisoners.
That's, of course, echoing the sort of comments that we've heard from the president. And more broadly, he's just a very... fierce critic of the FBI itself. He has said on a bunch of podcast appearances that he wants to shut down FBI headquarters on day one. He wants to turn it into a museum to the deep state. Lawmakers, certainly Democrats, asked him about a lot of these things during his confirmation hearing. Patel tried to push back on them. He said that he would not politicize the FBI, that he wants to take politics out of the FBI. He wants to focus on traditional crime fighting. But those comments did little to assuage the concerns that Democrats have.
And that just simply wasn't who Kash Patel was before he was at that Senate hearing. This is somebody who was known for being provocative, who wrote a book not just about the government gangsters, as he noted in the book title, but he wrote a children's book called The Plot Against the King that seemed to depict someone with blonde hair as the king, looked like maybe President Trump, and somebody who looked like Nancy Pelosi as one of the people who was engaging in the plot against and Someone who maybe looked like Kash Patel, who seemed to be the sorcerer behind the king. So it's one thing when you're trying to sell books and get yourself on podcasts. It's another thing when you want to run the FBI, which is one of the most important structures in this country for fighting crime.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
Who is Kash Patel and why is his FBI appointment controversial?
0:38–1:42
2
What were the concerns about Kash Patel's confirmation as FBI director?
1:42–5:58
3
How might Kash Patel's leadership impact the FBI?
5:58–8:59
4
Why is the U.S. cutting international aid and what are the potential consequences?
8:59–14:04
5
How is China responding to the U.S. cuts in foreign aid?
14:04–21:07