FBI Director Kash Patel defended on Tuesday (September 16, 2026) a recent policy change to allow some applicants who have engaged in prostitution and bestiality to be considered for employment, insisting that the move was made to enable victims of those acts to apply for a job without fear of automatic disqualification.

The subject arose during a fiery Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which Mr. Patel clashed with Democrats over his firing of agents who participated in investigations of President Donald Trump and suggested that agents might be dispatched to the polls on Election Day amid Justice Department and White House concerns about voter fraud.

The hours-long hearing featured the name-calling and bitingly personal exchanges that have come to define Mr. Patel’s appearances on Capitol Hill, with Democrats characterising the Trump appointee as unqualified, criticising him for politically charged investigations into Mr. Trump’s enemies and highlighting travel that has included a trip to the Winter Olympics in Italy in which he partied with U.S. hockey players and a snorkeling excursion at the Pearl Harbor memorial in Hawaii.

“He’s an incompetent lackey. He’s like an 18-year old-kid who wants to join a fraternity that he could never be a member of, doing keg stands and chugging with friends. He’s an embarrassment to the agency and wouldn’t qualify even to be an FBI agent,” said an exasperated Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, his voice rising in anger.

“What a mockery you are,” he added.

Mr. Patel shot back, “You are the biggest mockery in the United States Senate, and you’re sitting next to Schiff.” That was a reference to Sen. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and outspoken Patel critic.

Patel pressed on the FBI’s hiring standards

The FBI quietly issued guidance this past spring lifting a categorical hiring restriction on applicants who had previously participated in prostitution. The bureau made a similar change with regard to childhood experience in bestiality.

Under questioning, Mr. Patel denied that the changes reflected a lowering of employment standards and insisted they were designed to prevent victims who’d been forced to engage in that conduct from being automatically disqualified.

“We did not want to punish victims of bestiality, victims who were trafficked. We did not want to make it an automatic disqualification for the FBI to consider you if you were a victim of these awful, heinous acts,” Mr. Patel said. “We are not going to target victims and prevent them from serving in their capacity to serve this country.” The questioning spanned partisan lines, with Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana grilling Patel about the rationale for a change that the FBI director said was proposed to him by subordinates.

“When you saw bestiality, I say this with respect: The person who recommended it, why didn’t you just say what planet did you parachute in from?” Sen. Kennedy asked.

Mr. Patel conceded that was his initial response, but “they then explained to me and showed me cases in which people were forced into it and applied to the FBI and so I thought they should be considered. It’s not an automatic disqualification.”

The Associated Press reported last month that the FBI still intends to bar some applicants who are revealed to have previously engaged in prostitution, including if they’ve done so within the last 10 years.

Patel did not rule out sending agents to polling places on Election Day

The hearing took place two months before the midterm elections in November and at a time when the FBI has opened investigations related to the 2020 contest, including by seizing voter data in Fulton County, Georgia.

Mr. Trump regularly makes false claims that elections are rigged and riddled with fraud, especially in the months before an election. But there is no widespread fraud in American elections. Local election officials have detailed processes for auditing the accuracy of the vote after ballots are tallied.

Even as he disputed his loss in 2020, audits, reviews and recounts in the battleground states where he challenged the outcome all affirmed Democrat Joe Biden’s win.

Those voter fraud claims, and the FBI’s efforts to investigate the 2020 race, have spurred Democratic concerns that Patel could plunge the bureau into the upcoming election.

Asked whether the FBI has the general authority to monitor elections, Mr. Patel replied that responsibility rests with the Department of Homeland Security. He said the FBI’s presence on Election Day will be “housed” with election crimes coordinators at each of the bureau’s 56 field offices, but under questioning, he declined to rule out that agents would be dispatched to the polls in the event of problems or reports of interference.

“Do you pledge that you will not in any way interfere in the will of the American people when they go to the polls in November?” asked Democratic Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont in one of the hearing’s more combative exchanges.

“I pledge unequivocally that I will not participate in your charade of lies,” Patel said, later calling Welch a “total fraud.” FBI firings were also a featured topic of the hearing Patel repeatedly touted what he asserted was his record-breaking success at the FBI, proclaiming the “most prolific reduction in crime in U.S. history” even though violent crime rates in American cities had begun dropping well before Mr. Trump took office last year for reasons that are difficult to pinpoint.

Kash Patel: The die-hard loyalist 

Democrats seize on the tumult inside the FBI

Even as the Republican-led panel tried through its questioning to keep the focus on Mr. Patel’s crime-fighting efforts from his perch at the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency, Democrats seized on the tumult inside the FBI over the last year — including sweeping firings of agents who participated in investigations of Mr. Trump, the bureau’s aggressive efforts to investigate media leaks by serving subpoenas at reporters’ homes and Patel’s travel schedule that has blended private leisure with professional responsibilities.

Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut pressed Mr. Patel on the firing of national security agents with expertise in Iran shortly before the U.S. launched attacks on the country last February. He noted that the agents had participated in an FBI investigation into Trump over his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

“Do you think firing the president’s political opponents is more important than retaining the decades of experience and expertise monitoring intelligence threats from Iran?” Mr. Blumenthal asked.

“I think what’s most important is to not have a weaponized FBI, and I will endeavor every single day to make sure we have no one there that is doing that,” Mr. Patel responded. He did not say why their participation in the Mar-a-Lago investigation represented “weaponized” law enforcement.

Mr. Patel later suggested that the scope of firings had been overblown, saying many agents had retired on their own. And he defended his personal travels by pointing to numbers that he said showed that two recent predecessors, Chris Wray and James Comey, had traveled more.

Published – September 16, 2026 03:53 am IST

Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s choice to be director of the FBI, appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 30, 2025.
| Photo Credit: AP

Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, insisted to deeply skeptical Democrats on Thursday (January 30, 2025) that he did not have an “enemies list” and that the bureau under his leadership would not seek retribution against the President’s adversaries or launch investigations for political purposes.

“I have no interest nor desire and will not, if confirmed, go backwards,” Mr. Patel told a contentious Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing. “There will be no politicization at the FBI. There will be no retributive actions taken by the FBI.”

The reassurances were aimed at blunting a persistent line of attack from Democrats, who throughout Thursday’s hearing confronted Mr. Patel with a vast catalogue of his incendiary statements. They said those statements raise alarming questions about his loyalty to the President, such as when he described some of the prosecuted Jan. 6 rioters as “political prisoners” and called for a purge of anti-Trump “conspirators” in the government and news media.

“There is an unfathomable difference between a seeming facade being constructed around this nominee here today, and what he has actually done and said in real life when left to his own devices,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat. His colleague, Sen. Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota, later added, “It is his own words. It is not some conspiracy. It is what Mr. Patel actually said himself.”

Mr. Patel defended defend himself by insisting that Democrats were putting his comments and social media posts in a “grotesque context.” He said the suggestion that he had an “enemies list” — a 2023 book he authored includes a lengthy list of former government officials he says are part of the so-called deep state — was a “total mischaracterization.”

“The only thing that will matter if I’m confirmed as a director of the FBI is a de-weaponized, de-politicized system of law enforcement completely devoted to rigorous obedience to the Constitution and a singular standard of justice,” Mr. Patel said.

Mr. Patel was picked in November to replace Christopher Wray, who led the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency for more than seven years but was forced out of the job Mr. Trump had appointed him to after being seen as insufficiently loyal to him.

Mr. Patel is a former aide to the House Intelligence Committee and an ex-federal prosecutor who served in Mr. Trump’s first administration. He’s alarmed critics with rhetoric — in dozens of podcasts and books he has authored — in which he has demonstrated fealty to Mr. Trump and assailed the decision-making of the agency he’s now been asked to lead.

But Mr. Patel sought on multiple occasions to reassure Democrats that his FBI would be independent from the White House. He would not acknowledge that Mr. Trump had lost the 2020 election, conceding only that Joe Biden was sworn in as president. But he did not endorse Mr. Trump’s sweeping pardon of supporters, including violent rioters, charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

“I do not agree with the commutation of any sentence of any individual who committed violence against law enforcement,” Mr. Patel said in response to a question from Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the committee. Mr. Durbin made his opposition to Mr. Patel clear at the outset.

Mr. Durbin said the FBI is critical in keeping America safe from terrorism, violent crime and other threats, and the nation “needs an FBI director who understands the gravity of this mission and is ready on day one, not someone who is consumed by his own personal political grievances.”

Mr. Patel pledged if confirmed to be transparent and said he would not involve the FBI in prosecutorial decisions, keeping those with Justice Department lawyers instead.

“First, let good cops be cops,” Mr. Patel wrote in outlining his priorities. “Leadership means supporting agents in their mission to apprehend criminals and protect our citizens. If confirmed, I will focus on streamlining operations at headquarters while bolstering the presence of field agents across the nation. Collaboration with local law enforcement is crucial to fulfilling the FBI’s mission.”

Mr. Patel found common cause with Mr. Trump over their shared skepticism of government surveillance and the “deep state” — a pejorative catchall used by Trump to refer to government bureaucracy.

He was part of a small group of supporters during Mr. Trump’s recent criminal trial in New York who accompanied him to the courthouse, where he told reporters that Trump was the victim of an “unconstitutional circus.”

That close bond would depart from the modern-day precedent of FBI directors looking to keep Presidents at arm’s length.

Republican allies of Mr. Trump, who share the President’s belief that the FBI has become politicized, have rallied around Mr. Patel and pledged to support him, seeing him as someone who can shake up the bureau and provide needed change.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the committee, sought to blunt attacks on Mr. Patel preemptively by focusing on the need to reform an FBI that he said had become weaponized.

The FBI in recent years has become entangled in numerous politically explosive investigations, including not just the two federal inquiries into Mr. Trump that resulted in indictments but also probes of Mr. Biden and his son, Hunter.

“It’s no surprise that public trust has declined in an institution that has been plagued by abuse, a lack of transparency, and the weaponization of law enforcement,” Grassley said. “Nevertheless, the FBI remains an important, even indispensable institution for law and order in our country.”

He later added: “Mr. Patel, should you be confirmed, you will take charge of an FBI that is in crisis.”