FBI Director Kashyap “Kash” Patel spent a good portion of the day Tuesday testifying before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. He bragged about the agency’s crime-reduction success, defended personnel and policy changes, and doubled down on the Bureau’s handling of public demands for release of the Epstein files.
There were also a few instances of made-for-TV outbursts during the hearing. At times, Patel responded with outright insults when Democratic senators came after him. In one such instance, he called embattled legislator Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) a “political buffoon.”
The FBI is catching more bad guys these days, according to agency’s director. Patel rattled off a litany of statistics to show that the Bureau is once again interested in addressing actual crime. He said the agency has helped rescue 4,700 victims of child rape and trafficking under his watch, a 35-percent increase from the same time last year. They’ve arrested 1,500 child predators, a five-percent increase from the same time last year. The Bureau also helped take 300 human traffickers off the streets, a 10-percent increase; as well as 350 Tren de Aragua gang members, a whopping 250-percent increase from last year. This last factoid raises the question of why former FBI Director Christopher Wray was not interested in arresting Venezuelan gangsters.
Patel’s FBI also caught four fugitives on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted List, the same amount captured during Wray’s entire stint while Joe Biden was president. It removed 1,600 kilograms of fentanyl off the street, a 25-percent increase, and made 60 counterintelligence arrests this year, a 30-percent increase. Among those arrests was that of an active-duty Navy sailor who was charged with spying for China.
Patel also bragged about the FBI’s role in making the nation’s Capitol safer. He said law enforcement have arrested 21,000 people in D.C., which has led to a 60-percent decrease in gun crimes last month, a 74-percent decrease in carjackings, and a 53-percent decrease in homicides. “We are on track to have the lowest murder rate in modern American history — the lowest murder rate by double digit percentages,” he summarized. The agency is targeting “the worst of the worst in major US cities,” he added. New Orleans and Nashville have seen an increase of 250-percent in violent crime arrests.
The agency is also targeting transnational crime, especially that which is tied to fentanyl coming from China. The FBI is going after companies that make fentanyl starting materials, or precursors. He mentioned this month’s earlier bust in Ohio that shuttered a criminal enterprise that was supplying fentanyl precursor drugs. Twenty-two Chinese nationals and three Americans were arrested. He said at the time, “We charged an enterprise-wide system in mainland China to include dozens of individuals and banks and companies that are responsible for making these lethal precursors and shipping them here.”
Patel said he talked to his Chinese counterpart in the Ministry of Public Services about working with them to target the precursor chemical companies. The FBI has cut off the shipping points of multiple Chinese businesses. He said once the agency stopped up their delivery through Mexican cartels, they started flowing through India. Patel said U.S. authorities then reached out to Indian officials to begin working with them in efforts to shut down those points. When asked by a committee member if China is cooperating with these efforts, he said yes.
Patel credited this success, in part, to getting more agents out of D.C. and planting them in field offices around the country.
Patel also had to answer for all the people he fired, which Committee ranking member Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) was not pleased with. Durbin’s concerns indicate that, just as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been doing with the nation’s sprawling public health agencies, Patel has also been cleaning house as part of an attempt to change the agency’s culture. The American people perceive both agencies as very corrupt.
Durbin said Patel fired or forced out all six officials in charge of the agency’s major branches, ousted 5,000 career agents, got rid of a couple of agents with long military records, and changed the requirement for being a G-man. The FBI now accepts applications from people without college degrees. Patel said the agency will accept applications from police officers with experience in the field. The idea behind this change is that experience on the street will help make for a good asset to the nation’s top law-enforcement agency.
Addressing a common concern among Republican legislators, Patel said one of his main goals with all the changes was to ensure the FBI will no longer target people because of their politics. “The FBI will only bring cases that are based in fact and law and have a legal basis to do so, and anyone that does otherwise will not be employed at the FBI,” he said. He went on to say that they’re still looking into people who weaponized the agency.
Patel faced a number of questions about Epstein. Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked him outright: Was Epstein an intelligence asset for the U.S. government or any foreign government? As the director of the FBI, Patel could only speak for his agency, he said. And as far as that goes, Epstein was not an FBI source, Patel said. When Grassley asked Patel if he would give him all classified and non-classified records on Epstein, Patel said he would provide those “he’s legally permitted to do so under court orders.”
Patel worked hard to drive home the point that the problem with Epstein disclosure is the system. It all goes back to the people who arrested Epstein in the first place, he claimed. The “original sin” stems from the way U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Southern Florida Alex Acosta filed the case in 2006. “The original case involved a very limited search warrant or set of search warrants and didn’t take as much investigatory material as it should’ve seized,” the FBI director said.
The search warrants were limited to short time periods: 1997 to 2001 and 2002 to 2005. Acosta allowed Epstein to enter into a plea and non-prosecution agreement in 2008, “which then the courts issued mandates and protective orders legally prohibiting anyone from ever seeing that material ever again without the permission of the court. The non-prosecution agreements also barred future prosecutions for those involved at that time.” He then said the Trump administration has done more to turn over credible information then we “are legally able to do so.”
While Patel was testifying, the House Oversight Committee released documents from Epstein’s estate, testimony by former Attorney General William P. Barr about the federal investigation into Epstein, and letters from former attorneys general Alberto Gonzalez and Jeff Sessions.
Durbin asked the FBI director if the claim from a whistleblower that the New York Field Office was withholding Epstein records was true. “I’m not familiar with that whistleblower,” Patel responded.
Durbin also said that Patel put more than 1,000 FBI employees to work 24-hour shifts reviewing over 100,000 pages of Epstein-related records and that these people were told to flag any records that had Trump’s name on them. Patel denied this. He told Durbin he was citing “baseless reporting.”
Patel said the FBI has provided all credible information and working with Congress to turn over all documents “we can.” In his yelling match with Schiff, he defended the FBI’s lackluster response to transparency on Epstein files.