Senate Republicans say the new FBI director will need to fix an ailing bureau that former FBI Director James Comey “broke.”
Following President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel to be the next FBI director, Democratic detractors raised concerns that the former chief of staff at the Defense Department was unqualified.
However, GOP lawmakers taking control of the upper chamber in January are open to hearing from Mr. Patel, who will talk with senators this week.
Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the incoming majority whip, described Mr. Patel as another one of Mr. Trump’s “bold appointees.”
“The president ought to have who he wants serving in his administration,” the senator said. “And when you take a look at what we’ve just seen with the Biden pardon [of his son Hunter], we do have a two-tiered system of justice in this country, and it has to stop.”
Other GOP senators described the FBI as an agency rife with political bias and in desperate need of an overhaul, expressing openness to Mr. Patel shaking things up at the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
Mr. Patel, however, likely faces unanimous opposition from Senate Democrats.
Should his nomination win approval in the Judiciary Committee, Republicans can lose only three of their members in the vote to confirm Mr. Patel.
The FBI and Mr. Trump have been at odds since he launched his first presidential campaign. In July 2016, under Director James B. Comey, the bureau launched Crossfire Hurricane, investigating the Trump campaign for purported collusion with Russia.
When Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey in 2017, it was a factor in the assignment of special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Trump-Russia collusion — a probe that dogged Mr. Trump during his first term but ultimately found no evidence of collusion or ties to Moscow.
Since then, the FBI has been accused of purging conservatives from its ranks, targeting the Catholic Church and pro-life activists and conducting a heavy-handed raid on Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said that at “every level where partisans have been willing to abuse their power for political objectives, they should be removed from leadership.”
Mr. Cruz said he hears routinely from Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents who are “deeply dismayed about … this administration.”
“The DOJ and the FBI have been turned into political weapons used to protect the friends of the president and to persecute the enemies of the president. That is not how law enforcement is meant to operate,” he said. “I don’t want a Republican Department of Justice. I don’t want a Republican FBI. I don’t want a Democrat Department of Justice. I don’t want a Democrat FBI. I want a Department of Justice and FBI that follow the law regardless of department.”
Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, who will be talking to Trump nominees all week, told The Washington Times that the FBI “needs more transparency.”
“I can’t tell you of any reforms that have been made since the Comey FBI. I’ve always believed that James Comey broke the agency in half,” said Mr. Kennedy, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee that Mr. Patel will face for confirmation next month.
“[FBI Director] Chris Wray, of course, came in to try to fix it, and it’s been difficult. I’m not saying that he didn’t fix it. I’m just saying that there hasn’t been a lot of transparency. And when he’s appeared before Congress, and we asked him questions, he has not been terribly forthcoming,” Mr. Kennedy said. “I understand the need for secrecy with investigations, but when every answer is ‘I can’t talk about that because it’s a personnel matter’ or ‘I can’t talk about that because it’s being investigated,’ that’s not helpful.”
Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said he wants an FBI overhaul to clean out the partisanship.
“You need a complete housecleaning of all the partisans inside the FBI. Who are those individuals? We know who the previous group was,” he said, pointing to Mr. Comey, former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page.
“Who’s directing the political persecution of grandmas that showed up on Jan. 6 and they get swat arrested? This is an outrage what’s happening here,” Mr. Johnson said. “Expose the truth. Find out exactly what happened on Jan. 6. What confidential human sources did they have attending Jan. 6? We should find that out.”
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.