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Trump’s FBI chief pick, Kash Patel, insists he has no ‘enemies list’ and won’t seek retribution

Kash Patel handles a stack of papers as he appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Kash Patel, President Trump’s choice to be FBI director, appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing on Thursday.
(Ben Curtis / Associated Press)

Kash Patel, President Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, insisted to deeply skeptical Democrats on Thursday 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.

“There will be no politicization at the FBI,” Patel told a contentious Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing. “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 Patel with a vast catalog 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.

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“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,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) later added, “It is his own words. It is not some conspiracy. It is what Mr. Patel actually said himself.”

Before being nominated to lead the FBI, Patel railed against the bureau and promised to launch a campaign against what he calls “government gangsters.”

Patel on Thursday said the suggestion that he had an “enemies list” — a 2023 book he wrote includes a lengthy list of former government officials he says are part of the so-called deep state — was a “total mischaracterization.”

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“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,” Patel said.

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 Trump had appointed him to after being seen as insufficiently loyal to him.

President-elect Donald Trump turns to a fierce loyalist to upend America’s premier law enforcement agency.

A former aide to the House Intelligence Committee and an ex-federal prosecutor who served in Trump’s first administration, Patel has alarmed critics with rhetoric — in dozens of podcasts and books he wrote — in which he has demonstrated fealty to Trump and assailed the FBI.

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In a podcast interview last year, he said that if he were in charge of the FBI, he would “shut down” the bureau’s headquarters building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington and “reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state.’”

It’s not just criminal prosecutions that worry those who have crossed President Trump. There are other, more prosaic, means of retaliation.

“And I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to go chase down criminals. Go be cops,” he added.

Patel sought on multiple occasions to reassure Democrats that his FBI would be independent from the White House. He would not acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election, conceding only that Joe Biden was sworn in as president. But he did not endorse 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,” Patel said in response to a question from Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Durbin said the FBI is crucial 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.”

Patel pledged to keep the FBI out of prosecutorial decisions, keeping them instead with Justice Department lawyers.

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

Patel was part of a small group of supporters during 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.” A jury of New Yorkers convicted Trump on 34 felony counts over hush money paid to a porn actor.

The close bond between Patel and Trump would depart from the modern-day precedent of FBI directors looking to keep presidents at arm’s length.

Several Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee who have met with Patel, including Durbin, have issued statements sounding the alarm and signaling their opposition to the pick. The lawmakers foreshadowed their doubts about Patel by directing numerous questions about him to Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney general, when she had her own confirmation hearing this month.

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

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

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Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman of the committee, sought to blunt attacks on Patel: “Mr. Patel, should you be confirmed, you will take charge of an FBI that is in crisis.”

Tucker, Durkin Richer and Brown write for the Associated Press.

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