Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel confirmation hearings: Takeaways and analysis

After nearly six hours of questioning, Patel's confirmation hearing ended moments ago, wrapping up today's confirmation hearings. Gabbard and Kennedy hearings ended hours ago.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., circled back to the Mar-a-Lago issue after Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., tried to muddy the waters. Patel was asked point-blank whether he saw Trump issue a declassification order specifically for the classified documents that Trump was refusing to return. “I heard and witnessed the president issue a declassification order for a number of documents,” Patel said. “I don’t know what was found and not found at Mar-a-Lago.”

That’s not what he was saying publicly back in 2022. Trump “declassified whole sets of materials” before leaving the White House,” Patel claimed to Breitbart at the time, but, he said, White House counsel Pat Cipollone “failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings, but that doesn’t mean the information wasn’t declassified.”

“Would you lie for Donald Trump?” Booker asked him. “No,” Patel responded quickly. But without actually speaking as to what he testified, Booker wasn’t satisfied and urged his colleagues not to advance Patel’s nomination without answering one question: “Did he or did he not lie for the president?”

Patel deflected when Sen. Amy Klobuchar asked whether he stood by his past criticism of Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO who has become a close ally of Trump in recent months.

Democrats on the committee identified eight times Patel publicly attacked Musk — particularly at a time when Musk was supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' 2024 Republican presidential primary run. (DeSantis lost the nomination to Trump.)

Klobuchar quoted Patel as having said, “Elon Musk cares about two things: your data and his money.” The FBI director nominee responded: “I don’t have that full quote in front of me to respond.”

“It matters to us because he’s playing such a major role in the government,” Klobuchar said.

The FBI is the investigative arm of the DOJ, so one can potentially forgive Patel for not knowing the intricacies of how grand juries work. Wait, I just remembered that he’s been hyping his experience as a prosecutor, so he should have a good idea of the rules governing grand juries. And as Sen. Whitehouse tried to emphasize to Patel, building on what Booker said earlier, as a former witness he is allowed to talk about what he said to the grand jury that led to the charges against Trump in the classified documents case.

Whitehouse even went so far as to read off the rule from the DOJ's website that would let Patel speak. But Patel appeared ignorant on the matter, saying at different points that he wasn’t allowed to speak and that the committee would have to request the testimony. 

“I’m not an expert on this constitutional standard,” Patel said.

“It’s not expert,” Whitehouse said incredulously. “It’s like super simple.” 

From this end, it seems as though Patel doesn’t want to have to admit, under oath, that he has no real knowledge that Trump actually declassified the documents found at Mar-a-Lago as he previously claimed.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, just teed up an opportunity for Patel to talk about his experience as a public defender, warning that prosecutors have the awesome power to “ruin” people. Multiple Republican senators have spoken positively about Patel’s public defender experience. It’s a reminder that conservatives can be quite opportunistic with their praise for the profession. 

Conservatives have a history of attacking public defenders seeking confirmations, alleging that the people in this job — who do the necessary and constitutionally backed work of defending the accused in court — somehow support crime. We saw this during the attempted confirmation of Debo Adegbile to lead the Justice Department’s civil rights division during President Barack Obama’s administration. And we saw another example of this more recently during the Biden administration, when Republicans attacked eventual Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson for her public defender experience. (More on that here.) 

But now that Republicans are complaining that they’re the ones unfairly targeted by law enforcement, one’s experience in the role of public defender — at least, in the very specific case of Patel — is being portrayed as a benefit.

Unlike the Gabbard hearing, which has already wrapped, the Judiciary Committee is having a second round of questioning for Patel. This time around, senators will only get three minutes each instead of seven. The math says that with 22 members on the committee, that should take a little over an hour. But the math also says that we should have been done with both rounds by now, so numbers can be a little fuzzy in the Senate.

Whew. I was looking forward to when the committee got to its newest minority member, Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and he did not disappoint. Schiff was the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee when Patel was a staffer. When he became the chair in 2018, at which point Patel got a gig in the White House, Schiff wound up leading the first impeachment inquiry into Trump. 

Schiff drilled down on Patel’s fundraising off of the “J6 Choir” and his role in that, asking whether he’d done any due diligence or had lied to the committee earlier today about his involvement. But the real drama came when Schiff asked Patel to turn around to face the Capitol Police officers in the room:

Schiff: I want you to turn around — there are Capitol Police officers behind you. They’re guarding us. Take a look at them right now. Turn around. 

Patel: I’m looking at you. 

Schiff: No, no, look at them. I want you to look at them, if you can, if you have the courage to look them in the eye, Mr. Patel, and tell them you’re proud of what you did. Tell them you’re proud that you raised money off of people that assaulted their colleagues, that pepper-sprayed them, that beat them with poles. Tell them you’re proud of what you did, Mr. Patel. They’re right there. They’re guarding you today. Tell them how proud you are. 

Whew. I don’t think I need to tell you that Patel did not, in fact, turn around.

Patel avoided giving an answer to Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., as to whether he agreed with Trump’s pardon of Jan. 6 insurrectionists or his pardon of Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison after creating one of the biggest illegal drug marketplaces in American history.

Ulbricht has developed a cult following among crypto enthusiasts and self-proclaimed libertarian types, and Trump’s pardon was a gift of sorts to those people after many of them backed his campaign. Welch mentioned that Ulbricht was found to have sought out people he could pay to commit murders on his behalf to protect his drug empire. 

Patel deflected multiple attempts to get him to answer whether he agreed with this pardon, saying he was not consulted on it and “it’s not appropriate for me to speak on pardons.”

A big part of Patel’s testimony has focused on the need to restore Americans’ trust in the FBI. A poll from Gallup has been cited multiple times as GOP senators have lamented the fact that only about 40% of respondents think the FBI is doing an excellent or good job. It was treated like a bit of a mystery as to how things could have gotten so bad.

But diving into that a bit more, you can see that only 23% of Republicans in that poll backed the FBI versus over 60% of Democrats. If there’s any crisis in trust towards the bureau, it’s thanks to Trump’s ongoing attacks that trust in the FBI has eroded with Republicans making up the bulk of that downward spiral.