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.

Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., tried his best to get Patel to say whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Here’s the various combinations of words that came out of his mouth instead:

• “As I’ve said before, that President Biden was certified and sworn in, and he was the president. I don’t know how else to say it.”

• “My opinions on the 2020 election have been expressed in this hearing, and [Trump is] entitled to whatever opinions he wants.”

• “Senator, millions of Americans expressed concern, going back to multiple elections over election integrity.”

• “What I can say is the same for both of them, Senator, both of their elections were certified, and they are both — one was and one now is president.”

As Welch noted, none of those statements actually admit that Trump lost in 2020 and Biden won.

I’m only going to give this the brief amount of attention it deserves. Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., one-upped Sen. Thom Tillis’ “bingo” stunt to play a little game of “would you rather” with Patel. As one might guess, the questions were extremely leading. Each choice was between whether Patel would prefer something that either didn’t happen or was blown way out of proportion as a GOP talking point (see my colleague Ja’han Jones’ post on supposed anti-Catholic bias) and something that is part of the FBI’s job. As you can guess, Patel picked the latter answer every time.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn just tried to wedge some Jeffrey Epstein conspiracism into the Patel proceedings.

The Tennessee Republican invoked the onetime Trump associate and alleged sex trafficker’s name in a line of questioning asking Patel if he would “work with her” to retrieve records related to Epstein’s alleged crimes, which she claimed that Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., had tried to block as chair of the Judiciary Committee because he didn’t want details released for some nefarious reason.

Blackburn has helped give this conspiracy theory life in conservative media. And after Patel said he would help her retrieve information about Epstein, Durbin said her allegations against him were bogus.

The irony here is that Trump is the most prominent figure who has publicly hedged on releasing files related to Epstein, as MSNBC noted last year.

Gabbard’s public hearing has concluded. She’ll be facing more questions again shortly, but this time behind closed doors. Intelligence Committee members will also vote on her nomination in private, though some in the party have called for the vote to be made public, with the intention of protecting Gabbard’s chances of securing the nomination.

Upon returning from break, Booker asked Patel to speak about his role as a witness in Trump’s classified documents case. Patel said his grand jury testimony should be made public rather than answering Booker’s question. Booker noted there's no legal bar preventing Patel from sharing what he told the grand jury. In pressing Patel, Booker reminded me that Patel was very vocal between the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago and the charges against Trump. 

During that time, Patel claimed without evidence that the former president had declassified all of the documents found at his Florida home. Booker honed in on that and asked whether Patel had witnessed the president declassifying documents. It’s very convenient for the nominee that former special counsel Jack Smith has been blocked from releasing the second volume of his investigation’s report, leaving what Patel said in the dark.

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., squandered his opportunity to ask an extra question by rambling once again about Edward Snowden being a traitor and then asking Gabbard, “Why is he being treated as a folk hero by you rather than the traitor that he was?”

It feels like the trillionth time some iteration of this question has been asked, and Gabbard responds similarly every time by condemning illegal whistleblowing and saying she’ll work to ensure it doesn’t happen again. It’s a wasted opportunity for lawmakers to ask detailed questions that could help bring to light Gabbard’s most concerning lapses in judgement about foreign misinformation, which is by far the most pressing and job-relevant issue of the hearing.

Gabbard declined to give a straightforward answer when Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked whether she would carry out an illegal order by Trump. Wyden brought up the new administration’s effort to withhold federal funds earlier this week, which caused chaos across the federal government and has since been temporarily blocked by a federal judge.

“So my question is, if President Trump orders you to withhold appropriated funds from the inspector general, will you refuse that illegal order?” Wyden asked.

“I don’t believe for a second that President Trump would ask me to do something that would break the law,” Gabbard responded.

“That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking: If you are asked about an illegal order, what will you do?” Wyden said. “You can say, ‘Oh, it’ll never happen.’ [But] what will you do if you’re dealing with an illegal order?”

Gabbard simply said she would “comply with the law” if confirmed.

Wyden’s attempt at getting clarification on Gabbard’s answer was then cut off by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., the committee chair.

Before the lunch break, Patel essentially gave a nonanswer when Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono asked about his vow — on Steve Bannon’s podcast in December 2023 — to “come after people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped rig presidential elections.”

Hirono quoted Patel saying “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.” 

Patel said he wouldn't go after the media "unless private citizens have been defamed, that’s their right.” Hirono asked him again whether he intends to go after the media as he vowed, and he said, “I can’t go after the media for other people. That’s a decision they have to make.” 

Hirono called Patel’s podcast quote "chilling," noting: “I didn’t hear a ‘no,’ that you will not go after them.” 

Trump, as you may now, has openly threatened media outlets that have aired coverage or published reports he doesn’t like.

Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., asked Gabbard to share her position on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Gabbard called it “essential for our national security” and said she supports the law. She also said that “it almost must exist next to having safeguards in place to ensure Americans’ civil liberties are protected.” Gabbard added that she supported Rounds’ efforts at reforming the law, but it was unclear if she felt his reforms were adequate.

It’s hard to know whether national security hawks will buy her change in tone. In previous years, Gabbard has described the warrantless surveillance law as “overreach” and lobbied for its repeal. Her recent shift on the issue ahead of her hearing has not convinced every Republican.

“Her answers to the written questions were very hedged on it,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, recently told The Hill. “I know there’s been a lot of reporting that she’s changed her position. That’s not how I read her answers. I read them as, ‘I’ll take a look at the reforms and see if they meet my concerns.’”

On yet another issue, Gabbard’s past activism is sharply at odds with the typical value system of a candidate for this kind of nomination.

The Senate Judiciary Committee went on a half-hour lunch break a little after noon, with roughly half of the committee having questioned Patel. We’re a good chunk of the way through the first round of questioning, which was expected to take roughly 2.5 hours, and will come back to Sen. Corey Booker, D-N.J. The senators will get a second, shorter round of questioning as well, so buckle in for a potentially long afternoon.

Despite what Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, implied in his questioning, nobody is trying to directly blame Patel for the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. At the time, Patel was the (extremely unqualified) chief of staff to the acting defense secretary, Chris Miller, and not directly involved with the ongoing attempts to overturn the election’s results.

What Democrats are correctly pointing out though is his continued defense of the reasoning behind the attack, namely the lie that Trump won the 2020 election, spreading the myth that the riot was instigated by the FBI, and downplaying the violence that took place that day.

Over at the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing questions on a range of topics — many of which were touched on during his confirmation hearing with the Senate Finance Committee yesterday.

But one issue that wasn’t referenced yesterday was a sexual assault allegation against him stemming from an alleged incident with a former babysitter of his children in the late 1990s. She alleged Kennedy had groped her in his kitchen.

When asked about the allegation in July, Kennedy didn’t appear to deny it and told podcaster Saagar Enjeti: “I am not a church boy ... I had a very, very rambunctious youth. I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world.”

Sen. Michael Bennet pressed Gabbard for a direct answer on whether she believed Snowden “was a traitor.”

“Is Edward Snowden a traitor to the United States of America? That is not a hard question to answer when the stakes are this high,” a riled-up Bennet said after Gabbard repeatedly declined to give a yes or no answer.

The Colorado Democrat also had laid into Gabbard for her past comments blaming the U.S. and NATO for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

“We’re the Senate. We get to decide whether we’re going to confirm this nominee. Obviously, we didn’t select this nominee,” Bennet said.

Addressing his colleagues on the committee, Bennet asked whether they “can’t do better” than Gabbard, who he said “can’t answer whether Snowden was a traitor” and “made excuses” for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

“I’m questioning her judgment,” Bennet said. “That’s the issue that’s at stake here.”

Sen. Josh Hawley’s line of questioning for Patel may have sounded like incoherent jargon if you’re not tapped into the conservative media ecosystem. The Missouri Republican asked about an FBI memo focused on thwarting “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.” As Molly Olmstead wrote for Slate in 2023, this memo, which talked about how such extremists can find refuge in certain traditionalist Catholic groups, has been misinterpreted by right-winger conspiracy theorists to suggest the FBI is anti-Catholic. 

Patel vowed to “fully utilize, if confirmed, the investigative powers of the FBI to give you the information you require.” And he ominously vowed to “hold those accountable who violated the sacred trust of the FBI.” Again, this is completely conspiratorial stuff coming from the potential FBI director.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., asked Patel a straightforward question: whether he’d protect the FBI agents who worked on Trump’s federal prosecutions from political retribution.

Patel would only say that “every FBI employee will be held to the absolute same standard, and no one will be terminated for cases” and that “all FBI agents will be protected from political retribution.”

Blumenthal rejected that as not being good enough for not specifically committing to protecting those agents who worked on Trump’s cases. “That was your first test,” the senator said. “You failed it.”

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., pressed Patel about his past statements on his interest in seeing Trump’s adversaries prosecuted, which echo Trump’s own stated desires. Patel said that if “confirmed that the FBI investigations will only be launched on the following qualification, a factual, articulate legal basis to do so.”

“I have no interest, no desire, and will not, if confirmed, go backwards,” he said. “There will be no politicization at the FBI. There will be no retributive actions taken by any FBI [official], should I be confirmed as the FBI director.”

This is the correct answer that you want an FBI nominee to deliver in a Senate confirmation hearing. Unfortunately, given the apparent willingness of Patel’s to say different things to different audiences, let’s go ahead and take that with a grain of salt the size of a Buick.

Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico just asked Gabbard, “Who is responsible for the war in Ukraine?”

Gabbard replied, “Putin started the war in Ukraine.”

It was a deliberate choice of words that warranted a follow-up. Gabbard stated a fact — Putin started it — while dodging the question of her account of the United States’ role in Russia’s decision. In the past, she has suggested that NATO bore some responsibility.

Asked by Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., what her 2017 meeting with Syria’s then-President Bashar al-Assad entailed, Gabbard said they discussed “a number of topics.”

“I asked him tough questions about his own regime’s actions, the use of chemical weapons and the brutal tactics that were being used against his own people,” Gabbard said. She added that she was not able to extract any concessions from the now-deposed Syrian leader and did not go into the meeting expecting to do so, “but I felt these issues were important to address.”

Gabbard also said she thought her trip was in good judgment, leaning on her argument that it can benefit the country when leaders engage with others, “whether they be adversaries or friends.”

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., attempted to rake Gabbard over the coals for praising former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden as “brave” and for supporting legislation that called for dropping charges against him. (In 2013, Snowden leaked classified documents that revealed how the U.S. government was surveilling private citizens around the world.)

When Warner asked whether Gabbard still believes Snowden was brave, she tried to walk the line:

Gabbard’s strategy is to stand by the policy substance of her previous positions, while partially walking back her warmth toward a whistleblower. While she’s right to demonstrate that she remains opposed to invasive surveillance, I suspect she will sway nobody. The reality is that the textbook candidate for this gig is somebody who would have a track record of total hostility to leaking.

Patel has been anything but shy since leaving office, making hundreds of appearances on radio, podcasts, and other right-wing media. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., read off some of Patel’s greatest (really, his worst) hits back to him with citations.

Patel said he couldn’t remember saying that “Donald Trump has every right to tell the world that in 2020, 2016 and every other election in between was rigged by our government because they were” on August 27, 2023, during the Thrive Time Show. Nor could he say much when confronted with his statement on Steve Bannon’s podcast that “we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.”

Can we really trust someone with such a shoddy memory as FBI director?

Patel’s rise through the ranks in the first Trump administration was given major side-eye by many of his fellow appointees. His nomination to lead the FBI prompted several of them to speak out, as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., was happy to read into the record. Among the condemnations read out:

• Former Attorney General William Barr: Patel “had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency."
• Former national security adviser Charles Kupperman: “He’s absolutely unqualified for this job. He’s untrustworthy. ... It’s an absolute disgrace to American citizens to even consider an individual of this nature.”
• Former national security adviser John Bolton: “I didn’t think he was qualified. He demonstrated no policy aptitude at all. I was forced to hire him.”

When asked point blank whether he supported Trump’s blanket pardon of Jan. 6 defendants, Patel instead engaged in a severe case of whataboutism. He pointed to then-President Joe Biden’s decision to commute the sentence of Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist who was convicted for killing two FBI agents almost 50 years ago. Patel described the killing in lurid terms and Durbin agreed that Peltier deserved to be in jail. But Patel’s dodge had nothing to do with the question at hand, namely the decision to pardon roughly 1,500 Jan 6 defendants, including violent offenders who attacked Capitol Police.

Grassley tried to downplay Patel’s past promotion of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement.

“Outside of this committee and some people on this committee have accused you of promoting the QAnon movement,” Grassley said, adding: “I think it’s easy to see these attacks for what they are: guilt by association.” 

Patel responded “no” when Grassley asked if he is a “follower or promoter of QAnon.” 

But Patel absolutely has promoted the QAnon movement, including inscribing a QAnon slogan in sold copies of his Trump-inspired children’s book and making various appearances on QAnon-related podcasts.

Former Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, who used to chair the Intelligence Committee, was one of the two Republicans introducing Gabbard today. Curiously, Burr suggested in his remarks that he “experienced firsthand a coordinated attempt” to sink Gabbard’s nomination, citing reporters “asking me to confirm one of the many rumors circulating about this nominee” — a practice also known as journalism.

“I informed each journalist over a five-week period that the rumor shared with me was simply not true. This narrative was shared from one journalist to the next journalist to the next journalist,” Burr said without offering any details about what the reporters were seeking to confirm.

Burr, however, called the standard practice of news reporting a “coordinated effort to kill this nomination.”

Grassley asked Patel whether he’ll “protect whistleblowers from retaliation” as director of the FBI. Patel answered in the affirmative but his record on that front has been spotty at best. He has claimed the Kash Foundation, Patel's nonprofit, has spent far more in support of whistleblowers and other philanthropy than public records could confirm. Here’s how The Associated Press has reported it:

Patel said in early 2023 that his charity had distributed nearly $100,000 the previous year. The charity funded defamation lawsuits, covered the cost of sending kids to camp and provided holiday meals for the needy, Patel said. But the charity filed a report with the IRS a few months later showing it gave away only about $55,000 in 2022 to unidentified entities.

In his statement to the AP, Patel said his charity is “approaching $1 million in donations for legal funds, whistleblowers, scholarships, and support for veterans, active-duty soldiers, law enforcement, and communities affected by disasters and violent crime.”

The Kash Foundation, it’s worth noting, started its life as “Fight for Kash,” which the AP said “funds defamation lawsuits and peddles a wide variety of merchandise, including branded socks and water bottles, sweatshirts and baseball hats, a deck of playing cards with Trump as the ace and a bumbling Joe Biden in a jester costume as the king.”

Sen. Mark Warner, the vice chair of the Intelligence Committee, made a smart point in his opening comments. Gabbard’s past positions on Russia and Syria have not just raised questions about her overall judgment, but could compromise the nation’s ability to collaborate with allies. He said that her positions on Russia and Syria “leads me to question where you can develop the trust necessary to give our allies confidence that they can share their most sensitive intelligence with us.” Trust is the essential currency when it comes to the world of intelligence sharing, as well as helping the U.S. intelligence community make robust security assessments.

GOP Sen. Tom Tillis, who introduced Patel, was the first to bring out a prop at the hearing, flashing a piece of paper filled with boxes labeled, “K$H BINGO.” He framed it as a little game to keep track of Democrats’ criticism of Patel’s overt partisanship. 

“Some may view this as an unserious caricature and not appropriate for this committee," Tillis said. "Sadly, I consider it a serious caricature of what I expect to be witnessed today.” 

Honestly, this came across as a pretty puerile act during a hearing for a position as consequential as FBI director, and it also seemed like an obvious attempt to deflect from the valid concerns about Patel’s threats to weaponize the Justice Department. But one thing to consider: Tillis is up for re-election next year and has already drawn a primary challenger in his race, so perhaps this was an effort to bolster his MAGA bonafides.

Sen. Tom Cotton, who chairs the Intelligence Committee, kicked off Gabbard’s hearing with a defense of her service to the United States: “Let me remind everyone that Ms. Gabbard served in our Army for more than two decades.” He used the point to describe Hillary Clinton’s description of Gabbard as an “asset” of a foreign nation as a smear against a patriot. Incidentally, I agree with Cotton that it’s ridiculous to succumb to conspiratorial claims that Gabbard is a Russian asset. It’s more troubling that Gabbard has repeated Russian disinformation of her own volition.

Since leaving office in 2021, Patel has been busy trying to follow in Trump’s footsteps and make a lot of money off rubes. Durbin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, brought up one of the worst of those schemes in his opening statement, calling out his promotion of Warrior Essentials, a company that offered a way to “reverse” the Covid vaccine. Here’s how NBC News reported it at the time last year: 

“Mrna detox, reverse the vaxx n get healthy,” he wrote in one post, tagging the company Warrior Essentials and linking to its website. “Spike the Vax, order this homerun kit to rid your body of the harms of the vax,” he wrote in another. It is not clear whether the posts were paid promotions; they were not labeled as such. 

Warrior Essentials sells what it calls a “Spike Protein Detox Protocol,” a set of up to three supplements that it claims, without evidence, will “undo the damage from the spike protein,” a component of the coronavirus. 

It’s unclear whether he got paid for these posts, since they weren’t tagged as sponsored, but honestly which is worse?

In his opening statement, the committee's ranking member, Sen. Dick Durbin, invoked the history of infamous FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, noting Hoover’s FBI conducted “illegal surveillance” that resulted in groups being “assaulted, repressed, harassed, and disrupted because of their political views, social beliefs, and their lifestyles.” 

Durbin wasted no time saying Patel represents a similar threat, and that he’s not suitable to lead the FBI: “Mr Patel has neither the experience, the temperament, nor the judgment to lead an agency of 38,000 [agents] and 400 field offices around the globe.”

Grassley has made a big show of reading out a series of FBI emails that had “never been made public before” about the opening of the federal case against Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

It was difficult to determine what Grassley was trying to demonstrate in doing so, throwing out names that only those who have been burrowed deep into the right-wing narrative would recognize. As best as I can tell, he’s saying that the emails raise questions about whether the FBI and Justice Department collaborated improperly in investigating Trump? I think? We’re in full Bleepman-Gormer territory here, folks.

Grassley has already brought up one of the main lines of criticism against Patel: his so-called enemies list. The committee's Republican chair appeared skeptical of its existence, but the list in question appeared in Patel’s 2023 book “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for our Democracy.” In it, he provided a lengthy list of 60 people who he thinks should be targeted for standing against Trump in his first term as “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State.”

While it’s true that Patel doesn’t directly call it an “enemies list,” it’s clear that in naming them they will be part of the retribution that Trump has promised to carry out against his political opponents.

In 2017, Gabbard met with then-Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on what she later described as a “fact-finding mission.” Syria was years into a deadly civil war at the time, and the Assad regime was widely known to have been using chemical weapons on civilians. Gabbard told CNN at the time that she wanted to start a conversation “if there is a possibility that we can achieve peace,” but has otherwise said little about the meeting.

Gabbard later expressed doubt that the Assad regime was responsible for using poison gas in an attack that killed dozens of Syrians. In 2019, she declined to say if she believed Assad — who fled his country in December 2024 after a rebel uprising — is a war criminal.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have long questioned and criticized Gabbard’s sympathetic comments about Assad. At her hearing today, they’ll have an opportunity to ask her directly.

If you were wondering whether Republicans would start today’s proceedings by earnestly grappling with the political threats Patel has lobbed, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley’s opening statement signals they won't be. He began by showering Patel with praise.

“Mr Patel, I know you know this but it’s your job to restore the public trust and return the FBI to its core mission of fighting crime," Grassley said. "Your extensive background gives you a unique position to make this happen. Mr. Patel’s career has been a study in fighting unpopular but righteous causes, exposing corruption, and putting America first.”

There are a lot of paths that one can walk down to find themselves a sycophantic hanger-on nominated to lead a massive federal police force. But one way to start down that path is to have a federal judge berate you so hard that you can’t help but find some way to rebuild your sense of self-worth. 

The Washington Post reported in 2016 about a time when Patel, then a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s National Security Division, was yelled at for entering a Texas federal courtroom without a suit and for being a “spy” for others in Washington. As the Post reported:

“You’re not a member of the trial team,” the judge said. “It’s been going on for a month or so and you haven’t been here, have you?”

Ahead of his hearing, Patel published an excerpt of his opening statement in The Wall Street Journal. As you might expect from someone so unqualified, it’s heavy on biography and aspirations, but extremely light on facts. Among the most egregious examples of his twisting the truth comes when he outlines his work on the House Intelligence Committee under then-chair former Rep. Devin Nunes:

But my time on the House Intelligence Committee revealed how the FBI’s immense powers can be abused. I spearheaded the investigation that found the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—a tool I had previously used to hunt down terrorists—had been unlawfully used to spy on political opponents. Such misconduct is unacceptable and undermines public trust.

The “Nunes memo,” as it was called, was a dud both in terms of factual rigor and political impact when it was released in 2018. Rather than showing some vast plot to spy on Trump’s campaign in what his supporters called “Spygate,” it instead trafficked in innuendo and did little to dispute the results of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

In excerpts of her opening statement released ahead of her hearing, Gabbard wrote, “What really upsets my political opponents is my consistent record of independence, regardless of political affiliation, and my refusal to be anyone’s puppet.”

Gabbard is right to identify the importance of independent-mindedness in a director of national intelligence. The issue, however, is that her gullibility when it comes to disinformation suggests she’s lacking in that quality. Her past repetition of evidence-free Russian and Syrian talking points supporting their use of force, which were at odds with the assessment of not just Western intelligence but independent observers such as the United Nations, reflects a concerning credulity.

Aside from being deeply unqualified, if confirmed as head of the FBI, Patel promises to act with the same lack of constraints as its first director — but with one major exception. As I argued in December, J. Edgar Hoover was a conservative who loved breaking left-wing organizations, no matter how many of their rights he violated in the process. But Hoover still operated at least somewhat independently, outlasting several presidential administrations and becoming a power unto himself in Washington that even Richard Nixon feared. Patel will have the exact same zeal for targeting anyone he deems a threat to the MAGA movement but without any guiding principle beyond keeping himself on Trump’s good side.

In a column for MSNBC Daily this morning, writer Matt Johnson argued that Gabbard's history of being a political opportunist makes her an especially dangerous nominee for DNI.

As Johnson wrote:

Gabbard lacks intelligence experience, which may be one of the reasons she has a history of hammering facts into distorted shapes that fit her political narratives. This is an extremely dangerous trait for someone who would oversee 18 intelligence agencies and be their primary liaison with the president. Gabbard has proved over and over again that she is incapable of objectively and reliably evaluating intelligence. How can she be trusted to provide Trump with information that isn’t manipulated by a political agenda? How can allies trust her to use the intelligence they share responsibly?

Read more below.

In a new letter released on Monday by the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dick Durbin, the Democrat alleges he received what he calls “highly credible information” about Patel’s role in breaking protocol during the “in-progress retrieval of two Americans held captive by Iranian-backed militants” in 2020.

That’s not just a rookie mistake. It could have been an incredibly costly mistake. One that could have prevented these Americans from coming home.

Read more below.

As Gabbard prepares to get grilled by senators from both parties, it’s worth remembering that not everything Gabbard stands for is wrongheaded.

By the standards of the typical Washington foreign policy principal, Gabbard is not war-hungry. It’s a good thing that she has a track record of criticizing the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, post-9/11 nation-building, and Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. Relative to some others who could take the position of the director of national intelligence, she will not assume the same bellicose posture as some of her peers would.

That being said, she’s far from a dove. Among other things, she has called herself a “hawk” on terrorism and backed invasive drone warfare. And most significantly, she has a record of credulously repeating misinformation from authoritarian adversaries of the U.S., including evidence-free Russian propaganda about purported U.S. bio labs in Ukraine.

This is all to say that the strongest case against Gabbard isn’t that she diverges from the U.S. foreign policy establishment. It’s that she’s ill-suited for a position that’s all about being able to tell the difference between good and bad information.

One thing I hope comes up at Kash Patel’s hearing today? His statement that Trump’s administration represents a “new dynasty” ordained by “God.” The claim, which Patel made during Trump’s inauguration festivities, isn’t the kind of thing you ordinarily hear Americans — much less a potential FBI director — say about political figures. 

“We have been given a gift by God today to usher in a new dynasty because we just inaugurated Donald Trump as our 47th president,” Patel said to a roaring crowd of Trump supporters.

It speaks to Patel’s seemingly undying loyalty to Trump and the conservative movement. Ask yourself: If Patel truly believes Trump’s presidency represents some sort of God-given, dynastic power, how likely is he to see himself as an independent FBI director and push back against Trump’s vows to exact retribution against his political enemies via the criminal justice system? It seems like something a senator ought to discuss with him.

His dynasty comment begins around the 10-second mark below.

The FBI could soon be led by someone who couldn’t make it through the background investigation required of all FBI employees. Kashyap “Kash” Patel will face the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday as he seeks to lead the nation’s most powerful law enforcement and domestic security agency. In 25 years at the FBI, I led numerous high-level background inquiries, and, later, as an assistant director, I briefed the White House on serious issues arising from nominee investigations. In a field ripe with questionable candidates, Patel is one of the most ill-suited Cabinet nominees — not just now, but of all time.

Read more below.

Out of all of Trump’s controversial Cabinet picks, Gabbard may face the most difficult road to confirmation. The former Democratic congresswoman turned Republican — who, if confirmed, would coordinate the work of all U.S. intelligence agencies — has no background in intelligence and has never served on a congressional intelligence committee.

Although a Trump nominee’s lack of qualifications has proven not to deter Republican senators so far this year, Gabbard’s history of propping up America’s foes and criticizing U.S. intelligence programs has alarmed lawmakers for years. Her past comments about Russia and her mysterious 2017 meeting with now-deposed Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad will likely come up in her hearing today.

Several Republican senators have declined to say if they will support her nomination.