Republicans Put Kash Patel, MAGA Conspiracy Theorist, in Charge of FBI

Make way for a very different FBI director. Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux

In what would normally be considered a signature moment of a government gone wild, the Senate on Thursday confirmed the nomination of the MAGA activist and conspiracy theorist Kash Patel to run the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It’s an organization he has frequently attacked as a key entity in an evil “deep state” and which supplied 11 members of the famous “enemies list” Patel published in his 2023 book Government Gangsters. Patel tried to clean up his act during his confirmation hearings, but his background was such that in the final floor debate over his nomination, Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse tried to make it clear that the country’s top law-enforcement agency was being put in the hands of someone who was not just a “normally weird person” but an “abnormally weird person.” His social-media history alone marked him as part of Trump’s vast troll army rather than the sort of sober lawman you’d expect at the FBI.

Democrats were also concerned about reports that Patel was already meddling with the agency prior to confirmation and settling old scores for Trump, as the Associated Press reported:

[Senator Dick Durbin] contends that he’s learned from unidentified sources that Patel, despite not being confirmed yet as director, is receiving information about FBI operations from a member of a newly established advisory team inside the bureau and that he passes along that information to top White House official Stephen Miller.

Durbin says he’s been told that a senior Justice Department official told others that Miller had been pressuring the Justice Department “because Mr. Patel wanted the FBI to remove targeted employees faster, as DOJ had already done with prosecutors.”

The vote to confirm Patel was 51-49, with nay votes from Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski along with all the Democrats. (Mitch McConnell, who voted against Trump’s nominees for Defense and Health, voted in favor of Patel.) So far, Collins, Murkowski, and McConnell — who formally announced his retirement shortly before the Patel vote — are the only Republicans to vote against any of Trump’s nominees, despite the high number of unlikely or outrageous characters. So GOP subservience to Trump has played a large role in his perfect confirmation record, marred very slightly by Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration as attorney general long before hearings could even be scheduled — plus, a “flood the zone” strategy of putting out so many controversial nominees that it was hard for any of them to stand out.

Only two more Cabinet-level nominees remain: Education designee Linda McMahon and Labor designee Lori Chavez-DeRemer (who could lose some Republican votes due to her relatively pro-labor record but could well pick up a number of Democrats).

But the confirmed nominees to watch most closely are Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services and, now, the FBI’s Patel. Both men have potentially enormous power matched with erratic personalities and a penchant for seeing and then demonizing things that aren’t really there. It’s rarely good news to get a phone call or knock on the door from the FBI. But the number of people who may fear that experience has just gone way up.