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Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to join my distinguished colleague from California in opposition to the nomination of Kash Patel and to make crystal clear to this body what he is going to do in that job. He has shown who he is. So when these things go wrong, I want to be absolutely clear that our Republican friends were warned. They will own the consequences of Kash Patel's misbehavior.

Let's start with the fact that, unlike any FBI Director before, this guy is a vitriolic partisan. Those are the stripes he shows when he is left to his own devices, and those are the characteristics he will revert back to when he is running the FBI.

Here are just a few simple examples. This is from his book called ``Government Gangsters,'' and this is a page of his enemies' list. Well, Attorney General Bondi said no one should come to a law enforcement job with an enemies' list, so then they had to pretend that this was not an enemies' list. Well, of course, it is an enemies' list. Here is what Kash Patel himself says about it: ``Names named. Roadmap unveiled. The man hunt starts tomorrow.'' If you are going to set up a manhunt against people, are they not your enemies by any logical definition of the term?

He goes on to a video that shows himself chain-sawing off the heads of the people on his enemies' list, including the handsome junior Senator from California and the daughter of former Vice President Cheney. It is a pretty gross image to be cutting the heads off of people with a saw. He didn't put it up, but he retweeted it. He loved it so much that he put it up on his own media.

Things like that are not appropriate for an FBI Director. They are bizarre for just a normally weird person, but for an abnormally weird person to be the Director of the FBI, things are going to go bad. Be warned.

He is also a completely sycophantic suck-up when it comes to Donald Trump. He wrote children's books in which King Donald rules, and his loyal little functionary Kash brings justice to him by pursuing the slugs of the FBI. Really?

When the FBI is asked to investigate corruption in Trump world, do you think Kash Patel will rise to the occasion or do you think he will participate in a coverup? All you have to do is look at his own conduct and his own history.

This is not Democrats saying this. What we are doing is relating what he has said and what he has done. This is Kash Patel on Kash Patel.

He spread the really abhorrent lie that Federal law enforcement was behind January 6. On one of the many podcasts and interview shows where he spewed so much disinformation and partisan vitriol, he was asked: ``It looks like you have a preponderance of evidence suggesting there may have been federal law enforcement involved in making [January 6] happen.''

Patel's response: ``I'll get you to beyond a reasonable doubt.''

``[B]eyond a reasonable doubt.'' He believed and said Federal law enforcement Agencies were behind January 6. We know that is preposterous. We know that is false. We know that investigations have shown that none of that is even remotely true. That is completely false information. Yet here he is spouting it, and that is what he is going to look like as FBI Director too.

The FBI is going to have to appear before judges and convince judges of the probity of the Agency, of the legitimacy of the Agency, of the propriety of the investigation and that the Department has done a fair job of marshaling the evidence.

Here is what he says about judges: We have to start impeaching judges if they have ruled against Donald Trump.

They were a political terrorist, in his view. In any case that Donald Trump has been charged in, almost every judge is handling this thing as if they were not a judge but a political terrorist. And, of course, he meant the Trump judge down in Florida as the only one excepted. When you start talking about judges that way, you can't then expect judges not to pay attention when you come before them in trying to do the work of the FBI.

Then there is the question of what his former colleagues have said about him. These are things that he has said himself. What have his former colleagues said about him, every single one a Trump appointee?

John Bolton, National Security Advisor: I didn't think he was qualified. I was forced to hire him.

Political pressure jammed him into the job, and Bolton said: I didn't want any part of this guy. I was forced to hire him.

With Attorney General Bill Barr, they tried to force him on Bill Barr as Deputy Director of the FBI, and he said that Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to lead the FBI. He said: ``Over my dead body'' does he get that job.

These are the job recommendations of his own colleagues that show his unfitness.

Over at the CIA, they tried to stuff him in someplace, and the Director of the CIA, Gina Haspel--I am no friend of Gina Haspel, but here is what she said about him: If he came over, she would resign before allowing Patel to assume a position as her Deputy.

This is a guy who has a record of engagement with Trump appointees that shows that he is not qualified, not capable, and somebody over whom they would resign before they would let work for them. And now we are supposed to let him work for the American people? It is ridiculous.

He testified once in State court on a Trump-related case, and his testimony was, to put it mildly, not convincing.

Here is what the judge said:

The court finds that Mr. Patel was not a credible witness. His testimony . . . is not only illogical . . . but completely devoid of any evidence in the record.

OK. People come into court. They lie, and the court doesn't believe their nonsense. Statements like this happen all the time in court. But here is where they don't happen: They don't happen with Federal law enforcement agents. When I was the U.S. attorney in Rhode Island, if one of my FBI agents had gone over into the U.S. district court in Rhode Island and testified in a criminal case in such a way that one of the U.S. district judges said about that witness that he was not a credible witness and that his testimony was illogical and devoid of evidence in the record, we would be looking into that.

This comes darned close to being what is called Giglio material-- material that the government is forced to disclose to future defendants when it bears on the credibility of a government witness, an agent who is a government witness. People lose their careers over Giglio material.

This, if he were an FBI agent, would have caused a response at headquarters to say: What the hell is going on? How did one of our people get involved in such vagrantly fake testimony that he was called out by the judge in a case like this?

This is the person they want to put in charge of the organization whose probity and whose professionalism and whose integrity are essential to the successful working of the organization? The guy was basically called out as a liar and a fraud in plain court. This guy is a hot mess.

When you have a character like this who lies in court and who runs chain-saw memes about your opponents, about whom every person he tried to work with who was senior in the Trump administration said: Get this bum out of here; I don't want to be anywhere near him--that is a record.

To you all, my Republican friends who are going to vote on this guy, when he gets there and he does what his character tells us he will do, don't think this isn't going to come back to haunt you.

By the way, don't think that his ``Trumpservience'' as FBI Director won't turn on you. Just because he is a vitriolic partisan who despises Democrats doesn't mean that when Trump's ire moves someplace else--to Republican officeholders--he won't be there to deliver the FBI as an enforcer against you. So there is a lot to be concerned about.

I will close with this: Never before in the history of American law enforcement has somebody sought to attain a high position in American law enforcement who has pled the Fifth Amendment. Not only did he plead the Fifth Amendment, but he refused to tell the committee what it was all about. You can't plead the Fifth unless you have a reasonable expectation that could put you in jeopardy of a crime. What crime? How in jeopardy? Explain that. You are not just a normal person; you are trying to be the head of the FBI.

In a civil case, pleading the Fifth entitles the judge to instruct the jury to draw an adverse interest about your testimony that the jury can find against you because you took the Fifth.

Why have we not had a straight answer yet from our Republican colleagues about why the guy who wants to be the head of the FBI pled the Fifth? It is an unprecedented, terrible situation.

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