The Senate Judiciary Committee voted this morning, 12-10 along party lines, to advance Kash Patel’s nomination to lead the FBI, according to reports. The committee convened for two hours before casting their vote, with senators engaging in heated exchanges over Patel’s qualifications and past controversial remarks. Patel’s nomination now moves to the Senate floor for further consideration, where, as of Thursday morning, he is expected to be confirmed.
Disgraced former deputy and acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe described an atmosphere of “terror” and “panic” within the bureau as agents await the confirmation of Patel. McCabe, who approved a bogus surveillance warrant targeting Trump campaign officials based on Clinton campaign-funded research, now serves as a legal affairs and national security analyst for CNN. For weeks, he has warned that Patel’s confirmation would bring “chaos” to the bureau and lead to mass resignations among agents—news that conservatives and Trump supporters have welcomed.
During a recent appearance on the network, McCabe was asked about the Trump Department of Justice’s decision to fire dozens of senior FBI officials. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove also requested that acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll provide a list of agents involved in the partisan January 6 investigations for a formal review. The list, which included nearly a third of the FBI’s 37,000 employees, could result in thousands more agents being fired.
“This is totally unprecedented. FBI rank and file agents and analysts who make up the vast majority of the field offices who do the work of investigating these cases, of executing search warrants, of executing arrest warrants, doing surveillance, electronic surveillance, whatever it might be, those people are never touched by the political winds that blow through every four years, nor should they be,” McCabe said of the agency that hunted Trump supporters over non-violent trespassing offenses for four years.
“As you said, they don’t pick their work, they’re assigned to the work that they do. The work they do is lawful, it’s within FBI policies, and not doing the work is not really an option for them,” he added. McCabe went on to defend the bureau as a nonpartisan law enforcement agency, despite the fact that similar manhunts were never launched for Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, and pro-Palestine protesters have not faced even a fine for comparable actions.
