Every member of the Senate Judiciary Committee got roughly five minutes to question FBI Director Kash Patel on Tuesday. That’s it. Five minutes to pin down the director of the FBI on anything you think the country needs to know — the Butler assassination attempt on President Trump; the Epstein files; agent attrition; hiring standards; the Bureau’s habit of discovering that its own answers were incomplete a year after it gave them. It is one of the few genuinely scarce resources in Washington, and on Tuesday left-wing kook Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii spent hers asking Patel when he intended to respond to a letter committee Democrats sent him over the summer.
The catch: He had already responded to it in July; it was posted online and on FBI social media. Patel said as much. She asked again. He said it again and told her the response was public. She told him to hand it over right then. He told her to look it up. She concluded aloud that there must be no response, and he called that what it was – flat wrong and silly.
The defenders of this performance will say Patel was smug, and he was. Fine. Smugness from a witness is a hazard of the job, and the conventional remedy is to be better prepared than he is. What happened instead was a senator discovering live on camera that the premise of her question had collapsed and then repeating the question anyway, because the question was the point. It had been drafted, cleared, and loaded before anyone checked whether events had overtaken it. She wasn’t conducting oversight. She was reading a cue card at a man who happened to be sitting there.
This is the rot, and it is not confined to one senator or one party. Congressional hearings have been converted almost entirely into political theater, especially by Democrats. They arrive with a clip in mind. Staff writes the exchange backward from the clip. The witness arrives with his own clip in mind and answers backward from that. Nobody is trying to learn anything, because learning something would require the possibility of being surprised, and surprise is bad for the edit. Republicans do this too, constantly, and conservatives ought to admit it rather than enjoy this one and pretend the genre is otherwise healthy.
But that admission cuts in a particular direction here. The reason oversight matters right now — the reason it ought to be conducted by people who have read the file — is that the FBI has spent the better part of a decade earning distrust from both ends of the political spectrum, and it is currently run by a director who rarely passes up a chance to fight. Patel’s Bureau should be getting hard, specific, document-driven questions in every hearing. There are plenty available.
Hirono sits on the committee with subpoena power behind her and a staff whose job is precisely to know what has and hasn’t been produced. She had the tools to make him uncomfortable about something real. She used them to make herself the story instead, and then the Bureau’s own account posted the receipt and a two-word victory lap, which tells you the director’s staff is playing the same game from the other side of the table.
So the clip goes around, and everyone gets what they came for. Hirono gets to say she pressed the director. Patel gets a viral moment. The committee produces zero new information about anything. The only people who lose are the American people on both sides of the aisle.
Meanwhile, here’s some advice for Mazie: Have your staff do some basic research before you open your gaping mouth at a public hearing and make a proveably false accusation.
