Adam Schiff Lashes Out Over Kash Patel as FBI Director
Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), known for promoting the now-debunked narrative that former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia, voiced his outrage on MSNBC regarding the appointment of Kash Patel as FBI Director.
During a segment with host Lawrence O’Donnell, Schiff and O’Donnell expressed concern over Patel’s leadership of the FBI, warning that he might bring political bias to the agency—a body that critics argue was already misused during President Joe Biden’s administration in efforts against Trump. They speculated that a future Democratic president would likely remove Patel from the post.
“With all this going on in the Senate floor, you did something that senators have never done before, to actually go out to the street, in this case outside the FBI headquarters today, to protest the confirmation by the Republican senators of an FBI director who was absolutely unimaginable as being qualified for any form of federal service prior to Donald Trump winning the presidency,” O’Donnell said of Patel, a former national security official and federal prosecutor.
Schiff added, “Yes, we stood outside the FBI headquarters to make a last plea against this — this terrible choice to be FBI director, Kash Patel. Kash Patel is the guy you go to when everybody else says, ‘No, I won’t do it. It’s too immoral, it’s too unethical, it’s too unlawful.’ He’s the guy. That’s why he was chosen. You rise to the level of your utter sycophancy in the Trump Administration.”
He went on, “But here’s the thing. I’ve worked with the FBI for decades, ever since I was a federal prosecutor. They’re the premier law enforcement agency. Only in Trump world, a world in which you pardon hundreds of people for beating police officers, and then you purge the FBI agents that pursued them, only in that kind of world does a Kash Patel become FBI director.”
Schiff did not mention that President Biden granted Patel a preemptive pardon as Trump exited the White House. Biden also commuted the sentence of Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist convicted of executing two FBI agents in 1975, who is now serving the rest of his sentence at home.
Schiff continued, “But that’s the upside-down, terrible world we’re living in at this moment. And Kash Patel has now been given a 10-year term as FBI director. I cannot imagine the damage that he can do if he’s given a decade to do it. And so we find ourselves in really uncharted waters. I think you’d have to go back to Herbert Hoover to find another FBI director so intent on using the powers of that position to go after president’s enemies.”
O’Donnell agreed, saying, “And what we’ve also seen here, obviously, is now the politicization of that position, because it is inconceivable, if there’s a Democratic president sworn in four years from now, that that president wouldn’t immediately fire this FBI director.”
Schiff responded, “Yes, you know, we’ll — we’ll see whether this 10-year term, which was meant to insulate the office and allow an FBI director to go from one administration, continues serving into the next, a norm and more than a norm of practice that was changed when essentially, Chris Wray decided he needed to resign because it meant ultimate conflict with Donald Trump, and he felt that it was in the best service of the FBI not to continue as director.”
He concluded, “Look, when Donald Trump is gone, there’s a Democratic president. I can’t imagine they’re going to want to keep on someone as destructive as Kash Patel. But I couldn’t imagine, frankly, that we would be in this place to begin with. So, we’re in uncharted waters.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) suggested that Schiff’s intense opposition stems from fear that Patel, now heading the FBI, may have knowledge of Schiff’s alleged involvement in attempts to falsely implicate Trump in Russian collusion.