WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump’s push to shake up the FBI was welcomed by Republican senators, though it was not clear Sunday how strongly members of the new majority party would embrace his decision to appoint ally Kash Patel as the next top director of the Department of Justice. research arm.
Patel, a former national security prosecutor who echoes the president-elect’s rhetoric about a “deep state,” “must prove to Congress that he will reform and restore public trust in the FBI,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley from Iowa. be the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Republicans take control in January, in a post on X.
Patel lacks the high-level legal and management experience that FBI directors, including Robert Mueller, James Comey and Christopher Wray, who now serve in that role, had before their appointments. It’s a 10-year term, and Trump appointed Wray in 2017 after firing Comey. So Trump’s announcement late Saturday means that Wray must resign or be fired after Trump takes office on January 20, 2025.
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“Every president wants people who are loyal to themselves,” said Sen. Mike Round, R-S.D., on ABC’s “This Week.” But he called Wray “a very good man,” handpicked by Trump himself, and “I have no complaints about the way he’s doing his job right now.”
A president has “the right to make nominations,” Rounds said, before noting that the position is normally for 10 years, a length intended to insulate the FBI from the political influence of changing administrations.
“We’ll see what his process is, and if he actually makes that nomination. And if he does, just like anyone who is nominated for any of these positions, once he or she is nominated by the president, the president will get the benefit of the doubt on the nomination, but we’re still going through a process ” of giving advice and consent under the Constitution, Rounds said.
He added: “Sometimes that can be advice, sometimes it can be permission.”
Other Republicans who appeared on Sunday news shows at the end of the Thanksgiving holiday and before returning to work this week were in Patel’s corner.
Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., said Patel “represents the kind of change we need to see at the FBI. … The whole desk needs to be cleaned out.” He told NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ that ‘there are serious problems at the FBI. The American public knows it. They expect major changes, and Kash Patel is exactly the type of person who does that.”
He said Patel has “relevant experience” as head of the FBI and that “he is the one who can see through the solution here.”
During Trump’s first term, Patel served as an aide to the then-Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee before taking on roles at the White House National Security Council and later at the Defense Department.
Patel “played a critical role in exposing the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, acting as an advocate for truth, accountability and the Constitution,” Trump wrote in a social media post on Saturday evening.
Patel has called for a “comprehensive cleanup” of government employees disloyal to Trump and has called journalists traitors, vowing to seek to prosecute some reporters.
The selection is consistent with Trump’s view that the government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies need radical transformation, and with his stated desire for retaliation against perceived adversaries. It also shows how Trump, still furious over years of federal investigations that overshadowed his first administration and later led to his indictment, is moving to place close allies at the FBI and Justice Department who he believes are targeting him will protect rather than scrutinize.
Grassley said in his post that Wray “has failed in his fundamental duties” and that it was time to “chart a new course: TRANSPARENCY + ACCOUNTABILITY at the FBI.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said Patel was a “very strong nominee” and he believed Patel would be confirmed.
“All that crying and gnashing of teeth, all those people pulling out their hair, are the very people who are stunned that a real reformer is joining the FBI,” Cruz told CBS’s ‘Face the Nation.’
Democrats said they would oppose him.
“Patel’s only qualification is that he agrees with Donald Trump that the Justice Department should punish, incarcerate and intimidate Donald Trump’s political opponents,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said on NBC.
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Associated Press writers Fatima Hussein in West Palm Beach, Florida, Eric Tucker in Newtown, Pennsylvania, and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.
