Senate Confirms Weird Con Man Kash Patel As FBI Director, Good Luck America!
Wonkette already under investigation for that headline.
The US Senate narrowly voted yesterday to confirm conspiracy theorist, Donald Trump lickspittle, self-aggrandizing grifter, and laughably unqualified goon Kash Patel to a ten-year term as FBI director. The nation’s top law-enforcement agency will now devote most of its time to finding crimes it can pin on everyone Donald Trump has ever been mad at, possibly including some people who have already died but still piss him off.
Patel was confirmed to the job of dismantling the agency on a near party-line vote of 51 to 49, with only Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, in what was surely a principled move and not in any way a desperate attempt to convince their constituents that unlike every other GOP Senator, they are only like 99% percent Trump sycophant, voting with all the Democrats against Patel.
Reporting on this as if it were merely an interesting development and not a fundamental threat to democracy and justice, the Associated Press blandly explained that
Patel has spoken of his desire to implement major changes at the FBI, including a reduced footprint in Washington and a renewed emphasis on the bureau’s traditional crime-fighting duties rather than the intelligence-gathering work that has come to define its mandate over the past two decades as national security threats have proliferated.
With “reduced footprint in Washington,” the AP is sanewashing Patel’s bizarre vow on a rightwing podcast to shut down the FBI headquarters in DC, scatter all the staff across the country, and reopen the building as a “museum of the deep state,” a thing that any very sane person would be just fine with.
In a statement on Twitter, Patel did his own job of sanewashing, posting a message that sounded reassuringly like something a public figure might conceivably say, a least if you didn’t already know that he usually sounds like Alex Jones, but even more stupid:
“The American people deserve an FBI that is transparent, accountable, and committed to justice. The politicalization of our justice system has eroded public trust — but that ends today,” he wrote. He said his mission as director was to “let good cops be cops — and rebuild trust in the FBI.”
A more accurate way of reading that would be to just assume he meant the opposite of everything in the statement.
Senate Republicans proved yet again that they’ll do anything to please Donald Trump, even if it means putting a dangerously unqualified sycophant into one of the most powerful jobs in the country. Jesus rodentfelching Christ.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) tried to put in context what an incredibly bad idea it was for Republicans to confirm Patel, saying
“I am absolutely sure of this one thing: this vote will haunt anyone who votes for him. They will rue the day they did it.” […]
He added: “To my Republican colleagues, think about what you will tell your constituents” and family “about why you voted for this person who will so completely and utterly disgrace this office and do such grave damage to our nation’s justice system.”
Entirely accurate, but that assumes they have any integrity at all, a hypothesis belied by the confirmation vote itself.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that Republicans might not solely be motivated by their desire to help Trump become a dictator or simply fear that the Great Man will sic a primary challenger and millions of Elon Musk dollars on them. As Gabe Sherman reports at Vanity Fair (we’ll have an in-depth look coming later today), more than a few Republicans in both houses fear opposing Trump because the sundowning dictator
might incite his MAGA followers to commit political violence against them if they don’t rubber-stamp his actions.
“They’re scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff,” a former member of Trump’s first administration tells me.
It’s a powerful incentive to keep telling the emperor just how lovely his new suit of clothes look. And as Mitt Romney revealed, it was also a credible enough fear to convince some Republican senators not to find Trump guilty in his second impeachment trial.
Of course, if they had convicted Trump four years ago, he would have been barred for life from holding office again. Who could have predicted that Republican cowardice then would end up eating all our faces now? Other than everyone.
We will have a lot more Kash news for you in the coming weeks as he goes about proving Richard Blumenthal right, even if no Republicans acknowledge it.
[AP / NYT / Vanity Fair]
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May his utter incompetence outweigh his evil ambition.
I realize now that it's not *me* taking the crazy pills. Yeikes.
Or maybe having your head up Hair Twitler's ass yields the same effect. There's a whole collection of dunces in DC that seem to confirm that theory.