Senate Democrats battered FBI Director Kash Patel on Tuesday at a Senate Judiciary oversight hearing, combatively criticizing a broad swath of his behavior and performance to the point the panel’s chair asked one to “shut up.”
The scrutiny from Democrats previews how they may try to hold members of the Trump administration accountable if they take the majority after the midterms. It also highlights how the party has embraced the course confrontations common from Cabinet member testimony during the second Trump administration.
The party pressed the intelligence agency director on his investigations into journalists, drinking with U.S. hockey players in an Olympic locker room, and using taxpayer money to go on a “VIP snorkel” trip at the Pearl Harbor memorial in Hawaii, among other issues.
The tension climaxed when the normally genial Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) angrily asked Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) to end his questioning of Patel, saying, “Are you done now? Are you ready to shut up?”
Booker had called Patel a “thug” who targets reporters and their families when they write stories critical of him and the broader Trump administration and who investigated a journalist after writing a story on his girlfriend. When Grassley asked Booker to wrap up his comments, Booker said Grassley wasn’t being equitable with members’ time to speak.
“He’s like an 18-year-old kid who wants to join a fraternity that he could never be a member of doing keg stands and chugging with friends,” Booker said.
Patel called Booker “the biggest mockery in the United States Senate, and you’re sitting next to [Sen. Adam] Schiff.”
Grassley appeared to grow frustrated with Booker’s remarks and told him he wasn’t respecting him as chair. Booker later called for Patel to be sanctioned for speaking in what he said was a disrespectful manner to Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.).
Earlier in the hearing, Patel sparred with Welch after Welch brought up Patel’s Olympic drinking and intimated he couldn’t hear well after answering a question.
“Are you hard of hearing? I just said no,” Patel said.
“What you will never understand is the players who are my friends invited me,” Patel said, adding that the FBI was able to ensure “not a single security incident occurred” in at the event and called Welch a “complete and total fraud.”
Patel also pushed back against Booker’s statements around his probes of journalists and Sen. Mazie Hirono’s (D-Hawaii) questioning of his Hawaii trip, saying media coverage of the allegations has been incorrect and senators were lying.
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