The Situation:  I Don’t Believe Kash Patel

The FBI director earlier today made a series of claims before the committee. Let me be blunt: I don’t believe them. 

I don’t believe Patel. 

To be clear, I’m not accusing him of perjury. To do that requires knowing with a great deal more precision than I know precisely what the underlying reality is regarding the individual issues in question. It requires knowing more than I know about his state of mind when he testified as to those things. And it requires a careful analysis of the precise words that he spoke and their relation to that underlying truth. I don’t want to pretend to know more than I do about any of those things. 

But I do know that Patel made a series of statements that don’t comport with anything about my understanding about what’s going on at the FBI. Let me enumerate those statements. 

For starters, I don’t believe Patel when he said under questioning from Ranking Member Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) that he is unaware of reports that the FBI has required agents to take polygraph exams in which they were asked about any negative comments they might have made about Patel himself. 

I also don’t believe him when he testified that he didn’t recall any instances in which he or Attorney General Pam Bondi provided a waiver to favored members of his leadership team when they flunked more routine polygraphs.


And I don’t believe him when he testified later, under questioning from Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), that he doesn’t handle details of polygraph exams and that he defers on adjudications to the career professionals who run such things. He testified most improbably that the FBI doesn’t have loyalty tests and that he doesn’t ask who employees voted for. I don’t believe this. 

I also don’t believe Patel when he said under questioning from Sen. Whitehouse that his grand jury transcript from the classified documents investigation has been released. It hasn’t been released, though Judge James Boasberg—in declining to unseal it at Politico’s request—did make clear that Patel was free to discuss it. 

Notably, by claiming today that the transcript is available, Patel managed to avoid answering questions about his grand jury testimony both from Sen. Whitehouse and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.). The last time Patel testified before Congress, at his confirmation hearing, he pulled the inverse trick, saying falsely that he couldn’t answer questions about the testimony because it was sealed grand jury testimony, even though grand jury secrecy does not bind witnesses—only prosecutors, court staff, and grand jurors. This time, by claiming the document was already public, he managed to refer questions to the text of a document that is not, in fact, public. Neat trick. I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding. 

Patel also testified, in response to questions from Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), that no agent has been fired because he or she worked on cases related to the President. He repeatedly intoned, throughout the hearing, that “the only way, generally speaking, an individual is terminated at the FBI is if they have violated their oath of office, violated the law or failed to uphold the standards that we need them to have at the FBI.” Pardon me, but I don’t believe this is true. 

And if it is, it’s only because the words “generally speaking” are doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. The phrase “generally speaking" implies that there are exceptions to the trend.  Furthermore, even if an agent is only terminated for violations or for failing to uphold standards, there is supposed to be a referral to the Inspection Division, an intake decision, an internal affairs investigation, transmission of the investigative file to the Office of Professional Responsibility, and a determination of whether the allegation is true. That process usually takes, from start to finish, more time than Patel has even been in office. There's also an appeal process—or at least there’s supposed to be.

I don’t believe either that Patel was telling the truth when he said, in response to questions from Sen. Blumenthal, that he has never taken specific personnel direction from the White House with respect to whom to purge. And for that matter, I also don’t believe that he hasn’t taken direction from the White House regarding whom to “target” in an investigative sense. I certainly don’t believe that he does not “recall” talking to White House aide Stephen Miller about firing an FBI senior executive, as he testified in response to questions from Sen. Booker. 

I don’t believe Patel when he responded “No” to this question from Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.): “Did you ever take any action to terminate or discipline an FBI agent or employee in whole or in part as retribution for being part of an investigation of Donald Trump or January 6th?” 

Patel all-but-admitted that the facts do not support this answer a few minutes later, when Schiff asked the question in a slightly different fashion: “Are you testifying today that you never terminated anyone at the FBI in whole or in part because of a prior case assignment?” This time, Patel added a key caveat: “No one at the FBI is terminated for case assignments alone.” The flat “no” had turned into a, well, maybe in part. 

In the lengthy and acrimous exchange that followed this answer, Patel repeatedly insisted leaving in that “alone”—thereby conceding, all the while angrily denying he was conceding, that there may be some measure of political retribution for cases assigned and worked in the purge he is undertaking. 

I also don’t believe Patel when he testified baldly that the decision to move Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum security prison after her interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was made by the Bureau of Prisons. Call me cynical. But I just have a gut instinct that there’s more to the story than that. 

And, I don’t believe Patel when he testified that, “morale, when I travel around the country, in my experience, has never been higher.” This is garbage, and Patel surely knows it. He knows that you can’t fire popular senior leadership, wreak havoc all over the bureau, reassign all sorts of people to street jobs and perimeter security for Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations and expect morale to be good. 

There are a lot of other things Patel said today that I don’t believe. I don’t believe the crime and arrest statistics he rattled off reflect the virtues of policy changes he implemented; while the statistics themselves may (or may not) be accurate, given the length of time FBI investigations take, these figures would reflect initiatives of the last few months. They would reflect cases opened and worked under the prior administration. I disagree with the policy views he articulated on any number of issues. But policy disagreements are legitimate. And inflated arrest statistics and overblown claims of crime reductions are—however distasteful in a supposedly apolitical FBI director—the stuff of normal politics. 

Flagrantly misleading a congressional committee about one’s basic management of the agency one heads, by contrast, is something very different. 

Why exactly Patel thinks he can get away with this I’m not quite sure. As he noted several times, a bunch of the personnel matters he was asked about are issues in current litigation, and that litigation will produce discovery, in which Patel or others will have to testify and opposing litigants will get access to documents. It will also produce court opinions. And when judges confront the question of whose account of these firings is accurate, I venture the guess that Patel’s account will not fare well. 

While simpering Republicans keen to overlook everything may not care when the director is revealed to be a liar, Democratic senators and representatives certainly will care—and Patel is likely to have to be FBI director under Democratic leadership of one house of Congress or another at some point. 

Federal judges will care too, and FBI agents have to testify in federal courts literally every day. 

Most importantly, rank and file FBI agents will care; each and every one of them knows that they are useless to the bureau the moment they show what the bureau calls a “lack of candor” in an official context. Each and every one of them knows that they would be fired if they responded to official questions as Patel did. 

There’s one other thing Patel needs to reckon with: There are a lot of people—like myself—who don’t just not believe him. They know whether he’s lying. There are people in the bureau. There are people outside the bureau. Many of them have been struggling with whether to come forward and talk about their experiences over the last eight months. So far, very few have done so. 

I have this feeling when the FBI director testified to Congress with this sort of lack of candor, it will enrage others into action.

The Situation continues tomorrow.