Some Republicans Say Kash Patel Won’t Do The Awful Things He Said He’d Do

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the FBI, Kash Patel, has said he would wield the government as a weapon to “come after” Trump’s enemies.

Senate Republicans, who will decide whether Patel gets the job, say he wouldn’t actually do what he said.

“Sometimes people make statements in a political context that on further reflection they say, ‘Well, that was basically for public consumption,’” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told HuffPost last week.

Patel previously worked on Capitol Hill as a Republican staffer and served in the first Trump administration, where he earned a reputation as a Trump loyalist. Last year, he published a book titled “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy,” which included a list of “deep state” government officials who opposed Trump.

During an interview last December promoting the book with Trump ally Steve Bannon, Bannon said he expected Patel to be named CIA director during Trump’s second term, and Patel described his vision for vengeance against Trump’s enemies.

“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in the government, but in the media,” Patel said. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out, but yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”

Patel has begun making the rounds on Capitol hill ahead of the confirmation process this year. Republican senators already indicated they won’t support one of Trump’s other nominees, former congressman Matt Gaetz, and there’s no guarantee Patel can get 50 votes, either.

Cornyn said he met with Patel and suggested Patel confirmed his view that he wouldn’t vindictively prosecute Trump’s enemies.

“I told him I thought the task ahead was to restore the FBI to its former reputation as a nonpartisan, no political institution, and he told me he agreed,” Cornyn said. “I think there’s a difference between the hyperbole and the reality.”

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told HuffPost Patel told him he would prosecute violent criminals.

“I don’t think you’re going to see the FBI going after journalists,” Hawley said.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) also said he didn’t expect partisan prosecutions from the second Trump administration.

“He didn’t do it the first time. He’s not gonna do it this time,” Scott said. (Trump actually did press for prosecutions of his enemies during his first term, such as by publicly musing there should be probes of former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and he also pushed for a criminal investigation into a previous investigation of his 2016 campaign.)

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said he was skeptical of the descriptions of Patel vowing prosecutions before he was nominated and that he would ask him about the reports.

“Everything I read on the internet’s not always true,” Lankford said. “I’ll take the opportunity to ask him what his thoughts are.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said if Patel didn’t actually mean what he said before, then that presents another problem.

“If he’s not gonna do the things that he said he was going to do previously, how do we believe what he’s going to tell us now?”

In a February interview with NBCNews, Patel claimed his words had been taken out of context. Still, he said there should be “some form of accountability” for journalists supposedly coordinating with government officials to put out a false narrative about Donald Trump.

Republican senators generally seemed to agree that the Justice Department had been “weaponized” under President Joe Biden to target Trump, who faced two federal prosecutions for his attempt to undo the 2020 presidential election and for hoarding secret documents after he left office.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said it was “tendentious” to describe the list of “deep state” names in Patel’s book as an “enemies list,” but that Patel actually would do what he said.

“If you look at the weeping and gnashing of teeth, both from Democrats and from the corporate media about Kash Patel, it’s not that he’s going to be ineffective, but it is rather that they believe he’ll do exactly what he said he would do, which is root out that weaponization and politicization,” Cruz said.