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Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, soon, we will be voting on the nomination of Kash Patel to serve as Director of the FBI. I have spoken with my colleagues on this nomination within the last couple of days, but I want to spend a few more minutes urging my colleagues to vote for Mr. Patel's confirmation.

Mr. Patel's career shows that he is a man who will fight to defend the Constitution and fight to expose corruption. This is exactly the kind of experience the FBI Director needs.

For almost a decade now, Mr. Patel served as a public defender, defending the constitutional rights of some of the least popular people in America. After serving as public defender, Mr. Patel joined the Department of Justice under Democrat President Obama as a counterterrorism prosecutor in the National Security Division.

In this role, he investigated and he prosecuted many important cases, including the World Cup bombing in Uganda in 2010 for which he received the Award of Excellence.

In 2017, Representative Devin Nunes asked Mr. Patel to join the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to uncover the truth about Russiagate, and Mr. Patel did uncover the truth. Through tireless work, in regard to that investigation, Mr. Patel showed that Crossfire Hurricane was based on fraudulent, even discredited information, actually paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.

After exposing the Russiagate scandal in Congress, Mr. Patel then went on to serve in senior national security positions in the National Security Council, then as a Deputy Director of National Intelligence and as Chief of Staff to the Acting Secretary of Defense.

Mr. Patel managed large intelligence and defense bureaucracies, identified and countered national security threats, and prosecuted and defended the accused.

He has done this while fighting for transparency and accountability in government. We all know that if things are transparent, the people connected with them are going to be more accountable, and we also know that the public's business in this great democracy of ours ought to be public.

Mr. Patel's experience and Mr. Patel's vision is why he has been endorsed by organizations representing more than 680,000 law enforcement officers and by dozens of former and current FBI agents, State attorneys general, and U.S. attorneys.

These people understand law enforcement. These people understand the rule of law, and these people who have endorsed Mr. Patel trust that he will do the right thing, and we should as well today by voting for Mr. Patel.

I want to speak now to those who have viciously opposed Mr. Patel's nomination. At the heart of their opposition is the fear that he will act like Democrats did when Democrats were in power. So these Democrats are afraid that the FBI, under Mr. Patel's leadership, will use lawfare against political opponents like the FBI used lawfare against President Trump and others.

These Democrats are afraid he will use subpoena power and coordinate with the media to target those seeking accountability just like Democrats did against Mr. Patel and, also, against my own investigative staff.

These Democrats are afraid that he will deploy the FBI to conduct investigations and engage in surveillance against those who disagree like they did with Catholic families and parents expressing concern at school board meetings.

These Democrats are afraid that he will retaliate against whistleblowers like the Biden administration did against FBI and IRS agents who blew the whistle.

After reviewing Mr. Patel's record and listening to his testimony at his hearing, I am convinced that these fears that the Democrats have are unfounded. Mr. Patel's leadership will not be business as usual in the FBI as it has been in previous administrations when the FBI, the people on the 7th floor--not the local agents--were used for political weaponization.

Mr. Patel told us at our hearing he wants to reduce FBI involvement in politics and domestic surveillance. Mr. Patel wants to end political investigations and strengthen protections for whistleblowers. Mr. Patel wants to make the FBI accountable once again, get back the reputation that the FBI has had historically for law enforcement, and he wants to hold the FBI accountable to Congress, to the President, and most importantly, to the people they serve, the American taxpayer.

My Democratic colleagues often lament that Mr. Patel won't protect the independence of the FBI, but there is a fine line between independent judgment and being unaccountable. The FBI has been unaccountable all too long.

My Democratic colleagues decry the recent firing of FBI agents and somehow want to blame Mr. Patel for those personal decisions. That isn't fair, obviously, because he is not running the FBI. As my oversight has shown, many of those fired agents were behind the retaliation against multiple FBI whistleblowers. They ruined lives and careers for their own political hands. They should be held accountable, and, yes, they should have been and have been fired.

The FBI has also kept too many secrets. It has hid from the duly elected Members of Congress the origins of the lawfare against President Trump, which we all know and which I have shown in my exposure of a lot of emails, was in large part from the anti-Trump agent, Timothy Thibault.

Now based on testimony from soon-to-be Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, we know that the Biden DOJ and FBI violated process by not sharing evidence with Trump's defense team that could have helped Trump's case against the government.

If that happened--now, just think, if that happened on the Democrat side, you wouldn't hear the end of it. Yet, you can't hear a peep today from my Democratic colleagues. The government hid its investigations into those who dared to question the Democratic Party line.

But then, when it is convenient for political reasons, the FBI would leak or coordinate with the media to hide the truth and to smear people.

We need to restore transparency; we need to restore oversight; we need to restore accountability at the FBI, particularly on that top floor of the Hoover Building. Mr. Patel is exactly the man that can do that, and it is why those who benefit from the status quo have come so forcefully against him with a relentless smear campaign.

Mr. Patel is a reformer, and we need a reformer in the FBI. We need to restore the public trust, and we need to return the FBI to its core mission, which is to keep people on our streets safe.

The bottom line: It is the people doing the everyday work at the FBI, enforcing the law, solving crimes that the people on the 7th floor of the Hoover Building should be doing, instead of thinking about how we can get at our political enemies.

I will be voting to confirm Mr. Patel. I will urge my colleagues to do the same thing.

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