Senator Jamie Raskin (16:27)
Thank you very much Mr. Chairman, and welcome. Director Patel, you and I have not had the opportunity to meet and alas, you fail to respond to the eight oversight letters I've sent you over the last seven months. So we do have a lot of questions piling up for you. But I want to start with a word of praise. The first FBI Director was J. Edgar Hoover, who steadfastly refused to hire women, African Americans and other minorities as agents. And although he was a closeted homosexual who lived in domestic partnership for decades with Clyde Tolson, he also participated in anti gay crusades. He aggressively promoted what we would today call white Christian nationalism, and he would undoubtedly be turning over in his grave to see as one of his successors, a first generation Indian American and a proud Hindu. So I congratulate you on being a breakthrough in this sense and being a beneficiary of the civil rights movement. And that opened up the FBI and the federal workforce to lots of people who never would have been hired in its first decades. Lastly, you share J. Edgar Hoover's dangerous obsession with blind loyalty over professionalism and effective public policy. For Hoover, it was blind loyalty to him in keeping his secrets. For you, it's blind loyalty to Donald Trump in keeping his secrets. During your confirmation, it was widely noted on all sides that your primary qualification was was your unwavering loyalty to Trump. Unlike other directors, you had no work experience at the FBI, but you had made over 1,000 media and political appearances in support of Trump's campaign. Your Senate confirmation vote was 51 to 49, the closest in history, with your opponents warning you were not qualified and had no interest in actually developing the qualifications for the job. I hoped that they were wrong. Alas, they were not. While most other new FBI directors drew on their experience as FBI agents, you didn't have that. But you did write a picture book trilogy for children ages 5 and up, based on your experience clashing with President Trump's political enemies. In your book, you describe your literary alter ego Cash the Night as a wacky, easily bored wizard carrying out King Donald's vengeance by driving his enemies out of the kingdom. In the books, King Donald is besieged by the evil Hillary Queentown, but saved in the end by Cash. Then Cash goes on to catch mules who are stealing the 2020 election for the great King Donald from Sleepy Joe. And then in the third book, Cash takes down the Dragon of the Jalapenos, nicknamed the doj. Your supporters had hoped that you would graduate from imagining yourself a romantic fairy tale knight to actually running America's premier federal law enforcement agency. Alas, just as we've learned how dangerous it is to put a science denying anti vaxxer in charge of our public health, we've learned how dangerous it is to name as director of the FBI a man who thinks of himself as a fairytale knight who keeps a fire breathing dragon named DOJ at home to forcibly drive villains out of the kingdom. When Charlie Kirk was assassinated while his killer was still on the loose, you decided you didn't need to be at FBI headquarters in Washington to work with your team. While the chaotic manhunt unfolded. You spent your evening dining in a swanky midtown Manhattan restaurant and tweeting out false information that the subject of the shooting was in custody, a statement you had to retract. One hour later. Your performance was so disturbing that even the MAGA base was alarmed. Culture warrior Christopher Ruffo, who just a few months ago sat in your chair as a Republican witness, observed that you performed terribly and he called for your ouster. The FBI might be able to survive your delusions of grandeur and the explosively volatile temper that was on display yesterday in the Senate. But the intractable problem is that you are running the FBI not as a law enforcement agency charged with keeping the American people safe, but is a political enforcement agency working directly for the President's vengeance campaign. Seven months in, it's impossible to overstate the destruction, chaos and demoralization you've brought to the FBI and its workforce and the resulting danger your actions have caused to our country. You've been systematically purging the FBI of its most experienced and qualified agents, division leaders and experts in counterterror, counterintelligence, and cybersecurity. Precisely. The people who have the expertise you lack in which the FBI and the country need. They've been expelled from the ranks of the Bureau simply because they did their duty investigating crimes, including those committed by the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and beat the hell out of more than 140 police officers. Or simply because you suspected them of being insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump? You illegally sacked Brian Driscoll, the former acting director of the Bureau and a decorated counterterrorism expert who worked at the FBI for nearly 20 years, according to Driscoll. Driscoll, you told him your own job, quote, depended on the removal of agents who worked on the cases against the president, regardless of whether the agents chose to work on those cases or not. You added, quote, the FBI tried to put the President in jail, and he hasn't forgotten it. You forced out the leader of the Salt Lake City field office, Metab said, just weeks before Charlie Crook's assassination, depriving the FBI of an experienced counterterrorism expert described by her colleagues as absolutely the best and legendary. She would have led the FBI's manhunt had she not been fired. When Trump decided that rounding up immigrants with no criminal records was more important than preventing crimes like human trafficking of women and girls, drug dealing, terrorism, and fraud, you ordered the 25 largest field offices to divert thousands of agents away from chasing down violent criminals, sex traffickers, fraudsters, and scammers to carry out this immigration crackdown. Director Patel, you treated the men and women at FBI with disrespect and paranoia. You've assembled a roving band of freelancing henchmen within your office and charged them with conducting unauthorized investigations, targeting and harassing career FBI employees. Amazingly, you forced senior leadership to repeatedly take polygraph tests to prove their political loyalty and pushed out leaders who refused these demeaning exercises. And now we're seeing one very clear reason why you want to build a political FBI. The Epstein files. You want an FBI blindly loyal to Trump and to you as his enforcer so you can continue your cover up of a massive international sex trafficking ring with more than 1,000 victims, betraying all of the survivors of the sexual violence. Before you got in this job, you. You called for full release of the Epstein files, telling podcaster Benny Johnson that the only reason the list was not released by DOJ and FBI was, quote, because of who's on that list. Upon your confirmation, you promised that, quote, there will be no cover ups. No missing documents, no stone left unturned. And anyone from the prior current bureau who undermines this will be swiftly pursued. This spring, you ordered hundreds of agents to pour over all the Epstein files, but not to look for more clues about the money network or the network of human traffickers. You pulled these agents from their regular counterterrorism or drug trafficking duties to work around the clock, some of them sleeping at their desks, to conduct a frantic search to make sure Donald Trump's name and image were flagged and redacted with wherever they appeared, whether an email, a text, a letter, an interview, a photograph or a video. In May, Attorney General Bondi reportedly told Trump that his name had indeed appeared multiple times throughout the Epstein files. And not long thereafter, in July, you and the Attorney General released a memo claiming that, quote, no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted. In a few short months, how did you go from being a crusader for accountability and transparency for the Epstein files to being a part of the conspiracy and cover up? The answer is simple. You said it yourself. Because of who's on that list, Donald Trump's relationship with Epstein over the years is well documented. A week ago, the Oversight Committee released Trump's disturbing birthday book note to Epstein, written over a drawing of a woman's naked body, referring to a queen, quote, wonderful secret. The Oversight Committee obtained the note from the Epstein estate, not from the FBI, raising questions again of whether the FBI has been withholding documents while you're unleashing the FBI to cater to Trump's desire to shut down the Epstein inquiry. The first nine months of the Trump presidency have seen a spate of political violence and domestic terror events. We saw deadly attacks on political figures on both the left and in the right. The brutal assassination of Minnesota Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in the attempted murder of Democratic State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, who miraculously survived a combined 17 gunshots. We saw an arsonist at Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's residence on fire. And of course last week we saw the horrific cold blooded assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah that has shaken the nation. One minute after Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck, a 16 year old shooter in Evergreen, Colorado, radicalized by white supremacist ideology online, opened fire and critically wounded two other students at Evergreen High School. We've seen lethal anti Semitic violence, including the murder of two young Israeli embassy staffers just blocks from the Capitol. And then in the attack on a gathering of Jewish people in support of hostages held in Gaza in Boulder in June. We've seen continued mass shootings at schools, like the domestic terror incident at a Catholic school in Minneapolis last month, which killed two children and wounded 18 others. And in August, the man fired more than 500 bullets at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, killing a police officer who was a Marine veteran and a father. People like Melissa Hortman and Charlie Kirk should be able to participate in politics and as elected officials or active citizens without being shot down in cold blood. In the United States of America, people should also be able to go to elementary school, to middle school, to high school, to work, to the mall, and to church without being shot down in explosions of gun violence. The important position at the FBI requires a leader who puts public safety and national security and, and the rule of law first. I'm afraid, Director Patel, you've given us reason to believe you've used the powers of the FBI to serve Donald Trump and his agenda of partisan retribution. You've broken your promise not to do that. You've betrayed Jeffrey Epstein's victims and survivors. You've turned your back on the career law enforcement officers of the FBI. And as a result, you've left all of us less safe than before. Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
