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The Find Out Podcast
Kash Patel's Senate Meltdown
00:25:17
Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) joins us to discuss FBI Director Kash Patel's wild testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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- [00:17]
A
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Find out podcast. We are doing a special episode, a special Wednesday episode, because we are very, very fortunate to have the senior senator from Delaware and a member of the of the House of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senator Chr coons is with us. Senator, thank you for joining us today.
- [00:37]
B
Thanks, Tim. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Luke. Great to be on with you guys. We had a fiery morning here in the Senate on our Judiciary Committee. I'm on a bunch of other committees. Happy to talk about things going on there and here as well. Thanks for a chance to be on. Great.
- [00:52]
A
Thank you. Well, let's start off with the fiery morning. So obviously the FBI director, Kash Patel, testified in front of the committee today, and there were, let's say, some fireworks in your your words. What happened this morning? Did we learn anything? Would love to just hear your general thoughts before we dive into some specific questions.
- [01:15]
B
So a whole series of senators, myself included, pressed FBI Director Cash Patel on his promises in his confirmation hearing that he wouldn't politicize the FBI, that he wouldn't carry out revenge against his enemies list, that he would prioritize and focus on fighting crime and protecting our national security rather than settling scores, when, in fact, he has, over the last six to nine months, cleaned house, forced out a whole series of senior former FBI agents. In fact, several of them are currently suing him. And so different senators ask different versions of a question. Have you ever forced an FBI agent to take a polygraph test about whether they are loyal to you? Have you fired someone for purely political reasons? Can you promise me you will not fire those agents who worked on the January 6th cases? And he first with Senator Durbin, who's the most senior Democrat on the committee, got very irate and said it was offensive that he was asking him questions about personnel matters. And this is an oversight hearing. And that's part of the point. And then I suspect with Senator Booker, he was as fiery as he was with anybody because Corey has a talent for continuing and pushing and pressing. The larger point here is that the director of the FBI is someone whose selection by President Trump owed as much to his books and his campaigning, his podcast and his tweeting, as it did to his legal skills. And we're seeing that play out in how he's inserting himself into investigations and how he's making personnel decisions in how he's leading the FBI. And the bottom line is many of us suggested he's making the American people less safe. He's more concerned with his image than with the substance Yeah, I mean, I.
- [03:09]
A
Think that, you know, our listeners and people across the country, I think, have all been very, very concerned about the weaponization of the federal government since Donald Trump has taken over. And I think, you know, the, the selection of Cash Patel in particular, I think has been very, very concerning to us, I think. I'm going to ask you a bit of a rhetorical question, but I'll ask you answer. He did not allay any of those fears today, I believe. And what are some.
- [03:37]
B
I concluded by restating that I had voted against him and his confirmation and nothing he was saying today made me feel like I should have instead voted for him or made me feel more optimistic. I am grateful for the men and women of the FBI. They do great work. There are thousands of agents who are out there helping solve crimes and protect us from foreign threats every day. But I don't think they deserve a leader who is more focused on press and visibility and his digital presence than on his mission of crime fighting. But you know, look, bluntly, Tim, this is in keeping with an administration that has as its secretary of defense or now Secretary of War, a former Fox Weekend host, rather than who he had in his first term, a four star decorated Marine Corps general all of us voted for because he was competent. But Trump is bitter over the fact that General Mattis, you know, resigned in protest and said that Trump, in a letter to the Senate that Trump was dangerously unfocused on the core national security interest, the United States. And so he has selectively chosen in his cabinet or as leaders of major agencies, people who are loyal rather than people who are experienced incompetent.
- [04:55]
A
I am so glad that you pointed out that, that the secretary of defense slash war was the weekend host, not even the host, because I've made that joke numerous times that like we got a secretary of defense who wasn't even the Fox and Friends week weekday host, we got the weekend guy. But it does, it's a troubling trend here of, you know, there were some competent people like General Mattis, as you mentioned, in the first term. And now it just seems like that these people were picked for how they basically make Trump feel good about himself rather than anything else. And I think some people were saying today that that performance, that shameful performance that we saw today was really for a person of one not to, not to answer any questions for the committee.
- [05:40]
B
Yeah, look, clearly the secretary, now the secretary of War, not the secretary of Defense, was chosen as much for his hair and his jawline as he was for his deep understanding of how to run the most expensive, complicated, sophisticated military on earth. They just spent something like a billion dollars. They're in the process of doing it to rebrand the Department of Defense, the Department of War. Changing letterhead, changing signs, changing websites. And bluntly, I don't think the Chinese are more concerned about confronting a Secretary of War than a Secretary of Defense. It's just more culture wars and more visual signaling. The hunt to eradicate diversity. From the names and the statues and the websites of the Department of War similarly strikes me as both disrespectful of the service and sacrifice of people of color throughout the history of our nation, but also just a waste of time and effort when we could instead be focusing on our nation's challenges. So, too, within the FBI, I pressed Director Patel about specific people he had let go. One of the more recent examples being the senior agent in charge of the Salt Lake City office, someone with a lot of experience. And, you know, the FBI played a critical role in investigating the 911 attacks, in protecting us against domestic terrorism and foreign attacks, in investigating the January 6th assaults, which I would say is one of the biggest examples of domestic terrorism in the last 20 years. And yet with those folks either pushed out or sidelined, the ability to investigate the latest incidents of domestic terrorism goes way down. If you lose that experience, you know.
- [07:25]
C
Center, I, I want to tell you something as someone who works with the FBI. My name is, is Chris Goldsmith. I lead two organizations, Task Force Butler Institute and Veterans Fighting Fascism. I train veterans to do very similar work to what the civilians who performed research into the January 6th insurrectionists did, handing intelligence packages over to the FBI to, to facilitate those prosecutions. I have not heard from anyone in the FBI since the election. I found out, because a journalist reached out to me that my name and a threat against me by a Neo Nazi was. That threat was used to obtain a warrant. That Neo Nazi was arrested in part because of that threat to me in the past. I would get a victim notification letter, sure. Of course, that is no longer happening right now. And I, I, I want you to hear that from me as someone who is, who is working to combat extremism at the local level. There are countless folks like me who've been cooperating with the FBI to combat political violence, which the Trump administration is now saying is the biggest thing in the world.
- [08:41]
B
Right.
- [08:43]
C
And the FBI is not, not able to even let us know that people are getting arrested for making threats against us.
- [08:50]
B
That is a chilling reminder of the ways in which the trajectory of enforcement and engagement has changed at the FBI. And I thank you for that work and for your continued engagement and for your courage, because there's lots of folks who, hearing that would say, okay, I'm out. Thanks. But the work against extremism of all kinds requires folks to stand up and speak out and be counted and to be engaged in the way you are.
- [09:21]
A
Senator, I want to go back to the question of obviously, this horrible assassination last week of right wing political commentator Charlie Kirk. And you had mentioned some senior FBI officials, including in that Salt Lake City office, who had been let go. Were. What was your reaction to the FBI's response to, to this shooting, both on the ground and also from the FBI director himself?
- [09:51]
B
Well, I, I think there were clearly some missteps in the public communication around the investigation. The FBI director was tweeting and saying that they had a suspect in custody when they, when, when they didn't. And typically the FBI director waits to make any statement about an ongoing investigation until things have solidified and firmed up and it's clear that they're proceeding towards an indictment. But I think he was very eager. And look, Charlie Kirk was very close to Cash Patel and Donald Trump and a lot of the other most senior figures in this administration. What matters most to me is that in the investigation of this heinous, horrific political assassination of Charlie Kirk that the same standards and methods, timeline and resources are applied as hopefully were applied to investigate the tragic murder of Melissa and Mark Hortman in Minnesota. There were several individuals shot. Those two killed another state senator and his spouse, shot many times, and they miraculously survived. My colleagues, Senators Tina Smith and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, later found that their names were on a list that the killer was working from. Understanding what drives people to commit actions like this is the work of a lifetime for FBI analysts and for folks who study, those who don't just engage in angry debate or spend a lot of time on chat rooms fantasizing about, you know, changing the government or taking out big figures, but who actually take up arms and do it. And that's a very specialized field of study. And our whole country and our safety benefits when those folks are able to do their work in a non political, neutral fashion. I'm, I'm gravely concerned that President Trump keeps going after and saying he's going to accelerate going after left wing ideology and made no similar statements after Melissa Hortman's murder. And bluntly, I think what we're going to discover here, as has been the case across the assault on Nancy Pelosi's husband, or the attempt at kidnapping Governor Gretchen Whitmer or the assault on Governor Shapiro's home, the arson attempt, is that this is more often a case of severe mental illness. People who are paranoid or who are schizophrenic or who. And who have had the occasion and the opportunity to become further radicalized. Let me be clear that, you know, there's many, many people who live with mental illness who do not ever take up these sorts of extreme actions. I was not trying to say there's a direct correlation, but often the search for an ideological or a partisan political base is not fruitful because folks are driven by things very specific to them.
- [12:55]
C
Senator, since the Trump administration and J.D. vance, as we're recording this, just yesterday spent two hours on, what was Charlie Kirk's show, talking about how they're going to prosecute left leaning organizations for allegedly supporting what they call domestic terrorism, is there anything that you, as a senator in the minority that the Democrats in the House can do to protect left leaning organizations? I, I am one of those researchers and I come from a community, a rather small community of researchers who did things like investigate January 6th. I personally was infiltrating organizations like the 3 percenters and cooperating with the FBI. I imagine that I'm on a list somewhere. Is there anything that you can do while you're in the minority to assure us that we are not going to be destroyed by the federal government?
- [13:57]
B
Well, is there anything we can do? Yes, obviously. Ask questions, submit letters, demand answers, make noise. Is there anything we can do that will guarantee that they won't overreach or take actions that violate the guardrails of our system? No, because without a majority in the Senate, you can't do virtually anything. And the math works. The Republicans have a majority in the Senate and they've used that majority to confirm a whole series of people from the Director of National Intelligence to the Secretary of Health and Human Services to the FBI director who were chosen, as I've said, principally for their loyalty, not their competence. And as long as they are doing things in the appropriations process and the confirmation process and in hearings that hew to that MAGA line and don't defend the prerogatives of the Senate and protect, Senator, excuse me, protect individuals who've been acting as whistleblowers or who've been cooperating with law enforcement, there's a real limit to how much we can do.
- [15:04]
A
And I want to ask a question to you, Senator, that, you know, moments after the video started circulating online that horrible, horrible video, which I hope nobody watches. But the. The. The right immediately started pointing their fingers at the left, and they were blaming the left, Democrats and the left for doing this. You obviously sit on the Judiciary Committee. Do you see any. Like, what is your reaction when you hear something like that coming from everybody, from podcasters on the right and up to the President himself, who spoke from behind from the Oval Office that day and blamed Democrats for this?
- [15:44]
B
Look, I'm grateful for the voice and the leadership of Republicans like Governor Cox of Utah or Senator Langford of Oklahoma, who have repeatedly, positively, clearly said that political violence is a pox on our country, is something we should all reject, is utterly unacceptable. Part of what makes Charlie Kirk's murder so tragic is that he was engaging in debate. No matter what you think of his political views or of how he delivered his views, he was enthusiastic about debating people. And nothing is more profoundly American than the free speech rights that are protected through the First Amendment being exercised on a town square or. Or a college campus. So when members of the administration or the President himself, when senators or folks on podcasts or other outlets try and immediately pin it on a political enemy, they're showing more their colors as folks who are sharply politically motivated and want to take advantage of this moment than people who are committed to the core values of the American republic. Look, Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona was someone I served with for a decade and who I count as a friend. He was literally standing next to Steve Scalise when he was shot and nearly killed by an assassin. When I saw him after that incident, I think it was in 2017, in the Capitol, badly shaken. He still had Scalise's blood on his baseball uniform and was really shaken. Yet, Jeff, Senator Flake was someone who, while denouncing political violence, did not in any way blame Bernie Sanders for the motivation of the man who picked up that gun and nearly killed Jeff and nearly killed Scalise. And it takes a certain discipline and a commitment to truthfulness and to lowering the temperature in order to do that, even in a moment of such distress.
- [17:48]
C
Senator, I want to make sure that you are aware, I understand, that it's wrong to speak ill of the dead, but I want to make sure that you are aware that Charlie Kirk's organization has maintained a list of hundreds of professors, it's called the Professor Watch List, which he knew because of public recording and because of lawsuits, that anytime he put a professor on there, that they would be swarmed with death threats. Horrific, racist, misogynistic, Rape threats that would overwhelm schools, that would get schools shut down, that would ruin careers, that would force teachers to move their college professors to move their families out of their hometowns. I. I understand from your position that. That you may feel compelled to describe Charlie Kirk as a passionate debater, but you should also know that he wielded an immense amount of money and an immense amount of power to destroy the lives of people for using their First Amendment rights.
- [18:54]
A
Yep.
- [18:54]
D
He used it that way intentionally.
- [18:56]
A
Yeah.
- [18:56]
D
Yeah, several times.
- [18:59]
C
And this. This is something that. It is being. It. It is not known. I'm not saying it's being forgotten. It's being whitewashed. Only people who study extremists like me know this. So I just. I want to make sure that. Sure that you and all of our listeners know that Charlie Kirk did a lot more than go to colleges and try to debate people. He tried and did ruin many people's lives because of their First Amendment rights, because they were teaching things like the history of slavery, the history of gender and sexuality, women's rights, and feminism. Those are the things that Charlie Kirk should also be remembered for that was and is political violence. And today, as he is lionized, that website remains up and it is getting more traffic than ever. And I think that Democrats should. Should use their position to remind Republicans that we need to tone it down. And that means stop making private citizens targets for political violence in the way that Charlie Kirk and his, you know, tens of millions of dollars worth of assets were geared towards doing.
- [20:23]
B
Look, part of what has made our period in modern political history so difficult and so sharply divisive is the consequences of speaking out, the ways in which people are canceled or doxed. They lose their jobs or they lose their ability to teach or to live comfortably and safely. And so, no, that is not something I'd heard before about Charlie Kirk's career or campaigns. And the larger point is that part of what has generated so much anger on college campuses and across the country is the sense on the part of millions of Americans that they can't express their opinions without consequences that go beyond someone just being upset at them or disagreeing with them, that they'll go to their employer, they'll go to their neighbors, they'll accost them in public or private. And, you know, bluntly, as an elected official, one of the frequent mistakes I make is to read the comments on posts or recordings or podcasts that I do, because they're awful. They're just awful. And it's. We need to find a path towards Reducing the enthusiasm for harassment and aggression that can be so intense and so overwhelming that, as you put it, it forces people to move or to leave jobs or to abandon positions and to simply be cowed into silence. A lot of that is going on in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's murder. There are folks who are facing real consequences for how they have commented on this tragic incident.
- [22:02]
D
Well, I'm not sure if you're aware of it, but there's a site that has been created in the wake of his murder that is that right now. I think they're calling it, I don't want to say the URL, but they're calling it a record of the data regarding his death. And they're tracking people's remarks on his death, many of which are not celebrating or, or taking glee in it at all. They're just, a lot of them are just quotes about what he said.
- [22:29]
A
They're.
- [22:29]
D
They're not even, you know, doing anything other than reporting exactly what he said during his life. And their, their locations are being leaked, their names, their employers. There's been, I mean, I think that that's like 30, 000 submissions right now.
- [22:41]
B
Well, the thing that I, because of where I serve and its impact on my life, the thing that I'm struck by over and over, is that January 6th was a demonstrable moment of orchestrated political violence that resulted in a physical assault on law enforcement officers, a physical violation of the perimeter of the Capitol with an expressed intent to either hang Mike Pence or harm the speaker, and to interrupt the certification of a presidential vote, of a national presidential election. And so what has happened in the time since then where there were investigations and prosecutions and convictions, and then following the election of President Trump, pardons and now serious discussion of reparations for those who were duly convicted of crimes. This sets the standard nationally for how outrageous the, the change in treatment and perception of an actual fact of organized political violence can be in other countries around the world where political violence is much more a part of life year in and year out. They would find some of this unsurprising. How you view the conviction of a national leader or a particular riot or election related violence really depends on your politics and what party you support, or what region you're from, or what ethnicity you are. This is relatively new to modern America that we could have an incident so shattering, so nationally significant and consequential, and before and after a presidential election, have members of Congress, law enforcement, the general public, and the president himself view it, speak about it, and act on it in diametrically opposite ways. Yeah.
- [24:38]
A
Well, Senator, you have already given us more time than we thought we were going to get. So we really appreciate it. We know it's been a rough week for everybody, and I know that hearing this morning was crazy beyond belief. But we appreciate you and the other Judiciary Democrats holding the FBI director accountable. And we know you will keep doing that. And hopefully, you will come back sometime in the near future and give us an update on how things are going over there.
- [25:06]
B
I will. Thank you, Tim. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Luke. Thank you. Thanks for what you do. And to all our viewers today.
- [25:11]
A
Great. Thank you very much, Senator, and have a great day. And we'll we'll talk soon.