Instead of actually showing up for his hearing before the Judiciary Committee, Kash Patel should have propped up a TV playing the video of "It Wasn't Me" on a loop for six hours. Donald Trump's nominee to head the FBI has a long, well-documented history of being the looniest sort of conspiracy theorist. Still, when confronted with his own words by Senate Democrats, he denied it all with the insincerity of the cheating narrator of Shaggy and RikRok's 2000 hit song. Democrats were visibly frustrated by Patel's gaslighting, but one has to feel even sorrier for the nearly 40,000 FBI employees who will likely soon be working for this sorry man. Trump obviously picked him as a direct insult to them, especially as lurid lies about FBI agents are a favorite mode of conspiracy content for Patel. This hearing comes on the tail of two weeks of Trump waging all-out war on the largely anonymous staff at the FBI and larger Justice Department, from pardoning over 1,500 Capitol rioters to mass firing prosecutors who investigated Trump's attempted coup.
The DOJ is getting hammered hard, but this is merely part of what is shaping up to be Trump's efforts to purge the federal government of employees who do anything but fight wars and deport migrants. It started with firing "DEI" workers and instructions to everyone else to rat out coworkers for harboring the forbidden pro-diversity views. Seventeen inspectors general were also illegally fired. There were escalating announcements of illegal funding halts, culminating in an outrageous effort to stop most federal grants and loans, which was such a disaster Trump was forced to walk it back. Then federal workers got an email, clearly copied from billionaire Elon Musk's similar malicious campaign against Twitter employees, pressuring them to resign and implying they could be fired if they don't.
