Former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and GOP lawmaker from California Devin Nunes hailed President-elect Donald Trump’s pick of national security expert Kash Patel to head up the FBI during an interview over the weekend with Fox News host Mark Levin.
Nunes, the current CEO of Truth Social, Trump’s social media start-up, said that Patel is well aware of how the upper echelons of the FBI and broader Department of Justice, under which the bureau falls, have been politicized and corrupted over the last decade.
Kash Patel is a reformer who will do things at the FBI that the entrenched ruling class does not want him to do,” Levin said before swinging it over to Nunes.
“Yes, and I think most importantly with that, he knows how they do it. He knows how the DOJ and how the FBI corrupted the whole damn place. That’s the advantage he has, and that’s why they don’t want him in there,” Nunes said.
And I will just go furthermore, I think this brings an important component that I don’t think we’ve in an FBI director before,” he added. “Kash served at the beginning of his career on the other side. He served as a public defender, defending criminals against the FBI, against, you know, the law enforcement agencies.
“So he transferred from a public defender, then into the DOJ as a prosecutor. And at a time [when] we need people that understand both sides of the issues if we’re going to restore the FBI and the Department of Justice, where we truly get a situation in this country, again, where justice should be blind, that’s how it was set up by the founders of this country,” the former California lawmaker continued.
And if you don’t have a solid, reliable justice system, your whole damn country falls apart,” he said. “And look, and if it wasn’t for President Trump winning, the country just about fell apart. So what started with the Russia hoax back in the day, campaign gimmick to try to falsely accuse Trump of dealing with Russia and Republicans dealing with Russia ended up.”
Nunes added: “You talk about it all the time, but we need to talk about how they targeted Supreme Court justices, targeted Catholics, targeted President Trump, went through Mar-a-Lago, did multiple going — targeting Republicans across the board, and still never leaving the Russia hoax alone, including getting involved in the last election in 2020 with the whole hoax on the 51 spies who lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop was just Russian disinformation. That’s what has to be cleaned up permanently.”
Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, a leading figure among the Senate GOP’s moderate lawmakers, says he is “confident” that Patel will secure confirmation to the post if, in fact, the president-elect decides to fire current FBI Director Christopher Wray, whom Trump initially appointed after firing James Comey in May 2017.
“People I know and who I trust speak well of him and I’m looking forward to meeting with him,” Cornyn told radio host Hugh Hewitt. When pressed on whether Patel would be confirmed, Cornyn simply replied “yes, he will be.” He also relayed that Pam Bondi, whom Trump has tapped to serve as Attorney General, spoke favorably to him about Patel.
