FBI Director Kash Patel spent much of Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing defending a little-noticed change to the bureau’s hiring rules — quietly rewritten this spring so that a history of prostitution, or having experienced bestiality as a child, wouldn’t automatically knock someone out of consideration.
Patel told senators the change wasn’t about lowering the bureau’s standards. “We did not want to punish victims of bestiality, victims who were trafficked,” he said, arguing that without the update, the FBI could have permanently barred someone forced into prostitution or subjected to bestiality as a child from ever working there.
Democrats also pressed Patel over agents he’d dismissed for their roles in past Trump investigations and his remarks about potentially stationing FBI personnel at polling sites on Election Day, a move tied to White House worries about voter fraud.
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Patel also touted the FBI’s release of 3.5 million pages under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, while survivors said the documents left their own personal information exposed and produced no new prosecutions.
Read: Records Show Kash Patel Pushed FBI Staff To Answer “RetardFinder” On X
The exchanges got personal fast. Patel told one senator sitting near Sen. Adam Schiff, a frequent critic, that they were an embarrassment to the Senate. After Sen. Cory Booker called him a thug, he shrugged it off as free publicity for a possible Booker presidential run. Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy needled the hiring change differently, asking Patel who’d recommended it and joking they must have arrived from another planet.
