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Donald Trump is facing a battle to secure Senate confirmation for Kash Patel, his controversial pick to lead the FBI, as Democrats sharpen their attacks on the nominee and some Republicans withhold judgment.
Patel’s selection has jarred many on Capitol Hill because of his vows to root out the “deep state” from US law enforcement agencies and because it implies that Trump will oust current FBI director Christopher Wray before his term ends in 2027.
Patel now looks set to join three other Trump nominees facing rocky paths to confirmation in the Senate next year, after Matt Gaetz, Trump’s first choice to lead the justice department, stepped aside days after the president-elect named him for the role.
Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host tapped by Trump to lead the Pentagon, Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman the president-elect picked for director of national intelligence, and Robert F Kennedy Jr, the anti-vaccine activist nominated to be health secretary, also face challenging odds to clinch Senate approval.
“If we were in normal times and this was being done solely on the merits, he and many of the other proposed nominees are simply not qualified,” said Andrew Weissmann, a professor at the NYU School of Law, referring to Patel.
On Monday, Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee repeatedly blasted Patel’s nomination to lead the FBI.
“Kash Patel is an unqualified loyalist and should be rejected by the Senate,” they wrote from a joint account on X. “Donald Trump can’t be allowed to hire and fire FBI Directors just because they failed his loyalty test.”
Without Democratic support, Patel can lose no more than three Republican votes given the 53-to-47 majority they will hold in the Senate next year. A tie would give JD Vance, who will be Trump’s vice-president, the deciding vote.
But it may not come to that. Critics of Patel are counting on a small group of moderate Senate Republicans to oppose his confirmation. Several have indicated their scepticism by staying mum on Patel or saying he must prove his fitness for the job.
Senator Lisa Murkowski from Alaska declined to comment on Patel’s nomination. Susan Collins, the senator from Maine, said: “I don’t know Kash Patel . . . I had heard his name, but I don’t know his background, and I’m going to have to do a lot of work before reaching a decision on him.”
John Thune, who will be the Republican Senate majority leader in the new Congress, told reporters that Wray had been Trump’s FBI pick in 2017. On Patel’s nomination, he added only that “ultimately our members are going to decide” on Trump’s nominees.
A spokesperson for Utah’s recently elected Senator John Curtis said he believed presidents should enjoy a “degree of deference” on appointments — but said he took his “constitutional duty to provide advice and consent seriously”.
Curtis, a Republican, told the Financial Times he planned to “carefully examine the records and qualifications of every nominee president-elect Trump sends to the Senate”.
Patel described his nomination as the “honour of a lifetime”, saying on Trump’s social media platform that he would “restore integrity, accountability, and equal justice to our justice system and return the FBI to its rightful mission: protecting the American people”.
Patel, a board member of Trump Media & Technology Group, is particularly controversial because he has defended far-right QAnon conspiracy theories and pledged to seek retribution against opponents in both media and government.
His plan to eradicate the “deep state” includes permanently removing security clearances for law enforcement officers, including FBI and DoJ staff who probed potential links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Moscow.
Patel said he would seek to set up a “24/7 declassification office” in the White House reporting to Trump. “What the deep state uses the most to cover up their corruption is an illegal application of [the] classification system,” he told rightwing podcaster Shawn Ryan earlier this year.
Patel, who is 44, has also pledged to “shut down” the FBI’s historic headquarters in Washington “on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state’”.
But the controversial FBI pick has also won support from a number of key Trump allies on Capitol Hill.
“The people howling about Kash Patel’s nomination are the exact same people who have been weaponising the FBI against the American people,” Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican senator, wrote on X on Monday.
Bill Hagerty, the Republican senator from Tennessee, on Sunday told NBC: “There are serious problems at the FBI. The American public knows it. They expect to see sweeping change and Kash Patel is just the type of person to do it.”
