Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI Director, claimed he would not go after his political enemies to Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), despite Patel’s past claims that he would.
In an interview with Jonathan Karl on ABC’s “This Week,” Fetterman said that Patel told him he would not use the FBI to go after Trump's enemies, despite his comments vowing to go after such people.
“So I'm not going to go into detail, but he absolutely, — that's never going to happen,” Fetterman said when asked by host Jonathan Karl about Patel’s past comments pledging to go after political enemies. “That’s not it … that's what he claims.”
When Patel was nominated, a quote from him on a 2023 podcast interview with Steve Bannon was widely circulated. “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel told Bannon then. Patel's 2022 book, "Government Gangsters," listed 60 potential targets for a new Trump administration.
Fetterman, one of the few Democratic senators who has been meeting with Trump’s Cabinet picks, said he has no regrets about meeting with some of the controversial selections. He added that he learned a lot about Patel from his meeting, including that he used to be a public defender and his own family’s immigration story.
“There is going to be some [nominees] that I will vote yes, and there's some, maybe that I'll vote no,” Fetterman said. “But nobody can accuse me of just saying I had a closed mind, or I just said no because Trump picked this person, or whatever.”
Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah), who will be sworn into Sen. Mitt Romney’s Senate seat in the new year, said that he discussed Patel being blind to political affiliation in his new role.
“For me, one of the most important things that I needed to hear from Kash is that he would be blind to political affiliation, because I know some of the things that he said and that have been attributed to him,” Curtis said, also in an interview with Karl on “This Week.”
He added, “And I don't care if they’re Republicans or Democrats and we had some very specific conversations about that. And I wanted to make sure that he would be blind to that.”
When asked about Republicans claiming every senator should get in line with Trump and support his Cabinet picks because he has a mandate, Curtis said his son had brought up a similar concern at Thanksgiving.
“I did get more votes than him in Utah. Does that give me a mandate?’” Curtis said he told his son.
“I think people forget the 'advice' part of advice and consent. I can't advise the president if I haven't thoroughly talked to these people, if I haven't investigated everything about them, if I haven't learned their strengths and their weaknesses,” Curtis said. “And I think I owe that to the president. And I think if the better job I do, the better president he will be.”
