Whitehouse Slams Kash Patel: Should the FBI Just ‘Stop Looking at Terrorism Preventively?’

O’DONNELL: “Senator Whitehouse, I’ve got to ask you about what we just heard there. There’s someone saying, ‘I want to make the FBI completely unable to either investigate plots and stop the kind of thing that happened in New Orleans, or unable to even respond and investigate after the fact what happened in New Orleans.’”
WHITEHOUSE: “Well, remember the history of all of this. We, for a long time as Americans, have made the determination that we did not want the CIA and other American intelligence agencies operating within the United States against Americans. And the FBI had a criminal law enforcement responsibility, and it was focused on terrorism primarily as a criminal act. Then came 9/11, and people understood that the firewall between the intelligence community looking outward and the FBI only looking at criminal matters inward was a failed prescription. And that we needed to coordinate better. We needed to take down the firewall, make sure that the FBI knew where its lanes were, the intelligence community knew where its lanes were, and it was actually a very successful shift and a very important development in the response to 9/11. And to be completely unaware of that and to think that the FBI has no proper role — what does he think, the CIA should come in and start doing the FBI’s work in the United States? Or we just stop looking at terrorism preventively? We just look at it when a crime takes place and go investigate? It makes absolutely no sense. And if you know the history of the last couple of decades, it makes even less sense.”
O’DONNELL: “Senate confirmation hearings are places where words are taken literally and seriously. If you wrote something in college, you’re going to have to respond to it in a Senate confirmation hearing if it’s controversial. Here’s someone saying he wants to shut down the FBI headquarters building in Washington, D.C. on day one. That’s where thousands of members of the FBI work every day. That’s where the most important work of the FBI is done every day. He wants to shut it down on day one. Presumably, in his Senate confirmation hearing, he will try to find a way to say, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean that literally.’”
WHITEHOUSE: “You know, sitting on the Judiciary Committee, I see particularly judicial nominees, very often ones who are not white and not male, targeted by my Republican colleagues for things that organizations that they have a relationship with might have said, but they didn’t, or things that somebody else said and they might have re-tweeted or extended the Twitter chain. So, they’re willing to stretch pretty far to try to find something to be irate about with these nominees. With Patel, you don’t have to stretch. He puts it right out there. He’s going to close the part of the FBI that helps protect us against foreign terrorism. He’s going to shut down the Hoover Building, which I’m no great fan of the Hoover Building, but day one? That’s a lot of confusion. Where do people go to work now? And then, of course, he’s got his enemies list of people who he thinks the FBI should go to work on, that he’s going to be bringing with him. And he’s got his pledge to go after people like you, civilly or criminally, he says, if, in his view, in the government’s view, the press isn’t telling the truth. So, any one of those would be pretty disabling. And the fact that he brings all of this basket of sort of nightmarish views to the job with him, it’s going to be a lively hearing and he’s going to have to do a lot of fancy footwork to try to explain his way around all those things.”
O’DONNELL: “He, Kash Patel, does not have 51 committed Republican Senate votes for confirmation at this stage. His confirmation hearing could contain all sorts of surprises that people aren’t anticipating and could put his nomination in much more difficulty after the hearing than it was before the hearing.”
WHITEHOUSE: “Yeah, particularly when we’re seeing the results of an FBI background check. You know, who knows what that turns up, what other things he said that he has to disclose. It’s a lengthy and difficult process to clear a Senate committee. You have to make an awful lot of disclosures. So I suspect there’s going to be more that comes out before it’s over. But even if no more comes out, the feast that he has provided us, just from what we know already from his public comments, is going to make those hearings really, really challenging to the Republicans to be willing to hold and produce all of the votes that they need.”