Adam Schiff says the deadly truck attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day demonstrates why Congress should reject Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, after his second presidency begins.
“Kash Patel should not be confirmed,” the California senator said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “I think the terrorist attack on New Orleans … just underscores again the importance of having someone directing the FBI that has experience, that has judgment, that has character, [and] that will prioritize defending the country against the violence we saw in New Orleans” or that from Trump supporters during the US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021 after he lost the presidency to Joe Biden weeks earlier.
After expressing condolences to loved ones of the 14 victims killed in the New Orleans attack, Schiff added that Patel lacked the experience needed for the role to lead the bureau at the center of the investigation into that case. Patel instead is “someone whose top priority is political vendettas, who believes in ‘deep state’ conspiracy thinking”, said Schiff, who previously served on a US House committee that investigated the Capitol attack.
Patel, a Trump loyalist, has promoted false conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from the president-elect who defeated Kamala Harris in November’s election. Patel has also claimed federal bureaucrats working in the “deep state” actually tried to overthrow Trump.
In a previous interview with former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon, Patel said he would target judges, lawyers, and journalists for investigating Trump and claiming they had a role in robbing Trump of victory in 2020.
“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel said in the interview. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
Patel also claimed the FBI was involved in Trump’s 2020 election loss, in a November 2022 podcast episode that he hosted that was titled: “What did the FBI know before Jan. 6?” He started a foundation to defend Capitol attackers and helped produce a song to raise “funds and awareness for the due process that has been hijacked for so many people who were in and around” the Capitol attack.
Patel has also written children’s books propagating conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
John Thune, the Republican US Senate majority leader, told Meet the Press on Friday that he spoke with Patel and said he believed he would prioritize the mission of the FBI and rebuilding trust in the institution. He did not say whether he plans to vote to confirm him, though.
“The FBI is an agency that I think is in need of reform and needs a good makeover, so to speak,” Thune said. “I think that confidence and trust [in the FBI] is largely eroded, and there’s an opportunity to fix that.
“I sat down and met with [Patel]. I think he understands that’s the mission, and if he’s successful through the nomination process, I hope that he will take very seriously that responsibility and focus on what he can do to make the FBI operate in a way that is protecting the American people and also being accountable.”
The FBI has determined that the New Orleans attacker was a former US army veteran who had recently pledged his allegiance on social media to the Islamic State (US) terror group. He had traveled to New Orleans in October and November, using Meta smart glasses to record video of and scout out the site of the attack: Bourbon Street, where he ultimately drove a truck into a crowd before being shot dead.
The attacker also built and planted homemade bombs on Bourbon Street in advance of the truck attack but did not have the proper device to detonate them, federal agents have said.
At an International Association of Firefighters (IAFF) leadership training seminar being hosted by the New Orleans fire department union just blocks away from the Bourbon Street attack Monday, the agency’s chaplain, John Talamo, noted that there was another meaning locally to Monday’s date of 6 January – the end of the Christmas season and beginning of Carnival.
He said it was an especially tough time to be reminded that the world remained “infected by evil”.
But he also shared an anecdote about how he had recently tried to pay off an unhoused person’s bill at a local grocery – only to learn someone had beaten him to it.
“Evil still persists – but there are many, many good people, and we can’t lose our focus on that.”
