The Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearing for Kash Patel was exasperating for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the peek into an alternate reality. Over the course of several hours, a conspiratorial partisan activist, nominated to lead the FBI, joined with the panel’s Republican members to paint a picture that bore little resemblance to the world we actually live in.
As far as GOP senators and the nominee were concerned, Donald Trump’s Russia scandal wasn’t real; the FBI has been corrupted; federal law enforcement was weaponized against Republicans; and Patel is actually qualified to lead the bureau, despite everything we know about him, his record, and his hyper-partisan and conspiratorial worldview.
None of this was true or supported by any evidence. Throughout the confirmation hearing, however, Republicans didn’t appear to care. They prefer this alternate reality, so they pretended as if it were real.
Early on in the hearing, the panel’s GOP chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, declared, “In my hand are a series of FBI emails.” Initially, this piqued my interest because it suggested the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee might actually present the public with evidence to bolster his party’s aggressive campaign against the bureau.
Indeed, Grassley, as part of his opening statement in the hearing, specifically boasted that the emails “substantiated” his earlier allegations. He concluded that “partisan FBI agents and DOJ officials … acted in concert to further a political scheme.”
That certainly sounded interesting. If the Iowan’s claims were true, these emails would go a long way toward validating all kinds of criticisms Republicans have made in recent years about federal law enforcement. There was, however, one nagging problem with these developments. The New York Times reported: A series of internal F.B.I. emails released on Thursday showed that agents and officials followed standard procedure nearly three years ago when they opened the historic criminal investigation into Donald J. Trump’s attempts to stay in power after he lost the 2020 election. … [I]n fact, the emails showed that F.B.I. investigators took normal bureaucratic steps and precautions when opening the extraordinarily sensitive inquiry into Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election using slates of electors pledged to him in states he had actually lost.
Oh. So the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee waited for a key moment and the national spotlight to release a set of FBI emails, which ultimately showed agents and officials following “standard procedure” and taking “normal bureaucratic steps.” There may yet come a point at which Republican critics of the FBI and the Justice Department reveal actual evidence of federal law enforcement being “weaponized” against Trump and his cohorts, but GOP officials have been looking for quite a while, and that day has not yet arrived.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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