US senate narrowly confirms Trump loyalist Kash Patel as FBI director

The US senate has narrowly voted to confirm Kash Patel as director of the FBI.

The move places him atop the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency despite doubts from Democrats about his qualifications and concerns he will do Donald Trump’s bidding and go after the Republican president’s adversaries.

“I cannot imagine a worse choice,” Senator Dick Durbin told colleagues before the 51-49 vote by the Republican-controlled senate.

Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska were the lone Republican holdouts.

Mr Patel has spoken of his desire to implement major changes at the FBI, including a reduced footprint at headquarters in Washington and a renewed emphasis on the bureau’s traditional crime-fighting duties rather than the intelligence-gathering and national security work that has come to define its mandate over the past two decades.

But he also echoed Mr Trump’s desire for retribution.

Mr Patel raised alarm among Democrats for saying before he was nominated that he would “come after” anti-Trump “conspirators” in the federal government and the media.

Republicans angry over what they see as law enforcement bias against conservatives during the Democratic Biden administration, as well as criminal investigations into Mr Trump, have rallied behind Patel as the right person for the job.

But Democrats complained about Mr Patel’s lack of management experience compared with previous FBI directors and they highlighted incendiary past statements that they said called his judgment into question.

At his senate hearing in January, Mr Patel said Democrats were taking some of his comments out of context or misunderstanding the broader point that he was trying to make.

Mr Patel has also denied the idea that a list in book he authored of government officials who he said were part of a “deep state” amounted to an “enemies list”, calling that a “total mischaracterisation”.

FBI directors are given 10-year terms as a way to insulate them from political influence and keep them from becoming beholden to a particular president or administration.

Mr Patel was selected in November to replace Christopher Wray, who was picked by Mr Trump in 2017 and served for more than seven years but who repeatedly angered the president and was seen by him as insufficiently loyal. He resigned before Mr Trump took office.

Since Wray’s resignation, the FBI has been led by interim leaders, who have clashed with the Justice Department over its demands for details about the agents who investigated the Capitol riot.

Mr Trump has said that he expects some of those agents will be fired.

Mr Patel is a former federal defender and Justice Department counterterrorism prosecutor.

He attracted Mr Trump’s attention during the president’s first term when, as a staffer on the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee, Mr Patel helped write a memo with pointed criticism of the FBI’s investigation into ties between Russia and Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Mr Patel later joined Trump’s administration, both as a counterterrorism official at the National Security Council and as chief of staff to the defence secretary.