During a combative Senate hearing in which members of both parties pressed FBI Director Kash Patel for answers on a multitude of topics, one answer stood out like a sore thumb: his false claim, contradicted by victim testimony and established evidence, that Jeffrey Epstein never trafficked victims of sexual predation to “other individuals.”
Per CNN, Patel testified again the next day and “qualified” his “other individuals” claim: “I never said Jeffrey Epstein didn’t traffic other people, other women, and [that] there are not other victims,” he said, with the caveat that it was based on “information we were given.”
Since the FBI is one of the most-esteemed, investigatory bodies in human history, Patel’s claim he was “working with” information the “agency was given” seems notably evasive.
Other times Patel either evaded questions, strained credulity, or outright lied:
- Denied knowledge of “loyalty tests” inside FBI despite claims from fired agents in lawsuits
- Claimed his grand-jury testimony had been released when it had not been made public
- Provided shifting answers to questions about agents being fired as retribution for Trump-focused probes
- Stated the decision to move Ghislaine Maxwell was made by Bureau of Prisons, despite reports to the contrary
- Claimed, falsely, that a court order prevented him from releasing Epstein files when the opposite was true
AUTHOR FOOTNOTE
Passing the mic to Ben Wittes from Lawfare, linked below, because his lede paragraph is worth reading:
“I’m not accusing [Patel] of perjury,” Wittes wrote. “To do that requires knowing with a great deal more precision than I know precisely what the underlying reality is regarding the individual issues in question. It requires knowing more than I know about his state of mind when he testified as to those things. And it requires a careful analysis of the precise words that he spoke and their relation to that underlying truth. I don’t want to pretend to know more than I do about any of those things.
“But I do know,” Wittes added, “that Patel made a series of statements that don’t comport with anything about my understanding about what’s going on at the FBI.”
A subpoena of Patel’s internal communications would clear up any confusion as to what he knew and when, but I supposed that will have to wait until 2027 after Democrats retake Congress—assuming the United States is permitted to have Midterm elections by Fascist in Chief.
SOURCES
- CallToActivism on Twitter/X
- CNN
- Ben Wittes/Lawfare
- Politico
