Kash Patel’s confirmation to become the next director of the FBI moved forward in the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate on Tuesday in a first procedural vote.
Republicans said they were happy that President Donald Trump’s choice “has the votes” and will be confirmed later this week.
Along party lines, the Senate voted 48–45 to begin debating the nominee. This means that there will be 30 hours of debate before Patel is given final approval on Thursday, according to people familiar with the process who spoke to the New York Post.
GOP senators have praised Patel, 44, from Long Island for his experience as a prosecutor and as a national security aide in the first Trump administration. They have also praised his strong desire to get the FBI back to its core law enforcement duties and stop “weaponizing” politics at the agency.
In his confirmation hearing, Patel pledged to “cut in half” the number of offenses committed across broad categories of crimes, including the “100,000 rapes … 100,000 drug overdoses from Chinese fentanyl and Mexican heroin, and … 17,000 homicides.”
If confirmed as one of the nation’s top law enforcement officers, the nominee, who has praised rank-and-file FBI agents as “courageous, apolitical warriors of justice,” will serve a 10-year term.
“Mr. Patel has undergone a rigorous vetting. He produced more than a thousand pages of records and disclosed over a thousand interviews. He underwent an FBI background investigation, produced a financial disclosure, and worked with ethics officials to identify and resolve potential conflicts of interest,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a hearing last week.
“At his hearing, he answered questions for more than five hours and provided 147 pages of responses to written questions. We’ve examined every detail of his life, and he’s been subjected to relentless attacks on his character the whole time,” Grassley added.