Trump’s FBI Pick Refuses to Answer Perhaps the Biggest Question of All

Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s choice to run the FBI, pointedly refused to answer a question at his Senate confirmation hearing Thursday about using the bureau to go after the president’s enemies.

Senator Cory Booker directly asked Patel about his past statements in which he pledged to shut down the FBI Hoover building and “replace it with a mausoleum of the Deep State,” noting that Patel had plans to remove specific people from the FBI by bringing in political appointees to an apolitical agency.

Booker’s question was interrupted by Senator Chuck Grassley, the Senate Judiciary Committee chair, who then asked Patel if he would like to answer Booker’s question, or “move on.”

“We can move on,” Patel replied.

Patel likely refused to acknowledge Booker’s question because the New Jersey senator had a point. The nominee compiled a “Deep State” enemies list in his 2022 book Government Gangsters, and would want employees loyal to him to carry out retribution. Fellow administration nominee Pam Bondi, Trump’s choice for attorney general, backed Patel in her own confirmation hearings and implicitly acknowledged his list.

With the previous FBI director (and Trump appointee) Christopher Wray resigning last month, it would seem that Patel has a clear path to take over the bureau and begin going after Trump’s enemies. But not only does he have to be confirmed first, he also would have to fight allegations of malicious prosecution thanks to his preemptive list. Can Trump and Patel overcome the Senate and the courts?

Donald Trump is suggesting that diversity, equity, and inclusion policies are responsible for the deadly plane crash near Washington, D.C., that is believed to have taken the lives of 67 people.

The president made the troubling claim at a press conference Thursday morning—even as he immediately admitted he had zero evidence.

“The FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] is actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website. Can you imagine?

“Hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism, all qualify for the position of a controller of airplanes pouring into our country,” the president continued on, reading an FAA diversity program that existed under his own first administration.

Trump immediately made the conversation about DEI rather than focusing on what specific errors occurred or even waiting for a single shred of evidence to support his ludicrous claims to come out. It became overwhelmingly evident that Trump will lean on his DEI boogeyman as a scapegoat for anything that goes wrong with any federal agency during his term.

“We don’t even yet know the names of the 67 people who were killed, and you’re blaming Democrats and DEI policies and air traffic control, and seemingly the member of the U.S. military who was flying that Black Hawk helicopter,” CNN’s Kaitlin Collins said to Trump. “Don’t you think you’re getting ahead of the investigation right now?”

“No, I don’t think so at all.… The names of the people, you mean the names of the people on the plane … you think that’s gonna make a difference?” the president replied.

Trump was again pressed on his claims that DEI caused this fatal crash.

“I’m trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash,” another reporter asked.

“Because I have common sense, and unfortunately a lot of people don’t,” Trump replied. He then alleged that he was going to fix this issue in 2020 if the election hadn’t been “stolen” from him, as he is still convinced.

This statement places people of color, people with disabilities, and anyone who doesn’t fit into MAGA’s vision for America firmly into the crosshairs of the Trump administration. It’s a dark moment in time when our president is trying to convince us that DEI caused all of this, rather than simply honoring the memories of those lost in this horrific accident and committing to taking the proper next steps.

Robert F. Kennedy’s virulent vaccine conspiracies got some members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, or HELP, emotional on Thursday, with New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan arguing that Kennedy’s parroting of debunked theories wasn’t just harming people with autism but paralyzing the entire country’s scientific progress.

“The problem with this witness’s responses on the autism cause and its relationship to vaccines, is because he’s relitigating and churning settled science,” Hassan stressed, raising her voice. “So we can’t go forward and find out what the cause of autism is and treat these kids and help these families.”

Hassan, who herself has a disabled son and who successfully made autism research a federal priority in 2024, told Kennedy that the study that first linked vaccines to the neurodevelopmental disorder “rocked” her world.

“Like every mother, I worried about whether vaccines had done something to my son. And you know what? It was a tiny study of about 12 kids, and in time, the scientific community studied, and studied, and studied, and found that it was wrong. And the journal retracted the study because sometimes science is wrong, we make progress. We build on the work and we become more successful,” she said.

“And when you continue to sow doubt about settled science, it makes it impossible for us to move forward,” Hassan said. “So that’s what the problem is here. It’s the relitigating, and rehashing, and continuing to sow doubt so that we can’t move forward. And it freezes us in place.”

A disclosure form filed for Kennedy’s nomination revealed that the outspoken vaccine critic had made a business out of his extreme public health stances, pulling in roughly $10 million over the last year related to dividends from his vaccine lawsuits, anti-vaxx speaking fees, and leading Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit dedicated to spreading misinformation about vaccine efficacy.

Kennedy’s history in public health is questionable at best. His stances, which include unscientific beliefs that AIDS is not caused by HIV and that a large number of vaccines should be stripped from the market, could have major impacts on the agency designed to protect America’s health, especially as bird flu outbreaks dot the country.

In December, Trump announced that Kennedy would spend his time at the top of HHS researching the already thoroughly debunked conspiracy that ties vaccine usage to increased autism rates.

And Kennedy’s vaccine conspiracies aren’t just easily refutable, anti-vax hogwash—they’ve caused legitimate, real-world harm. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on the Pacific islands of Samoa in 2019, Children’s Health Defense spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines, sending the nation’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles—an illness that was declared eliminated by the United States in 2000 thanks to advancements in modern medicine (read: vaccines)—as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of 5.

Donald Trump is claiming that diversity, equity, and inclusion is to blame for the deadly collision of a passenger plane and a military helicopter in the Washington, D.C., area.

During a news conference Thursday, Trump cited a “big push to put diversity into the [Federal Aviation Administration]’s program,” which he insisted happened before his second term began.

“The FAA is actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website,” Trump said, citing an “article.” 

The article is likely this one published by Fox News in January 2024, which reported on an FAA policy to place a “special emphasis in recruitment and hiring” on people with “targeted disabilities” that included “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”

In a sense, Trump was right: That language did predate his second term. It first appeared on the FAA’s website in 2013, according to Snopes. So it was still in place during Trump’s first term. 

On Tuesday, the Trump administration had released materials targeting disabled employees at the FAA, directing the agency “to immediately return to non-discriminatory, merit-based hiring” and stop its DEI initiatives. Still, according to the president, DEI was to blame for the deadly incident that happened the next day.

Trump also scrapped all Department of Homeland Security advisory committees in a “commitment to eliminating the misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security,” and fired the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard.

Republican lawmakers armed with limited information were quick to play the blame game too. Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo spoke to some Republican lawmakers who cast responsibility for the deadly incident on anyone, or anything, but their own party or its leader. 

“You hate to jump to any conclusions,” Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles said, before openly speculating about possible conclusions. 

“Human error?” Ogles mused. “Was it some sort of equipment failure? Did DEI play a role in this type of thing?” 

Ogles encouraged examining the incident with “eyes wide open,” but clearly his eyes are focused away from one group in particular. 

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson also got a chance to guess, after Bartiromo described an expert blaming the Federal Aviation Agency and air traffic control.

“I’m not exactly sure what caused this, what it was, purely the air traffic control system, but I know it’s completely antiquated, it needs to be upgraded; we’ve known about this for years and quite honestly, administrations haven’t done anything about it,” Johnson said.

He added that there was an opportunity for “someone like Elon Musk” to “really modernize things.”

As part of his push to “modernize things,” shadow president Elon Musk demanded that FAA chief Michael Whitaker quit, because he was angry that Whitaker wanted SpaceX  to pay fines for failing to follow its license requirements during two SpaceX launches. Whitaker resigned less than two weeks ago.

Trump’s freshly appointed transportation secretary is doing a terrible job of inspiring confidence in his abilities, following the devastating aircraft collision at Ronald Reagan National airport near Washington, D.C.

A U.S. military Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines passenger plane carrying 64 people collided late Wednesday night, leaving no survivors and giving the Trump administration its first aviation crisis.

Sean Duffy, the former reality TV star turned transportation secretary, was asked Thursday morning about how normal it was for military helicopters and other aircraft to get clearance to cross a potentially busy flight path.

“I don’t want to go into too much detail about the information we have from the FAA, but obviously it is not standard to have aircraft collide. I want to be clear on that.”

Duffy was quickly lambasted for stating the painfully obvious.

“I’m starting to think the guy from MTV’s The Real World and Road Rules All Stars might not have a lot of expertise in transportation issues, particularly aviation safety,” one X user wrote.

“Just imagine if Pete Buttigieg said this,” said another, in reference to Biden’s transportation secretary.