Washington, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show to discuss concerns about President Trump’s pick for FBI Director, Kash Patel, and putting his loyalty to the President over our country’s national security.
Watch the full video of the interview here.
Key Excerpts:
On Kash Patel’s lack of character, unfitness for FBI Director:
[…] It is an enormously powerful position where you want someone of stature, someone of independence, someone of character, someone frankly, like Christopher Wray, who I didn’t always agree with, but had all of those attributes. The last person you want is someone like Kash Patel, because in addition to being dishonest, untrustworthy, lacking in character, all the things that you went through, his only real qualification is he was the guy in the first Trump administration that you went to when no one else would do the dirty work the president wanted done. He was the guy, and he therefore rose very quickly through the ranks. That is not who you want in this position.
On the concerningly low standards for Trump’s nominees:
[…] If you can’t trust someone in these urgent situations, whether it’s a hostage rescue or it’s a report of a terrorist act that might be committed – if you can’t trust the FBI director in that room, people are going to get hurt. And so you need someone of character. You need someone that you can rely upon. You don’t want someone who is endlessly self-promoting, self-aggrandizing, claiming they had positions they didn’t, claiming they got authorizations they didn’t, or fabricating things, blaming the government – in this case, the FBI for January 6th, patently false claims. That we’re even considering him is such a dramatic lowering of the bar from the first term. I think when you get past Matt Gaetz, this is the most, not only unqualified but disqualified candidate for any of these positions. And he has competition for that.
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