FBI Director Kash Patel has gone on a bizarre rant about the “buffoons on Capitol Hill” after a humiliating appearance before a Senate committee.
The 46-year-old former podcast bro appeared on Fox News after visiting the Senate on Tuesday, where he clashed with lawmakers on the Judiciary Committee over hiring standards, bestiality, hockey, Hawaiian holidays, and more.
The acrimonious hearing saw Patel spar particularly with Sen. Peter Welch, and he had more to say afterward, hitting out at Democratic committee members who dared to grill him.
“This is what the Democrats do on the Hill,” he told Fox host Sean Hannity on Tuesday evening. “They don’t want to participate in the most prolific reduction in violent crime in U.S. history, thanks to President Trump and his law enforcement team.
“What they want to do is baseless personal attacks. What they want to talk about is Russia collusion. What they want to do is lie to the American people, and what they want the mainstream media to do is not cover this historic reduction, not cover the lives saved.”
In August, the FBI issued a press release saying that violent crimes fell by 9.3 percent in 2025. However, data from the Council of State Governments’ Justice Center shows that violent crimes in the U.S. fell in both 2023 and 2024.
“When they want to act like buffoons on Capitol Hill, I think the world is going to look at that hearing and say, a United States senator called the director of the FBI a thug and yelled and screamed at Chairman Chuck Grassley of the United States Senate,” Patel continued.
Grassley, the 92-year-old Iowa senator who heads the committee, told Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey to shut up after he quizzed Patel over what the FBI does and doesn’t choose to investigate.
Booker appeared to become frustrated at the responses offered by Patel, and when Grassley tried to move on to a new senator, Booker said, “Mr. Chairman—Chairman, I’m asking yes-or-no questions about activities of the FBI, that as a matter of oversight I have the right to do,” The New Republic reported.
“That’s what they’re going to see,” Patel continued to Hannity. “And then the other thing the rest of the world is going to see is the historic success we’ve had in securing this country.”
Patel told the Fox host that the combative nature of the meeting stemmed from Democrat anger, claiming in the third person that, “most importantly, we removed the institutionalization that these Democrats were barking about for years. And President Trump and Director Kash Patel and his team have delivered what they never could.
“And the fact that we delivered it is ticking them off more than anything they could possibly think of. So when you’re over the target, what are they going to do, Sean?
“They’re going to yell at you about your personal life and lie about it and threaten the ones you love, which they did repeatedly today. We’re not going to stand for that, but we’re also going to continue this historic mission. We’re only halfway done.”
Among the questions posed to him on Capitol Hill was one from Vermont Democrat Welch, who asked him why Patel appeared inside the locker room after the U.S. men’s ice hockey team captured the gold medal at the Winter Olympics in Milan in February.
“What you’ll never understand is the players, who are my friends, invited me to the locker room,” Patel said. “What you’ll never understand is that during that trip, where 300,000 Americans went to Italy to participate in the games and watch them, not a single security incident occurred.”
In another clash, when Welch questioned Patel over his vacations—including a snorkeling trip in Hawaii—Patel said, “I go where I want to go after delivering the most prolific crime reduction in U.S. history.”
During the hearing, he was also forced to answer why his agency had changed its hiring policy to no longer automatically disqualify people who had engaged in bestiality.
“What we did was, we did not want to punish victims of bestiality—victims who were trafficked,” he said, according to The New Republic. “We did not want to make it an automatic disqualification for the FBI to consider you if you are a victim of these awful, heinous acts.”
He added: “Applicants who have engaged in bestiality means they were victims of bestiality because they were forced to do so.”
