Ranking Member Raskin Grills FBI Dir. Kash Patel in Opening Statement at Judiciary Hearing: “You’ve Left All of Us Less Safe”

Washington, D.C. (September 17, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at the Full Committee hearing on Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), slamming Director Kash Patel for making all Americans less safe through his partisan mass firings, forced resignations and cuts to key crime-fighting efforts at the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, while leading the cover-up of President Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein and displaying blind loyalty to the President.

 Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks at today’s hearing.

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WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
House Judiciary Committee
Hearing on “Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation”
September 17, 2025

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And welcome, Director Patel. You and I have not had the opportunity to meet and alas, you failed to respond to the eight oversight letters I’ve sent you over the last seven months. So, we do have a lot of questions piling up for you.

But I want to start with a word of praise for you. The first FBI Director was J. Edgar Hoover, who steadfastly refused to hire women, African-Americans and other minorities as agents. Although he was a closeted homosexual who lived in a domestic partnership for decades with Clyde Tolson, Hoover also participated in homophobic crusades. He aggressively promoted what we could today call White Christian Nationalism and he would undoubtedly be turning over in his grave to know that one of his successors was a first-generation Indian American and a proud Hindu. So I congratulate you on being a breakthrough beneficiary of the Civil Rights movement that opened up the FBI and the federal government to lots of people who never would have been hired in its first several decades 

But you share Hoover’s dangerous obsession with blind loyalty over professionalism. For Hoover, it was blind loyalty to him and keeping his secrets. For you, it is blind loyalty to Donald Trump and keeping his secrets.

During your confirmation, it was widely noted on all sides that your primary qualification was your unwavering loyalty to Donald Trump. Unlike other FBI Directors, you had no work experience at the Bureau. You had made over 1,000 media and political appearances in support of Donald Trump’s campaign.

Your Senate confirmation vote was 51-49, the closest in history, with your opponents warning you were not qualified and had no interest in actually developing the qualifications for the job. I hoped that they were wrong. Alas, they were not. 

While most other new FBI Directors drew on their experience as FBI agents, you didn’t have that. You wrote a picture book trilogy for children ages 5 and up based on your experience clashing with President Trump’s enemies. In your book, you describe your literary alter-ego, Kash the Knight, as a wacky Wizard carrying out King Donald’s vengeance by driving his enemies out of the Kingdom. In the books, King Donald is besieged by the evil Hillary Queentown but saved in the end by Kash; then Kash goes on to catch “mules” who are stealing an election from for the great King Donald from Sleepy Joe. Then in the third book, Kash takes down the Dragon of the Jalapenos, nicknamed DOJ.

Your supporters hoped that you would graduate from imagining yourself a romantic fairytale knight to running America’s premier federal law enforcement agency. Alas, just as we’ve learned how dangerous it is to put a science-denying anti-vaxxer who dumps bears in Central Park in charge of the nation’s public health, we’ve learned how dangerous it is to name as Director of the FBI a man who thinks of himself as a fairytale knight who keeps a fire-breathing dragon named DOJ to forcibly drive villains out of the Kingdom.

When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, while his killer was still on the loose, you decided you didn’t need to be at FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. to work with your team while the chaotic manhunt unfolded. You spent your evening dining at a swanky midtown Manhattan restaurant and tweeting false information that the subject of the shooting was in custody, a statement you had to retract an hour later. Your performance last week was so disturbing that even the MAGA base was alarmed. MAGA culture warrior Christopher Rufo, who just a few months ago sat in your chair as a Republican witness before this Committee, observed that you “performed terribly” and called for your ouster.

The FBI might be able to survive your delusions of grandeur and the explosively volatile temper you displayed yesterday in the Senate. But the intractable problem is that you are running the FBI not as a law enforcement agency charged with keeping the American people safe but as a political enforcer agency working directly for the President’s vengeance campaign.

Seven months in, it is impossible to overstate the destruction, chaos, and demoralization you have brought to the FBI and its workforce, and the resulting danger your actions have caused to our country. You have been systematically purging the FBI of the most experienced and qualified agents, division leaders, and experts in counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cybersecurity, precisely the agents who have the expertise you lack and which the FBI and the country need. They have been expelled from the ranks of the Bureau simply because they did their duty investigating crimes, including those committed by the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and beat the hell out of more than 140 police officers, or simply because you suspected them of being insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump.

You illegally sacked Brian Driscoll, the former Acting Director of the Bureau and a decorated counterterrorism and crisis negotiation expert who worked at the FBI nearly 20 years. According to Driscoll, you told him that your own job, “depended on the removal of agents who worked on the cases against the President, regardless of whether the agents chose to work on those cases or not.” You added, “the FBI tried to put the President in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it.”

You forced out the leader of the Salt Lake City field office, Mehtab Syed, just weeks before Charlie Kirk’s assassination in Utah, depriving the FBI of an experienced and multilingual counterterrorism expert described by her former colleagues as “absolutely the best” and “legendary.” She would have led FBI agents in the Utah manhunt had she not been canned.

When Trump decided that rounding up immigrants with no criminal records was more important that preventing crimes like human trafficking of women and girls, drug dealing terrorism, and fraud, you ordered FBI’s 25 largest field offices to divert thousands of agents away from chasing down violent criminals, sex traffickers, fraudsters and scammers to help carry out Trump’s extreme immigration crackdown.

Director Patel, you have treated the men and women at the FBI whom you haven’t fired yet with disrespect and paranoia. You have assembled a roving band of freelancing henchmen within your office and charged them with conducting unauthorized investigations, targeting and harassing career FBI employees. You have amazingly forced senior leadership to take polygraph tests to prove their political loyalty to Trump, and pushed out leaders who refuse these demeaning and demoralizing exercises.

And we’re now seeing one very clear reason why you want to build an FBI that can protect the President at all costs: the Epstein files. You want an FBI that’s blindly loyal to Trump—and to you as his enforcer—so that you can continue your cover-up of a massive international sex trafficking ring with more than 1,000 victims—betraying all of the survivors of the sexual violence.

Before you got into this job, you called for the full release of the Epstein files, telling right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson that the only reason the list was not released by DOJ and FBI was “because of who’s on that list.”

Upon your confirmation, you promised that “There will be no cover-ups, no missing documents, and no stone left unturned—and anyone from the prior or current Bureau who undermines this will be swiftly pursued.”

This spring, you ordered hundreds of FBI agents to pore over all the Epstein files but not to look for more clues about the money network or the network of human traffickers. pulled these agents from their regular counter-terrorism, counterintelligence or anti-drug trafficking duties to work around the clock, some of them sleeping on their office desks, to conduct a frantic search to make sure Donald Trump’s name and image were flagged and redacted wherever they appeared, whether an email, a text, a letter, an interview, a photograph or a video. In May, Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly told Trump that his name had indeed appeared multiple times throughout the Epstein files. And not long thereafter, in July, you and the Attorney General released a memo claiming that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.”

In a few short months, how did you go from being a crusader for accountability and public transparency for the Epstein files to being part of the conspiracy and cover-up? The answer is simple, you said it yourself: Because of who’s on that list. 

Donald Trump’s relationship with Epstein over the years is well-known and well-documented. Just a week ago, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released Donald Trump’s disturbing “birthday book” note to Epstein, written over a drawing of a woman’s naked body referring to “a wonderful secret.” The Oversight Committee obtained the note from the Epstein estate, not from the FBI, raising questions again of whether the FBI has been withholding documents related to Donald Trump, and why. 

While you’re unleashing the FBI to cater to Trump’s desire to shut down the Epstein inquiry, the first nine months of the Trump presidency have seen a spate of political violence and domestic terror incidents. We saw deadly attacks on political figures on both the left and the right—including the brutal assassination of Minnesota Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the attempted murder of Democratic State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, who miraculously survived a combined 17 gunshots. We saw an arsonist set Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence on fire. And of course, just last week, the horrific cold-blooded assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah that has shaken the nation. 

One minute after Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck, a 16-year old shooter in Evergreen, Colorado radicalized by white supremacist ideology on-line opened fire and critically wounded two other students at Evergreen High School.

We have seen lethal antisemitic violence, including the murder of two young Israeli embassy staffers just blocks away from this Capitol building in May, and then the attack on a gathering of Jewish individuals in support of hostages held in Gaza in Boulder, Colorado in June. 

We’ve seen continued mass shootings at school like the domestic terrorism incident at a Catholic school in Minneapolis last month—which killed two children and wounded 18 others. In August, a man fired more than 500 bullets at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, killing a police officer who was a marine veteran and father.

People like Melissa Hortman and Charlie Kirk should be able to participate in politics as elected officials or active citizens without being shot down in cold blood in the United States of America . People should also be able to go to elementary school, middle school, high school, to work, to the mall,  and to church without being shot down by gun violence.

The important position at the FBI requires a real leader who puts public safety, national security, and the rule of law first. I’m afraid, Director Patel, you’ve given us reason to believe you have used the powers of the FBI to serve Donald Trump and his agenda of partisan retribution. You’ve broken your promise not to do that. You’ve betrayed Jeffrey Epstein’s victims and survivors. You’ve turned your back on the career law enforcement officers of the FBI, and as a result, you’ve left all of us less safe than before.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back.