Kash Patel told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday morning that the FBI dropped its automatic hiring ban on bestiality and prostitution to protect victims. "We did not want to punish victims of bestiality, victims who were trafficked," the FBI director said. "We did not want to make it an automatic disqualification for the FBI to consider you."
Patel's own staff wrote a different applicant into the memo. The FBI sent it to its background-check staff on June 16, CBS News reported on August 28. Under it, a candidate who hired a prostitute fewer than three times, more than ten years ago, stays in the running. A candidate who stole from an employer stays in if the theft is more than three years old. A candidate with bestiality or animal cruelty in his past stays in if he was under 18 when he did it.
Buyers. Not the trafficked.
Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, did not buy it either. "When you saw bestiality, I say this with respect: The person who recommended it, why didn't you just say what planet did you parachute in from?" Kennedy asked. Patel said that was his first reaction too, before subordinates sold him the victim argument.
The FBI told CBS in August the change covered "rare exigent circumstances." Patel told the Senate it covered victims. Patel's recruiters wrote it for a hole: the FBI lost 1,139 special agents in 2025, averaging 21.8 years of service each, by former FBI analyst Philip Fields's count. Patel dug part of that hole himself when he purged the agents who worked the Mar-a-Lago search and the Trump investigations, a purge Narativ reported the day it happened in January. Durbin went there next. Chairman Chuck Grassley's majority chose not to follow, and the reason sits in Patel's opening statement.
