Sheldon Whitehouse: “I am here to join my distinguished colleague from California in opposition to the nomination of Kash Patel and to make…”

“I am here to join my distinguished colleague from California in opposition to the nomination of Kash Patel and to make crystal clear to this body what he is going to do in that job. He has shown who he is. So when these things go wrong, I want to be absolutely clear that our Republican friends were warned. They will own the consequences of Kash Patel's misbehavior. Let's start with the fact that, unlike any FBI Director before, this guy is a vitriolic partisan. Those are the stripes he shows when he is left to his own devices, and those are the characteristics he will revert back to when he is running the FBI. Here are just a few simple examples. This is from his book called ``Government Gangsters,'' and this is a page of his enemies' list. Well, Attorney General Bondi said no one should come to a law enforcement job with an enemies' list, so then they had to pretend that this was not an enemies' list. Well, of course, it is an enemies' list. Here is what Kash Patel himself says about it: ``Names named. Roadmap unveiled. The man hunt starts tomorrow.'' If you are going to set up a manhunt against people, are they not your enemies by any logical definition of the term? He goes on to a video that shows himself chain-sawing off the heads of the people on his enemies' list, including the handsome junior Senator from California and the daughter of former Vice President Cheney. It is a pretty gross image to be cutting the heads off of people with a saw.…”