FBI Director nominee Kash Patel’s Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday was a chance to learn about the direction the agency would take after a number of years filled with controversies linked to online censorship.
Patel addressed several of these issues, including the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop stories and the FBI’s role in the scandal – which he said would not repeat going forward.
Patel also spoke against the FBI attempting to pressure Big Tech to get these companies to censor content, as well as against wiretapping political candidates and their staff – but also pledged to work with Senator Richard Blumenthal in order to bring potentially controversial changes to Section 230 that could jeopardize end-to-end encryption.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, was on the confirmation hearing panel and recalled that in October 2020 – a month before the election – the FBI was among those who worked to falsely present Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation.”
Graham quoted Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as revealing this, and asked Patel whether he promises that “those days are over at the FBI.”
Patel replied, “Yes, senator, they are.”
Another Republican, Senator Josh Hawley, stayed on the same topic but expanded on other instances when the FBI, under the previous administration, was found to be suppressing online speech, including around Covid topics.
Hawley characterized these activities as attempts to violate the First Amendment and censor regular American’s political speech. And he wanted Patel to clarify if the FBI under his leadership would end these practices.
Patel said he would “always follow the law” and work with Congress to shed light on what he called corrupt activities the FBI was involved with in the past, particularly concerning free speech censorship.
Senator Eric Schmitt focused on the agency’s politicization, citing behavior like investigations of presidential candidates, political opponents, and wiretapping of their advisors, and asked Patel if he would make sure the FBI gets “back to its core mission” and disengage with politics.
Patel replied to the Republican senator that he himself was the target of the weaponization of law enforcement and that he believes politics have no place in the FBI – adding that, if confirmed, he would “make sure no American feels that sleight of hand ever again.”
But, politics was once again the heart of the issue when Democrat Blumenthal grilled Patel about his involvement in assisting what is known as the J6 Prison Choir – gathering about two dozen men put in prison after the January 6 unrest.
They came up with a charity track, “Justice for All,” meant to help with their legal costs, and Blumenthal said Patel produced and helped raise money for the group, using that to question whether he is fit to now head the FBI.
Patel replied that neither his career in government service nor any part of the song glorified violence against law enforcement – but suggested that Blumenthal’s question in itself demonstrated the level of divisions present around the topic of law enforcement.
Patel said that it should be restored to be “constitutionally based, de-weaponized and de-politicized.”
Patel then brought up the Communication Decency Act’s Section 230 as a topic he and Blumenthal share interest in and said he was committed to working with the senator on that.
The likely future FBI chief, however, did not go into more details regarding this point.
What is known is that Blumenthal is the sponsor of the third version of the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act introduced in 2023, which aims to change the terms under which platforms enjoy protection from legal liability under Section 230.
In some ways, this proposed legislation is similar to the EU’s “Chat Control.”
The bill’s stated purpose is to make platforms more responsible for removing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), but the way it is drafted has been drawing criticism from a large number of civil and privacy rights groups, who see it as clashing with the First and Fourth Amendments.
Among other things, they suspect that it provides for the introduction of content scanning by means of encryption backdoors – something that Blumenthal has in the past denied was the goal – but also “incentivizes” platforms to remove encryption and destroy privacy in order to avoid having Section 230 protections removed from them.
