WATCH: Sen. Schiff Breaks Down FBI Director Kash Patel’s Sidestepping During Senate Hearing, Warns of Future Investigations of Patel

Schiff to FBI Director Patel : “You damn well better preserve records, because we’re going to be investigating all these hundreds of wrongful terminations, and we’re going to hold you accountable.” Washington, D.C. – Last night, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined MS NOW’s The Briefing with Jen Psaki to recap the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel’s refusal to answer questions during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. During the hearing, Schiff pressed Patel on his mismanagement and politicization of the agency – including purging FBI agents who investigated President Trump – and emphasized that he will investigate Patel. View the full interview here . Key Excerpts: On Schiff investigating Patel’s corruption at the FBI and attacks on the media: […] [Patel] is being sued and the bureau being sued for wrongful terminations. There’s also litigation always when they try to go after journalists. And if discovery comes out and shows that Patel was made aware and maybe even asked for information about these reporters, and the reporters I was asking about there were those who wrote stories about him using a SWAT team to provide protection to his girlfriend and other stories about his excessive drinking on the job; these are not predicates to investigate some reporter or do queries or abuse FBI resources. And if it comes out in litigation that he was aware of this, that he was involved in this, he’s committed perjury – so, part of the object here too is to pin him down; I fully expect that he will lie to the Congress and hope that he doesn’t get caught – but we will be investigating. I will also be really interested in this private litigation and what it turns up in discovery. On Patel and Blanche dodging Schiff’s questioning on purging investigators tied to investigating President Trump at the FBI and DOJ: […] When Todd Blanche testified, I asked him about comments he made at CPAC, that conservative convention, when he said that basically they had cleaned house at the Department of Justice of anybody who had worked on any of the prosecutions of Donald Trump, and that Patel had done the same thing at the FBI. When I asked Blanche about it, Blanche said, “Well, he was under an ethical requirement that he not involve himself in cases involving his old client, the president.” So, he wasn’t involved in the firings. He was just stating a fact. Patel today said, “Well, if we cleaned a house of all these agents who worked on these investigations of the president, it was because they decided suddenly to retire, or for reasons unrelated to the fact that they all worked on these cases.” None of it passes the smell test. And I wanted to get across one main point, not just to Patel, but to the lawyers sitting behind him and people watching from the FBI: you damn well better preserve records, because we’re going to be investigating all these hundreds of wrongful terminations, and we’re going to hold you accountable. On Patel and Blanche’s refusal to expose truth behind Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding partly funded by Russian oligarch: […] In this case, the oligarch spending potentially 100, $200,000 on Don Jr.’s wedding. It’s absurd. Of course, they’re aware of it. They would be derelict. Their staff would be derelict not to prepare them. This is a different kind of a lie. It’s a kind of a lie that says I don’t want to have to answer questions about this because there’s no way to answer them truthfully without looking like a horse’s ass. So, “I’m just going to say I don’t know anything about this story.” But the fact that here we have an oligarch close to the Kremlin spending that kind of money on the president’s son, and to have the attorney general say, “Well, people are saying that he’s close to the Kremlin. We don’t know that, and I don’t want to know.” That’s the whole implication of that statement by Todd Blanche. “I don’t know. I don’t want to know.” The president has said what he’s going to say. Don Jr. says this Kremlin guy is a close friend. “I’m not going to ask any questions because I wasn’t hired to do that. I don’t represent the American people. I don’t represent our national security interests. I represent my criminal defense client, Donald Trump, only.” ###