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FBI Director Kash Patel Faces Senate Judiciary Committee; Patel Dodges Question On Legitimacy Of 2020 Election Results; Patel Pressed On Changes To FBI Recruiting Standards For Those Accused Of Engaging In Prostitution, Bestiality; Gavin Newsom On Potential 2028 Presidential Run. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired September 15, 2026 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[12:00:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

DANA BASH, CNN HOST, INSIDE POLITICS: Welcome to Inside Politics. I'm Dana Bash in Washington.

And we're going to show you live pictures of Kash Patel fielding questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee. This hearing has veered into some very unexpected directions, with topics swinging from election lies and violent immigration operations to bestiality and prostitution. You heard me right. We're going to get into that later on.

But first, I do want to focus on the Democrats questioning of Patel about election security. 49 days out from the midterm elections, and that question came around the same time President Trump was lashing out at the Supreme Court on his social media platform after justices blocked his push to restrict mail-in ballots just seven weeks before the midterms.

I want to get straight to Evan Perez, who's on Capitol Hill at the hearing, monitoring it. What are -- what's standing out so far to you, Evan?

EVAN PEREZ, CNN SENIOR JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, a lot of the hearing today has focused on Kash Patel's attempt to try to focus on some of the statistics you saw. You could see on the table where he's seated. He has laid out a number of note cards and pages of prepared documents. A lot of them trying to tell the story of his leadership that he says shows a dramatic reduction in crimes. Some of the numbers are a little hard to understand or know where they're coming from.

For instance, claiming that the FBI has stopped 1,100 terrorist attacks during his -- during the past year. I'm not sure where that's coming from, but I guess we will find out. We've asked the FBI to clarify. But one of the major focuses, of course, is the question of election security. What is the FBI's role in trying to post agents, for instance, to make sure that what the president says is concerns about vote fraud that none of that happens?

Listen to this exchange with Senator Blumenthal when Patel was asked about this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL (D-CT): The FBI has no general authority to monitor elections.

KASH PATEL, FBI DIRECTOR: That priority rests with DHS.

BLUMENTHAL: So, you would agree with me that deploying FBI agents to the polls on election day would be contrary to law.

PATEL: I don't know that we can't legally do it. I'm telling you we're going to house our agents and intel analysts in our field offices for election security.

BLUMENTHAL: Well, I'm dissatisfied that you are unable to give us an unequivocal, clear, unambiguous commitment that the FBI will be kept out of election interference.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PEREZ: And Dana, in a subsequent round of questioning, the FBI director tried to, I think, say that the -- that FBI agents are going to be posted at these command centers that are set up in all 56 field offices. Now, that is not unusual. That's how it's usually done, is that they have agents in these field offices and their job is to take any complaints that come in and do investigations if something does arise.

The question, though, that everybody's on edge on is whether the president is going to order either FBI or DHS or perhaps even the National Guard in some of these states to go to the polls because there is a clear legal line that would be crossed if that happens again. Everyone is sort of anticipating what the president might do, but here the FBI director wasn't conceding any of that today, Dana.

BASH: Yeah, that was a really interesting and important exchange. Thank you so much, Evan. Appreciate it. And I'm joined by a terrific group of reporters here. On edge is an understatement, Jeff Zeleny, about how this is going to go down when people go to the polls vis-a- vis what the president is planning to do with federal troops, no matter what flavor of federal troops they are.

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: There's no doubt about it. I mean, election security and sort of the mechanics of the election. Once upon a time, not that long ago, was sort of an afterthought. I mean, we focus much more on the races and the issues and the agenda. Now this year, I would argue it is perhaps one of the most important things between now and when the votes are counted.

Seven weeks from today, it is 49 days away, ballots have already been sent out in North Carolina. They'll be sent out soon in other states. So, this is upon us. But this whole idea of the election security, I mean, the president throws out the word hoax on a variety of things, but it has really settled into the ethos of elections, I guess.

[12:05:00]

But talking to Republicans, I mean, this whole question of mail-in ballots and things, a lot of Republicans also vote by mail -- particularly in rural red Republican areas in Republican states, so there's not a lot of ease on both sides. And on the same hand, or the other hand, I guess I would say, the Apostol Union is largely run by union members who are more likely to vote Democratic here. So, it would be Pollyannish to think we could get back to a day when we're focusing on issues in candidates and not the mechanics of the election, but it is front and center in this race.

BASH: It is, and it all matters at this midterm. I want to talk about another part of this hearing that has to do not with the upcoming election, but with the 2020 election that President Trump is still trying to litigate, despite the fact that we have seen no evidence to prove his claim that he doesn't let up on that the election was stolen from him. And Georgia has been a key part of this.

Tia, you of course work for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Senator Welch of Vermont had some Q&A with Patel about the FBI doing investigations still of the past election.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. PETER WELCH (D-VT): President Trump referred to Democrats and said, this is public at the State of the Union. The only way they can get elected is to cheat. Do you agree with President Trump's statement?

PATEL: The information you're discussing involves ongoing investigations and I'm not going to comment on it.

WELCH: No, I'm asking you --

PATEL: I gave you my answer.

WELCH: -- about his assertion that in this upcoming election --

PATEL: The president has the absolute right, as any of the president --

(CROSSTALK)

WELCH: -- the only way that the Democrats can win is to cheat. Do you agree with the president?

PATEL: Based upon the Russia gate hoax and everything else that's happened, the president is completely justified in making his opinions known, as does any president before him.

WELCH: Do you pledge that you will not, in any way interfere in the will of the American people when they go to the polls in November.

PATEL: I pledge unequivocally that I will not participate in your charade of lies.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: Tia?

TIA MITCHELL, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, THE ATLANTA JOURNAL- CONSTITUTION: Yeah. It's quite problematic. I mean, we should first of all, note, he's talking about this ongoing investigation. That's what the federal government calls it. The people in Fulton County whose ballots were seized, the elected officials, the voters do not know what's going on with that election. They do not know where the ballots currently are that were seized. There have been --

BASH: From 2020.

MITCHELL: Yeah. They seized the 2020 ballots last year and there have been no updates. What they're investigating, what the findings are. It's just kind of there was a raid and then very little information. So, I just want to say because he's talking about this ongoing investigation, we would love to hear more, you know.

BASH: And he wouldn't answer that question.

MITCHELL: Yeah. But I would say, you know, deeper than that and I know this is the point you're getting to, Dana, is that the fabric of our democracy is based on free and fair elections. Our democracy falls apart once people do not feel confident that the will of the voters is reflected in who ultimately gets to take office, and that's different than saying, you know, there were anomalies, there were things that need to change.

You can disagree with the results, but you've got to ultimately feel like the courts and the elected officials and the candidates work together to uphold the rule of law. And that's what's so troubling about the FBI director, someone with so much power, not committing to those norms.

BASH: Yeah. And this is also what you were alluding to, Tia, the idea that this is a president who sows those seeds very openly, very aggressively when it looks like he's not going to win or when he didn't win, 2020, and then looking ahead to what could potentially be coming his way.

And as you come in, Frank, I want to show our viewers what the president posted this morning about his anger at the United States Supreme Court. Why? Because the Supreme Court last night struck down the executive order, the plan that the president put in place to restrict mail-in voting.

And the president lashed out, saying this Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the radical left into making decisions that have set America back at least 100 years. These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court. They are merely a shell of their original selves. It is a court that will go down as having rendered some of the most destructive, hurtful, and damaging decisions in our country's history.

Now implied there, and just sort of put a finer point on it, the justices he appointed and were confirmed by the Senate were not on his side on this mail-in ballot thing.

[12:10:00]

FRANKLIN FOER, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: Exactly. And it's just a piece of a broader. Intimidation effort that he is waging against not just the courts when they disagree with him, but election officials, as Tia has pointed out, and so much of this is kind of a hypothetical discussion about what might happen. It's worth pausing just to consider how much damage has already been done over the course of this administration to the independents of elections.

We've had this hyper-charged reapportionment war that he ignited. That's netted about 10 seats to the Republicans. His DHS, his FBI are constantly bullying election officials, threatening them with jail, threatening to withhold their money. There's this big attempt to centralize elections, which the Supreme Court has in part stymied, but there's a lot that he's done --

BASH: Because the constitution says specifically that's not how we do it.

FOER: Exactly, exactly. And so, when we talk about the hypothetical threats this November, it's premised on all sorts of things that have already been that have gone down.

ZELENY: It is lashing out at the Supreme Court is completely missing the fact of how many cases have rolled in his favor, like on voting rights and other things. So that is absolutely without not seeing the whole picture here of all the rulings.

BASH: As we go to break, I just want to read part of a really important story on this topic by our friend of the show, Zolan Kanno- Youngs in the New York Times this morning. Trump's effort to assert control over elections continues despite court loss.

The Justice Department sent threatening letters to at least 30 top election officials across the country, escalating a fight to gain access to private voter data and election records. Federal agents are scouring voter rolls managed to -- managed by states for noncitizens. Officials in the Justice Department have also explored whether they could bring criminal charges against state or local officials if the administration determined they had not sufficiently safeguarded their computer systems. Exactly the kind of thing that you were talking about, Frank. And we are not going to let up on the story.

Coming up, a very sharp term, but it comes from the same hearing. Talk of bestiality at this Kash Patel. Hearing on Capitol Hill, what was it all about? I'm going to talk to the former FBI director, Andy McCabe, next.

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[12:15:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BASH: Welcome back. There has been a really wide-ranging hearing with the FBI Director Kash Patel, ranging even into the FBI's new recruitment standards to remove automatic disqualification for certain kinds of offenses.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PATEL: Thank you for bringing this up, so we can get to the truth of the matter. What we did was, we did not want to punish victims of bestiality, victims who were trafficked. We did not want to make it an automatic disqualification for the FBI to consider you.

SEN. JOHN KENNEDY (R-LA): Tell me what it said before?

PATEL: It automatically disqualified any individual who participated on either side of it. Obviously, we are never going to hire the criminal --

KENNEDY: The side of what? The bestiality.

PATEL: Yes.

KENNEDY: So, you disqualified the animal?

PATEL: Well, I don't think -- we have great canines, but we're not going to disqualify.

KENNEDY: I understand. I'm trying to understand why you did this.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: That wasn't all. Senator Kennedy had many follow-ups that led to more talk of bestiality.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. DICK DURBIN (D-IL): The FBI has removed from its list of automatic hiring disqualifications theft from an employer, sex solicitation, and bestiality.

KENNEDY: Victim of what? Give me the --

PATEL: Prostitution, bestiality, crimes like that.

KENNEDY: What about the bestiality?

PATEL: Criminal engagement.

KENNEDY: The side of what, the bestiality? Why would you even get into bestiality?

PATEL: We are not into bestiality.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: Again, that was just a taste of it. There have been at least 19 mentions of bestiality so far. The hearing is still going on. Former FBI deputy director Andy McCabe is here. Andy, but you've never had an intro like that, but talk about what this is all about.

ANDREW MCCABE, FORMER FBI DEPUTY DIRECTOR & CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Well, that's a really good question. I'm not 100 percent sure. So, we've seen the FBI took steps to eliminate what were previously automatic disqualifiers for candidates for employment. One is theft from an employer, another is involvement in prostitution, and then the third is involvement in bestiality. They did not specify that these reductions were an effort to solely benefit persons who were victims of crime.

So, in the context of bestiality, I can tell you, Dana, in 21 years in the FBI, this issue never came up. There was never a problem of excluding otherwise viable candidates who had been the victims of forced bestiality. So, the fact that the director is using this as a way to kind of soften the blow, as it were, now and to try to put this in some sort of a reasonable package is not entirely believable in my estimation.

[12:20:00]

BASH: And Andy, the --

MCCABE: The other thing is --

BASH: I was just going to say that -- sorry to interrupt you, but I want to make sure to get to the heart of the matter. And forgive me if you were going to do this, which is the FBI is struggling in its recruiting, and so it's changing the standards.

MCCABE: There is no doubt about that. The FBI has lost a record number of personnel. By the end of this year, estimates are they'll be at a deficit of like 5000 employees. Many of those are people who've been forced out for political reasons. Others are people who are leaving the agency just because they're not, you know, they're disgruntled with what they see from their leadership.

The point is this is not a policy that needed to be changed to stem that blow, right? The idea that the FBI director would put his own credibility and judgment on the line over something as esoteric and irrelevant as protecting victims of bestiality who might happen to want to work for the FBI is really unconscionable to me.

What he's managed to do with this decision, allowing this rule change to take place, is once again draw regretful, negative, inflammatory public attention to the FBI. It's something that every one of his predecessors assiduously avoided doing, and here you have kind of Kash Patel driving that sort of -- kind of negative feedback for the FBI once again.

BASH: Andrew McCabe, always good to talk to you. Thank you so much for helping understand this.

MCCABE: Thanks.

BASH: And Franklin, your analysis of this?

FOER: Yeah. I mean, I think the laxening of standards is part of a drive to make up for that gap of all these -- all the expertise that has fled the building. And we've seen how that expert -- that loss of expertise has hurt the FBI in pretty graphic ways, where there's been some bungling.

There's been examples of incompetence, but we also know that the loss of expertise is something that's not going to be compensated for overnight by just shifting around some standards, especially not with the more esoteric parts of the hiring criteria because the people who have left had this granular, nuanced understanding of our adversaries built up over time. You have people who worked on counterintelligence, who understood how Chinese efforts to infiltrate the United States, we're working, and these are things that you build up in your mind over years and they're not things that can be replaced easily overnight.

MITCHELL: Yeah. I just also want to say, like, the standards were in place for a reason, right? Because when you're thinking about our law enforcement agencies, federal agencies, sensitive data, sensitive information, and again, we want our best and brightest. The thinking was, well, perhaps if you've been convicted of certain crimes, you no longer qualify because we don't necessarily want someone who has that in their past serving in these roles.

So that's another reason why the relaxing of standards is, you know, could be a concern and that doesn't mean that people aren't irredeemable. But do we want someone who's been charged with bestiality, you know, in these -- in these roles. That's the question.

ZELENY: And I think underscoring all of it is readiness. I mean, that is the central point of all of this. We're in the shadow of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and readiness, and how ready and capable is the government for the next attack? All of that really has been eroded. There are deep worries among officials from both parties, or who have worked administration to both parties, just a readiness question across the government with so many people leaving.

BASH: All right, everybody, stand by. Coming up, what could keep Governor Gavin Newsom from running for the job he clearly wants? We'll hear his answer, next.

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[12:25:00]

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BASH: California Governor Gavin Newsom's term is about to come to an end. My colleague Jake Tapper went fly fishing with the governor and asked if he's decided on a 2028 presidential run.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM (D-CA): Honestly, you have to feel like you can stand on there and stage with what 30?

JAKE TAPPER, CNN CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: It's going to be a lot of people. It's a lot of Democrats.

NEWSOM: 31 flavors.

TAPPER: And you're not even the only Californian.

NEWSOM: No, right? Yeah.

TAPPER: You got Ro Khanna.

NEWSOM: Yeah.

TAPPER: Kamala.

NEWSOM: Yeah. I don't know she runs, but we'll see.

TAPPER: I know she's called around.

NEWSOM: Yeah, but I wouldn't run if she ran.

TAPPER: If she runs, you will not.

NEWSOM: Of course, not. Why would I? I wouldn't do that to her. I wouldn't do it to me. Why would I? I wouldn't do that to you. I wouldn't waste everyone's time. Who needs that?

TAPPER: What do you mean? That doesn't even make sense to me.

NEWSOM: I just -- I wouldn't, no, I wouldn't. First of all, electorally, it's a gift from God for everybody else. They enjoy the hell out of it. Mutual assured destruction. It services no greater good.

TAPPER: I mean, you do whatever you want. I don't care. But like -- but my counter argument would be like, you know, she had a shot, and you've never run, and she's run twice.

NEWSOM: Yeah. I mean, that would be the -- that'd be the approach to the campaign. Certainly, that would be the case you'd make. Pretty good one, actually, you know, that's objectively true. I just, but I know what that means. I know her base of supporters. I know her friends. The Zen diagram on that is just pure crossover. It's not. I wouldn't do that too. I wouldn't do that to people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: Fascinating.

MITCHELL: Sound good.

BASH: Yeah, it was fascinating. I want to talk about this, and I just want to show a little bit of the slight evolution in his thinking. I talked to Governor Newsom back in February when he was out on a book tour and talked about the fact that he and Kamala Harris, not only did they have the same donors and so on and so forth. They came up together. They've known each other for decades. Listen to that.