Kash Patel is using his Senate hearing this week to prove he’s the right man to run the FBI.
Instead, the FBI director spent part of it explaining why the bureau no longer automatically turns away job applicants with one of the most disturbing entries a background check can turn up.
The Trump loyalist insisted he wanted to protect victims, but senators from both parties remained unconvinced as the nearly five-hour grilling grew stranger.
Republican Sen. John Kennedy asked Patel to explain the old rule, prompting a follow-up so absurd that even Patel couldn’t keep a straight face.
The Sept. 15 Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing was meant to cover the state of the FBI under Donald Trump.
But lawmakers kept circling back to a change the bureau made quietly and never announced.
In August, CBS News reported that the FBI had scrapped several automatic disqualifiers for applicants. One of them was bestiality, meaning sexual activity with an animal.
Under the old rules, anyone who admitted to it was out. Now, a candidate can still be considered as long as it happened before they turned 18.
Tuesday was the first time Patel addressed the change publicly.
“We did not want to punish victims of bestiality, victims who were trafficked,” Patel told Sen. Dick Durbin.
When Durbin kept pressing, Patel snapped that applicants who had engaged in bestiality “were victims of bestiality because they were forced to do so.”
Kennedy wanted to hear what the policy said before Patel touched it. Patel told him it “automatically disqualified any individual who participated on either side of it,” and the Louisiana senator was not about to let that phrasing slide.
“Either side of what? The bestiality?” Kennedy asked. “So you disqualified the animal?”
“Well, I don’t think, we have great canines, but we’re not going to disqualify them,” Patel responded, laughing.
Kennedy didn’t laugh along. “Why would you even get into bestiality?” he asked.
When Patel insisted the FBI was “not into bestiality,” Kennedy abruptly cut in: “I know you’re not.”
Patel said subordinates pitched the change and showed him cases of trafficking victims who later applied. Kennedy asked how anyone does it involuntarily. He then wondered aloud why Patel didn’t ask whoever recommended it, “What planet did you parachute in from?”
Finally, Kennedy asked point-blank whether someone who had sex with an animal could still become an FBI agent.
“They cannot,” Patel said. When Kennedy added that such people “ought to be in jail,” Patel replied, “They all are.”
The problem is that his own policy doesn’t seem to say that. The new rules reportedly don’t distinguish between applicants who were coerced and those who acted willingly.
Online, people could hardly believe what they were watching.
“We are not a serious country anymore,” one user wrote after a clip of the exchange went viral. “This administration is beyond an embarrassing joke.”
Another X user could only manage writing the words, “Just another Tuesday in maga.”
A third asked whether there was “a large contingent of victims of bestiality trying to get into the FBI” that she somehow missed.
Even bureau veterans were thrown. Andrew McCabe, the FBI’s former deputy director, told CNN he couldn’t “ever, ever” remember hearing the word bestiality at work and called the change “mind-boggling.”
Bestiality wasn’t the only standard Patel’s FBI relaxed. Applicants who engaged in prostitution can now be considered if it happened fewer than three times and more than a decade ago.
That change also covers people who paid for sex, and an FBI spokesperson previously acknowledged it could apply to someone who hired a sex worker where it’s legal.
Applicants who stole from an employer are eligible if the theft was more than three years back, a change Patel never explained Tuesday.
On the eve of the hearing, Judiciary Democrats sent Patel a letter demanding a “full accounting,” including how many applicants hired or placed under review since June 16 would once have been rejected outright.
The hearing was chaotic well beyond the hiring questions. As ABS reported, Patel came armed with color-coded cue cards and repeatedly begged the Republican chairman to end things early.
It’s worth mentioning that back in May, he had agreed to take an alcohol dependency test alongside a Maryland Democrat after being questioned about a $7,000 bar tab in Washington.
Days earlier, he was reportedly ordering polygraphs for more than two dozen current and former members of his own security detail while hunting for leakers.
PATEL: The previous regulation automatically disqualified any individual who participated in either side of it
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 15, 2026
KENNEDY: Either side of beastiality? So you disqualified the animal?
PATEL: Well, we have great canines, but we're not going to disqualify them
KENNEDY: I'm trying to… pic.twitter.com/I2oJH6XKJf
