'We Are Not Into Bestiality,' FBI Director Kash Patel Tells Members of Congress
Wait, what?
"We are not into bestiality," FBI Director Kash Patel told members of Congress yesterday, moments after assuring them that they were "not going to disqualify" any of the agency's "great canines" for engaging in sexual activity with FBI agents.
I'm sorry—what?
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After watching this exchange from the hearing, I wondered for a moment if journalist Aaron Ruper, who had shared the clip, hadn't been taken in somehow by a deepfake.
But no, it's real. And as far as I can tell, it's not actually a defense of human-to-canine coupling, thank goodness. It's just Patel handling questions about recent FBI policy changes in pretty much the worst way possible.
Let's back up a moment. In August, the Associated Press reported that the FBI would no longer bar the hiring of agents who had paid for sex—with a human, I guess I should clarify—in the past. "The move away from an automatic disqualification falls along a continuum of evolving recruitment standards within federal law enforcement and at the buttoned-up bureau, which several years ago relaxed its approach to candidates' past marijuana use," noted the A.P. "The bureau still intends to dismiss applicants who are revealed during the vetting process to have engaged in prostitution within the last 10 years, three or more times overall or while in a position of trust such as public safety," according to an A.P. source who "spoke on condition of anonymity."
The FBI has a long history of arresting people who pay for sexual activity and people who sell it, so I greeted the policy change with a hearty eye roll. But it's probably no big deal. The agency isn't saying it will hire someone with a history of solicitation, merely that it won't treat this as automatically disqualifying in all circumstances.
Flash forward to Tuesday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, which was aimed at FBI oversight generally. Sen. John Kennedy (R–La.) questioned Patel about recent hiring policy changes, which also removed automatic disqualification for applicants who had engaged in bestiality.
According to Patel, the change has a serious and sad rationale: accommodating applicants who had been forced to engage in heinous acts like bestiality in their youth.
I can't imagine that this is a common hindrance to FBI employment. (I hope not.) But if the FBI has to change its policy to accommodate even one such person—OK, fine. No big deal, again.
Patel also said that under the recent policy change, people who had been forced into prostitution could now be considered for FBI roles.
Patel's answers about FBI applicants and prostitution were a little convoluted. What I took his answers to mean was that the policy change simply says it's not automatically disqualifying to have prior experience with prostitution, and the FBI will consider individual circumstances when deciding whether it's actually disqualifying. This could allow the FBI, at its discretion, to hire people who had been forced into prostitution but to reject some people who had a history of sex work or of paying sex workers.
In general, Patel was pretty abysmal at handling Kennedy's questions about hiring policy changes. Check out this exchange:
Kennedy: "What about the bestiality?"
Patel: "Same thing. Because the regs wrote it up in a fashion—before I arrived—that addressed prostitution, bestiality, and trafficking. They were there before I got there—"
Kennedy: "Yeah, but 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 criminals—"
Kennedy: "Each side of what, the bestiality?"
Patel: "Yes."
Kennedy: "So you disqualified the animal?"
Patel: "Well… I don't think we… We have great canines, but we're not going to disqualify—"
Kennedy: "I understand."
I don't understand. Was Patel trying to make a joke there, with the "great canines" bit? If so, it seems in poor taste, and it falls flat. It also obfuscates what I think Patel was starting to actually say: that the previous policy punished people who forced others into things like prostitution or bestiality and people who were forced into these things (both sides).
The exchange goes on:
Kennedy: "Why would you even get into bestiality?"
Patel: "We are not into bestiality. But a lot of these individuals—"
Kennedy: "I know you're not! But you changed—"
Patel: "But I'm trying to explain it, hang on—"
Kennedy: "You changed the qualifications and mentioned bestiality."
The back-and-forth was actually fairly typical for congressional hearings, during which whoever is in the hot seat hardly ever gets the time or space to adequately explain themselves and members of Congress usually seem more interested in hearing themselves grandstand than in gaining a genuine understanding. It's really kind of beautiful and hilarious to see a high-ranking official like Patel subject to the same sort of show-trial nonsense that private individuals hauled into congressional hearings are subjected to.
I was almost starting to feel sorry for Patel here—until he reminded me that he's the head of the FBI by doing one of the most FBI things possible: wildly exaggerating about human trafficking.
Asked by Kennedy how someone could unintentionally participate in bestiality, Patel replied: "In a lot of these cases, when human traffickers—who are some of the worst individuals on planet earth—they don't just traffic you for prostitution, they traffic you for degrading acts of all kind, and they force you into that kind of conduct."
Patel is claiming that human traffickers frequently force their victims into having sex with animals. Um, citation needed? I have been reporting on human trafficking prosecutions in the U.S. for more than a decade, and I don't recall a single case where this was even alleged. I'm not going to say it has never happened, but it is absolutely not happening in "a lot" of cases. Either Patel is misinformed, or he's deliberately trying to shock, disgust, and scare people in order to portray himself and the agency in a better light.
(The best data I could find on the issue are probably from this study—published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law—which found "472 bestiality-related arrests between 1953 and 2015" in the United States. Of the 456 arrests it included for further study, 38 cases involved the offender coercing or convincing someone to engage in bestiality.)
The exchange between Patel and Kennedy yesterday may have been incredibly bizarre in some ways. But between the unhinged fearmongering about human trafficking and the senator's refusal to let his interrogation subject complete a thought, it was also just business as usual in Washington.
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