Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to run the FBI, repeatedly evaded the question of whether he would investigate officials on a published list of his perceived enemies during his confirmation hearing Thursday, even as he sought to allay fears about his fitness to serve and his fealty to Trump.

In trying to distance himself from far-right associates and his own public statements, Patel, a cocky and confrontational Trump loyalist, went so far as to suggest he disagreed with Trump’s decision to pardon Jan. 6 rioters who attacked law enforcement officials. It was a rare divergence from a president who selected him to run the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency.

Asked if he agreed with Trump’s broad grant of clemency on the day he was inaugurated, Patel, a former congressional staff member and national security aide, said he had “repeatedly, often publicly and privately, said there can never be a tolerance for violence against law enforcement.”

The nomination of Patel, 44, has upended the post-Watergate tradition of picking nonpartisan FBI directors with extensive law enforcement experience. If confirmed, Patel could provide Trump with a direct line into the bureau, possibly eliminating guardrails meant to insulate it from White House interference.

While the hearing addressed a range of issues stemming from Patel’s actions and statements, Democrats time and again accused Patel of prioritizing his allegiance to Trump over adherence to the rule of law, a charge the nominee forcefully denied.

When Sen. Mazie K. Hirono, D-Hawaii, asked if he planned to investigate former FBI director James Comey and others he has attacked publicly, Patel said he would abide by the law and the Constitution and would scrutinize only those he deemed likely to have committed crimes.

Patel said he would not go “backwards” when asked if he planned to investigate his immediate predecessor, Christopher Wray, who stepped down after Trump made plain that he would fire him. Patel has assailed the bureau over its investigations into Trump.

“Will you lie for the president of the United States? Will you lie for Donald Trump?” asked Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., his voice rising to a shout.

“No,” Patel answered.

Patel, who has repeatedly accused the bureau’s leadership of weaponizing its vast powers to target Trump, told the committee he believed that 98% of the FBI was made up of “courageous apolitical warriors for justice” who “just need better leadership.”

He did not explain how he determined that the other 2%, about 760 people out of a workforce of 38,000 employees, were supposedly partisan.

Patel said his main goal as director would be to fight violent crime and protect the country from three principal national security threats — terrorism, Chinese espionage and Iranian aggression.

It is unclear whether Patel has enough GOP votes to be confirmed, although Republicans expressed confidence that he would prevail. When he was named in November, Democrats believed that his unflagging loyalty to Trump — and past inflammatory comments about the FBI — would incite a popular backlash.

That has not yet happened. And Patel’s hearing, which coincided with the equally contentious confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, generated a rhetorical heat. But it did not appear to ignite a political conflagration that threatened his nomination by undermining support among the Republican majority.

In part, that was because Patel, like many Trump nominees, employed a deft duck-and-deny strategy: Patel said he could not remember details about unflattering episodes or damaging alliances. He answered specific queries with sweeping generalizations. He accused his accusers of distorting his words, even after they were read to him verbatim.

When Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, asked why he appeared on a podcast hosted by Stew Peters, who has often expressed antisemitic and white nationalist views, Patel claimed he could not remember.

“You made eight separate appearances on his podcast,” Durbin said.

When Durbin wanted to know why he has associated with so many extremists and conspiracy theorists, Patel offered an extraordinary answer that made Democrats guffaw: He said he went on such podcasts to “disavow them of their false impressions and to talk to them about the truth.”

Patel, alternating between deference and defiance, also said he “rejected outright QAnon baseless conspiracy theories” after previously saying he agreed with “a lot” of what the movement promoted.

During several exchanges, Patel denied that the 60-person list included as an appendix to his book “Government Gangsters” was an enemies list. The list has incited deep concerns that he would deploy the vast powers of the bureau to punish Trump’s perceived political opponents or those in government who worked on investigations that ensnared him.

“It’s not an enemies list,” Patel said. “It’s a total mischaracterization.”

Under questioning from Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., Patel repeatedly declined to say that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election, indicating only that Biden had been “certified” as the president.

“The other way to say it is he won,” Welch said. “What’s so hard about just saying Biden won the 2020 election?”

The most bitter exchange of the day took place when Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who has clashed with Patel repeatedly over the years, accused him of disrespecting the service of Capitol Police officers injured in the Jan. 6 attack by collaborating on a song written to raise money for the families of people imprisoned for ransacking the building.

Schiff urged Patel to turn around in his chair to look at officers providing security for the hearing.

“Have the courage to look them in the eye,” Schiff said, urging Patel to address the officers.

Patel did not.

Nonetheless, Patel seemed to relish the spotlight and became more relaxed and confident as the hearing dragged on. He parried a tough question from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., by reminding her that she had only a few minutes left to interrogate him under committee rules.

The Judiciary Committee’s leaders set the partisan tone of the hearing in their opening statements. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the panel’s chair, painted a portrait of a politicized FBI that he said was “in crisis,” a characterization that many of the committee’s Republicans embraced in their questioning. Democrats singled out caustic past statements by Patel about the agency he seeks to lead.

Durbin said Patel “does not meet the standard” to lead the FBI, citing his relative lack of law enforcement experience and unflinching loyalty to Trump.

Trump’s choice to run the Justice Department, Pam Bondi, already assured senators that there would be no such list of perceived rivals if she were confirmed as attorney general. But the abrupt firings of prosecutors who investigated Trump raises the question of whether Patel will carry out a campaign of retribution, as both he and the president have long promised.

In particular, former and current agents are concerned that Patel will target investigators who worked on the inquiry into Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia given that he and the president have repeatedly denounced it as hoax. The department’s top watchdog and a special counsel examining the origins of the inquiry have concluded it was legitimate.

Patel has vowed to drastically reshape the FBI, but whether that threat is real or just bombast remains unknown.

Trump’s selection of Patel was unusual in many ways — not the least of which is the fact that he asserted his Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate himself.

He invoked the right before a grand jury examining whether Trump had mishandled national security secrets by repeatedly refusing to return classified documents. Patel is believed to have been questioned about his public claim that Trump had declassified all the government documents he kept after leaving office.

At first, Patel refused to answer, citing the Fifth Amendment, according to people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe grand jury issues. Prosecutors eventually granted Patel limited immunity, to find out what defense, if any, he might be able to offer for his former boss.

Democrats repeatedly pressured Patel to publicly release his testimony, but he refused.

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, one of the most senior Republicans in the chamber, predicted that Patel would eventually be confirmed, after some sparring, “on a party-line vote.”

True to form, Republicans rallied around Patel, brushing aside questions about his qualifications and overall fitness to air familiar grievances about the FBI’s conduct in its investigations into Trump.

But in private, many Republicans have expressed reservations about his temperament and pressed for assurances he would act responsibly — and independently — if confirmed.

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., was one of the few members of the committee’s majority to offer a hint of those concerns, giving avuncular but pointed advice to Patel.

“Don’t go over there and burn that place down; go over there and make it better,” said Kennedy, who has been a fierce FBI critic.

The New York Times News Service