A reasonable person would expect FBI Director Kash Patel to avoid any and all questions about his reported drinking issues during a Senate hearing, but Patel is fighting to keep his job, so he made the big mistake of engaging with Sen. Chris Van Hollen on the topic of drinking, and it didn’t go great for Patel.
Van Hollen said that Patel had been making false statements during the hearing:
Let me just say this, Mr. Director. In your response to me earlier, where you had a little bit of a blowup, you made a couple provably false statements… Mr. Director, I was reading about and asking you to respond to allegations that are made. In fact, I was giving you an opportunity to do that, and you took that opportunity. But in the process, you made these provably false statements that I know are like urban legend in right-wing media about margaritas in El Salvador, which is provably false.
And so coming from the mouth of an FBI director to make provably false statements in a hearing like this is extremely troubling, and it leads me to ask whether or not the other things you’ve been saying are false statements. And so my… because that was, that’s a provably false statement. You made a couple others that are provably false, and this is from the mouth of the FBI director.
Things got even more heated.