Senate Republicans are hoping to block some of Donald Trump’s more extreme or unqualified nominees without angering the president-elect, but his picks for defense secretary and FBI director are causing them to sweat, according to reports.
FBI nominee Kash Patel has promised to target individuals he claims stole the 2020 election from Trump based on the same lies that caused “2000 Mules” filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza to issue an apology to a man he falsely accused of fraud, and MSNBC’s Jonathan Lemire told “Morning Joe” that GOP senators were concerned about his qualifications and intentions.
“There are real consequences here for innocent people, but Kash Patel, at least so far, has not had any consequences for supporting these lies,” Lemire said. “In fact, it’s partially why he is Donald Trump’s choice to be FBI director. What I’m hearing on the Hill is, yesterday, that was the day senators are back on the Hill since the choice that Patel was announced. Even Susan Collins, who many expect will stand in opposition to this, she played lip service.”
Senators aren’t going to go on the record as opposing the president-elect’s nominees, Lemire said, but he said at least four have “expressed misgivings” about Patel and defense nominee Pete Hegseth, who has been accused of sexual misconduct and drunkenness.
“Right now Republican senators to have a bit of a balancing act,” he said. “How many of these can they oppose? Matt Gaetz took himself out of the running, sparing themselves a no vote [for attorney general]. We had Pete Hegseth, he was on the Hill yesterday trying to lobby senators. We know there is real, growing opposition to him because of some of the allegations coming from the New Yorker and other places.
“We also have senators saying, why is Christopher Wray being fired? He’s done a good job. Let’s not forget, Wray himself was only in the post because Trump fired James Comey because of allegations that he was meddling with the Russia investigation. Give us the state of play there [in] what’s got to be a stressful time for these Republican senators.”
Washington Post correspondent Jacqueline Alemany agreed, saying that GOP senators were not comfortable with many of Trump’s picks but uncertain how far they could go in opposing some of them.
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“Republicans on the Hill so far are loath to come out hot on this and outright deny and say that they are not going to support certain nominees,” Alemany said. “They want to at least have the appearance of going through a fair and thorough process. That’s why think you’re seeing, now, a number of Republicans, even some more conservative Republicans who would be more likely to support Trump’s picks unconditionally, call for FBI background checks.”
“They are basically now rallying around process, trying to get the Trump transition process to go the more traditional route, which is a bit of a sea change already from what we saw at the beginning of November, when Trump initially won the election and we were talking about recess appointments,” Alemany added.
“Now you have people like John Kennedy who are calling for thorough background checks with the FBI so people like Patel can be vetted, and so that Republicans on the Hill have the full array of facts on them. You are right, there’s some sort of internal thinking about these limits, about how far they can oppose Trump at the end of the day. But if there is this growing constituency of opposition, like we’ve seen with Matt Gaetz, it ultimately might have the power to persuade Trump otherwise.”
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