FBI nominee Kash Patel gets questions on cybercrime investigations, Silk Road founder, surveillance powers

A senator on Thursday questioned whether the president’s pick to lead the FBI might harm cybercrime investigations with his plans for the bureau.

At a nomination hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., asked Kash Patel about comments he made in September.

“I’d shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and open it the next day as a museum of the deep state,” he said then, pledging to disburse 7,000 employees across the country to “chase down criminals.”

Klobuchar’s question came at the end of her time limit as she tried to get an answer.

“Can he just answer the question? If he said that the FBI headquarters — where they investigate cybercrime and terrorism — should be shut down and opened up as a deep state museum?” she asked. “Did he say that the headquarters should be shut down?”

It was a rare moment of focus on cybersecurity in the contentious hearing to vet Patel, one of President Donald Trump’s more divisive nominees. But it wasn’t the only question to surface of late about the impact of Trump administration decisions on cyber personnel.

Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., asked Patel for his opinion of Trump’s grant of clemency to Ross Ulbricht, whom a jury convicted in 2015 of conspiracy to commit computer hacking, among other crimes.

Patel answered that it wasn’t his place to comment on presidential pardons.

Patel’s hearing was one of two on the Hill on Thursday where nominees addressed their views on surveillance authorities, specifically those under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

A big point of debate over renewing those authorities in the past two years was whether to require a warrant when the FBI queries the database about U.S. citizens whose information had been collected incidentally because they were communicating with foreign surveillance targets.

Those who opposed the warrant requirement said it would slow investigations too severely, and Patel told Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, that such a mandate is “just not comportive” with protecting U.S. citizens. 

The law itself isn’t the issue, Patel said. “The issue has been those that have been in government service and abused it in the past,” he said. “And so we must work with Congress to provide the protections necessary for American citizens.”