Kash Patel Reveals Alarming Plan to Have FBI Monitor the Polls

FBI Director Kash Patel all but confirmed that the bureau’s agents will be deployed to voting locations this November.

As Patel testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, multiple Democratic senators asked him whether the FBI would be at polling stations for the midterm elections. After trying to dodge their questions, he eventually admitted they would be there.

Senator Richard Blumenthal tried multiple times to get Patel to commit to saying that zero agents would be at the polls, to which Patel said that agents would be at the bureau’s field offices on Election Day, refusing to offer any guarantees.

“On Election Day, the FBI will follow the law. If there’s a reason to go there because there’s been a violation of law, we will, otherwise we won’t,” Patel said.

Senator Peter Welch also asked Patel about agents being sent to polling locations, specifically noting that Michigan’s Republican nominee for governor, Representative John James, said that Patel had told him that the FBI would have a presence in the state leading up to Election Day.

Patel replied that there were election crimes coordinators in all of the bureau’s 56 field offices. Welch was taken aback, saying, “I thought you weren’t going to be sending people to the polls.”

“When did you hear that? It’s just another lie,” Patel said, accusing Welch of lying for a campaign sound bite. When Welch pressed Patel, he repeated his line about election crimes coordinators, adding, “Election integrity is of paramount importance. This FBI will not shy away from that effort.”

“Do you pledge that you will not in any way interfere in the will of the American people when they go to the polls in November?” Welch asked.

“I have pledged unequivocally that I will not participate in your charade of lies,” Patel said.

All of this raises questions as to whether President Trump plans to send federal law enforcement to polling places for the midterms, and what their orders will be. He has compliant lackeys in the form of Patel’s FBI and ICE agents funded by the Department of Homeland Security’s bloated budget. Trump frequently accuses his political opponents of cheating and rigging elections against him. Based on how he acted in the 2020 presidential elections that he lost, those accusations seem more like confessions.

A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts could not inscribe “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump” on the side of the building—almost certainly dashing Trump’s hopes to get his name placed somewhere on the historic cultural institution.

“Simply put, defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper wrote. “The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”

This is a developing story.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is stoking the flames of Donald Trump’s $5,000 giveaway.

Speaking with reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday, the chief House Republican not only suggested that the government handouts could actually happen but said the process will “take time.”

Johnson opted not to elaborate when asked if the checks could be sorted out through the House’s reconciliation process.

“I’m not going to get into the details of all that because, again, we haven’t had the time to process that,” Johnson said. “It’s a big idea.… We’ve begun some of that process right now.”

“I spoke to the president about this late last night,” he continued. “He is very animated right now, as the vice president was this morning.”

It’s been six days since Trump announced his grand plan to dole out $5,000 to every American should Republicans win in the midterms. Only, the sudden and unexpected promise did not come with any details on how the checks would actually be distributed, or how the government could afford it.

Despite Trump’s repeated commitments to “drain the swamp” and “get rid of the debt,” the national debt has more than doubled since he first entered office—moving from $19.97 trillion in 2016 to more than $40 trillion today. During Trump’s first term, the debt grew by $7.8 trillion, and through the first year and a half of his second term, the sum has grown by another $3.8 trillion.

Trump’s last attempt to bribe Americans with money, stimulus checks during the Covid-19 pandemic, helped with his popularity but cost the country a lot in the end. The pandemic-era relief effort extended up to $1,800 to qualifying single adults, totaling $814 billion, according to IRS data collected by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

But those congressionally approved checks were significantly smaller than Trump’s current offer, which was unveiled just seven weeks before contentious midterm elections. And this time, American voters seem more skeptical that the president will actually follow through on his word.

“Personally, I think it’s just a publicity stunt and I don’t think that it’s ever gonna happen,” a voter named William told Fox News Digital Tuesday. “It’ll need to go through Congress, and I don’t think with the midterm elections … the possibility of that happening is just so far down the road.”

Daniel from Maryland told the network that he wasn’t sure if the U.S. “[has] the money for that.”

“And I think if we did, it should be going a couple different other places than that, for sure,” he added.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has begun quietly firing new officers hired during the agency’s push to recruit thousands of “Homeland Defenders.” The results have been deadly.

ICE has started to dismiss some of its newest recruits, citing poor performance and red flags that should have been identified in the vetting process, three former DHS officials told The Washington Post Tuesday.

ICE officials struggled to process the massive surge of applicants after the Trump administration dangled a $50,000 signing bonus in front of people’s noses, hoping to entice Americans to join the legion of officers tearing families apart. In August 2025, an ICE whistleblower wrote to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General warning that the hiring surge had “overwhelmed” the agency, and that applicants were being cleared for duty “without fingerprints, identity verification, or credit checks.”

The agency’s slapdash method of hiring and firing unqualified officers has had disastrous results.

Joseph Moore, a 38-year-old father of two, took his own life in the parking lot of ICE’s Philadelphia office after he was notified that he would be fired. It was his dream to work in law enforcement, and after struggling to hold down a job, Moore leapt at the chance to join ICE. When that opportunity was taken away, he shot and killed himself, according to the Philadelphia Police Department. (His family has expressed doubts that his death was in fact a suicide.)

Two former ICE officers told the Post that their colleague’s death might have been avoided if the agency had adequately vetted him and determined that he was not qualified to serve in law enforcement.

“Once you get fired from law enforcement, it’s terribly hard, right or wrong, to get back into law enforcement,” one of the officers told the Post. “It’s the death of a career, and the weight of this hits some officers hard enough where they take their own lives.”

FBI Director Kash Patel on Tuesday was forced to answer why his agency is no longer automatically disqualifying applicants who engaged in bestiality. What followed was a perplexing exchange that highlighted the deep absurdity of our current political moment.

Democratic Senator Dick Durbin kicked off the bestiality questioning.

“According to a memo issued this June, the FBI has lowered its hiring standards by dropping automatic disqualification for applicants who have stolen from [their employers], paid for sex, are engaged in bestiality. In July, you claim the FBI is ‘losing too many qualified candidates to the rigors of requirements from yesteryear,’” Durbin said. “Director Patel, do you believe those who have previously stolen from [employers], solicited sex, are engaged in bestiality are qualified candidates that the FBI is losing?”

“What we did was, we did not want to punish victims of bestiality—victims who were trafficked,” Patel replied, failing to clarify that the FBI was not in fact making it easier to hire people who had sex with animals. “We did not want to make it an automatic disqualification for the FBI to consider you if you are a victim of these awful, heinous acts.”

“He’s no longer protecting those who’ve been charged with bestiality, he’s protecting those who are victims. Just turned it upside down,” Durbin replied. “What I’m reading to you is you dropped automatic disqualification for applicants who have been engaged in bestiality, not victims of bestiality. Applicants who have engaged. Do you disagree with that?”

“Applicants who have engaged in bestiality means they were victims of bestiality because they were forced to do so,” Patel said. “And at this FBI, we are not going to criminalize and prevent victims from serving the United States of America and the premier law enforcement agency in the world.”

Even Republican Senator John Kennedy was stunned by Patel’s answer, arguing with the FBI director about the loosened hiring standards.

“What about the bestiality?” Kennedy said, genuinely confused.

“It automatically disqualified any individual who participated on either side of it,” Patel replied.

“Either side of what, the bestiality?”

“Yes.”

“So you disqualified the animal?”

“Well, we have great canines, but we’re not going to disqualify [them],” Patel said, a poor attempt at a joke.

“I’m trying to understand why you did this.... And I understand the game. People try to make you look bad. We do the same thing when the other party’s in office,” Kennedy continued. “Why would you even get into bestiality?”

“We are not into bestiality—”

“I know you’re not, but you changed the qualifications and mentioned bestiality. If if Joe participated in bestiality—not as the animal but as the human—don’t you think he ought to be disqualified?” Kennedy raised, still confused.

“If he voluntarily did it, sure. But if he was trafficked into it…”

“How do you involuntarily do it?”

“In a lot of these cases, when human traffickers … they don’t just traffic you for prostitution. They traffic you for degrading acts of all kinds,” Patel said. “And some of these individuals would go on to be law enforcement officers, who qualified to be law enforcement officers and later applied to the FBI.”

“When you saw bestiality, I say this with respect, the person who recommended it, why didn’t you just say, ‘What planet did you parachute in from? Why do I wanna lead with my chin and get into bestiality?!’” Kennedy hollered.

“That was my initial response, senator. But they then explained to me and showed me cases in which people were forced into it and had applied to the FBI, and so I thought they should be considered. It’s not an automatic disqualification. That’s all,” Patel said, alluding to an apparently significant number of bestiality victims who want to join the FBI.

“Okay, all right. I think I understand. But you’re not telling us today that if a human being had sex with an animal, that they can still be an FBI agent,” Kennedy asked.

“No, they cannot.”

“In fact, they oughta be in jail right?”

“They all are.”

“Yeah, well. OK.”