Group Activity: Kash Patel Confirmation Hearing

From the LiveNow Feed:

From The New York Times:

Kash Patel, the Trump loyalist tapped to run the F.B.I., provided fresh details about his life — including legal work on behalf of a human trafficker, membership in an exclusive Las Vegas club and participation in a diversity-and-inclusion program — in documents sent to lawmakers.

In a 24-page questionnaire sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee this month, Mr. Patel also downgraded his work as a Justice Department investigator on the 2012 attack in Benghazi after claiming he had been among those leading the inquiry.

The committee is holding a hearing on Mr. Patel’s nomination on Thursday. As part of that process, Mr. Patel, 44, responded to a series of standard questions about his personal and professional experiences.

Most answers are written in job-application boilerplate, but taken as a whole the questionnaire paints a far more nuanced portrait than the bombastic and combative Mr. Patel projects on right-wing podcasts or as a speaker at Trump rallies.

In particular, it illuminates his early years as the Long Island-bred son of immigrants from the Indian state of Gujarat who worked as a caddy and toiled for years as a local and federal public defender in Florida.

Mr. Patel reports in detail on his legal defense of crack dealers, gun runners and one 2013 case in which he persuaded federal prosecutors to drop charges against a man accused of trafficking 17 people, including three minors, from an unnamed foreign country.

But one of the most intriguing lines is his reference to participating in the American Bar Association’s Judicial Intern Opportunity Program, a diversity initiative, while a student at Pace University’s law school in 2003.

The program, a summer internship with judges in 12 cities around the country, “provides opportunities to students who are members of groups that are traditionally underrepresented in the profession, including students from minority racial and ethnic groups, students with disabilities, veterans, students who are economically disadvantaged, students who identify as LGBTQ+, women and others,” according to the bar association’s website.

“It is also an opportunity to make an impact on the diversity and inclusion pipeline and give back to the legal community,” the program’s directors wrote.

That he availed himself of such a program as an ethnic minority would be unexceptional had not Mr. Trump made attacking diversity, equity and inclusion programs in academia and government a core element of his pitch to voters.

If confirmed, Mr. Patel would be the first director of color of an agency that had a decadeslong history of racial and gender discrimination.