{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.schiff.senate.gov/news/press-releases/watch-sen-schiff-breaks-down-fbi-director-kash-patels-sidestepping-during-senate-hearing-warns-of-future-investigations-of-patel/", "WATCH: Sen. Schiff Breaks Down FBI Director Kash Patel\u2019s Sidestepping During Senate Hearing, Warns of Future Investigations of Patel", "2026-09-16", "2026", "2026-09", "Democrat", "Senate", "CA", "Adam B. Schiff", "S001150", "www.schiff.senate.gov", "schiff", "https://www.schiff.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/", "scraper", "Schiff to FBI Director Patel: \u201cYou damn well better preserve records, because we\u2019re going to be investigating all these hundreds of wrongful terminations, and we\u2019re going to hold you accountable.\u201d\n\nWashington, D.C. \u2013 Last night, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined MS NOW\u2019s The Briefing with Jen Psaki to recap the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel\u2019s refusal to answer questions during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.\n\nDuring the hearing, Schiff pressed Patel on his mismanagement and politicization of the agency \u2013 including purging FBI agents who investigated President Trump \u2013 and emphasized that he will investigate Patel.\n\nView the full interview here.\n\nKey Excerpts:\n\nOn Schiff investigating Patel\u2019s corruption at the FBI and attacks on the media:\n\n[\u2026] [Patel] is being sued and the bureau being sued for wrongful terminations. There\u2019s also litigation always when they try to go after journalists. And if discovery comes out and shows that Patel was made aware and maybe even asked for information about these reporters, and the reporters I was asking about there were those who wrote stories about him using a SWAT team to provide protection to his girlfriend and other stories about his excessive drinking on the job; these are not predicates to investigate some reporter or do queries or abuse FBI resources. And if it comes out in litigation that he was aware of this, that he was involved in this, he\u2019s committed perjury \u2013 so, part of the object here too is to pin him down; I fully expect that he will lie to the Congress and hope that he doesn\u2019t get caught \u2013 but we will be investigating. I will also be really interested in this private litigation and what it turns up in discovery.\n\nOn Patel and Blanche dodging Schiff\u2019s questioning on purging investigators tied to investigating President Trump at the FBI and DOJ:\n\n[\u2026] When Todd Blanche testified, I asked him about comments he made at CPAC, that conservative convention, when he said that basically they had cleaned house at the Department of Justice of anybody who had worked on any of the prosecutions of Donald Trump, and that Patel had done the same thing at the FBI. When I asked Blanche about it, Blanche said, \u201cWell, he was under an ethical requirement that he not involve himself in cases involving his old client, the president.\u201d So, he wasn\u2019t involved in the firings. He was just stating a fact.\n\nPatel today said, \u201cWell, if we cleaned a house of all these agents who worked on these investigations of the president, it was because they decided suddenly to retire, or for reasons unrelated to the fact that they all worked on these cases.\u201d None of it passes the smell test. And I wanted to get across one main point, not just to Patel, but to the lawyers sitting behind him and people watching from the FBI: you damn well better preserve records, because we\u2019re going to be investigating all these hundreds of wrongful terminations, and we\u2019re going to hold you accountable.\n\nOn Patel and Blanche\u2019s refusal to expose truth behind Donald Trump Jr.\u2019s wedding partly funded by Russian oligarch:\n\n[\u2026] In this case, the oligarch spending potentially 100, $200,000 on Don Jr.\u2019s wedding. It\u2019s absurd. Of course, they\u2019re aware of it. They would be derelict. Their staff would be derelict not to prepare them. This is a different kind of a lie. It\u2019s a kind of a lie that says I don\u2019t want to have to answer questions about this because there\u2019s no way to answer them truthfully without looking like a horse\u2019s ass. So, \u201cI\u2019m just going to say I don\u2019t know anything about this story.\u201d\n\nBut the fact that here we have an oligarch close to the Kremlin spending that kind of money on the president\u2019s son, and to have the attorney general say, \u201cWell, people are saying that he\u2019s close to the Kremlin. We don\u2019t know that, and I don\u2019t want to know.\u201d That\u2019s the whole implication of that statement by Todd Blanche. \u201cI don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t want to know.\u201d The president has said what he\u2019s going to say. Don Jr. says this Kremlin guy is a close friend. \u201cI\u2019m not going to ask any questions because I wasn\u2019t hired to do that. I don\u2019t represent the American people. I don\u2019t represent our national security interests. I represent my criminal defense client, Donald Trump, only.\u201d\n\n###", 1, "2026-09-17T09:52:05Z", "2026-09-17T09:53:00Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.schiff.senate.gov/news/press-releases/watch-sen-schiff-breaks-down-fbi-director-kash-patels-sidestepping-during-senate-hearing-warns-of-future-investigations-of-patel/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.859589945524931, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}