Good news – if you or anyone you know has ever engaged in acts of bestiality, you are not prevented from joining the ranks of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In one of the weirdest moments of one of the weirdest tenures at the helm of the US investigation service, Kash Patel – ninth director of the FBI, podcaster and real-life Tom Haverford from Parks and Recreation – this week found himself getting grilled by senators on why he had relaxed hiring standards at the bureau, including by scrapping a rule disqualifying people who had engaged in bestiality before turning 18 from joining the service.
Pressed on the relaxation by ranking Democrat senator Dick Durbin, Patel told the Senate Judiciary Committee: “Applicants who have engaged in bestiality means they were victims of bestiality because they were forced to do so.
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“And at this FBI we are not going to criminalise and prevent victims from serving the United States of America and the premier law enforcement agency in the world.
“They did that before. I eliminated the bureaucracy that prevented these great Americans from serving, or at least being considered for serving and I’m going to continue to do that.”
When Republican Senator John Kennedy asked Patel about the rule change, Patel said that before his appointment, the rules “automatically disqualified any individual who participated on either side of it. Obviously we were never going to hire the criminal”.
“Either side of what? The bestiality?” Kennedy said. “So you disqualified the animal?”
“We have great canines, but we’re not going to disqualify the animal,” Patel said.
Kennedy went on: “I’m trying to understand why you did this,” before asking, quite understandably: “Why would you even get into bestiality?”
Patel explained that sometimes when people are sex trafficked, they are forced to have sex with animals, and did not want to disqualify these people from joining the FBI.
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“These changes didn’t start with you, did they,” said Kennedy. “Someone came to you and recommended this. 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 want to lead with my chin and get into bestiality?’”
Patel’s latest comments follow a tumultuous few months for the FBI director, during which he has launched legal proceedings against the Atlantic magazine for a whopping $250 million after it published a report alleging that, among many other things, he was frequently away from work and drank to excess; faced questions about his use of the FBI’s private jet to attend performances by his girlfriend, an aspiring country singer; turned up in the locker room of the US ice hockey team at the Winter Olympics despite his assistant director for public affairs insisting he wasn’t there; and, obviously, commissioned his own customised Nike footwear.
Now he appears to be distracting attention from that little list by talking about, er, bestiality. The “dead cat strategy”, as they call it in political circles…
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