WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate on Thursday narrowly voted to confirm Kash Patel as director of the FBI, moving to place him atop the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency despite doubts from Democrats about his qualifications and concerns he will do Donald Trump’s bidding and go after the Republican president’s adversaries.
“I cannot imagine a worse choice,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told colleagues before the 51-49 vote by the GOP-controlled Senate. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska were the lone Republican holdouts.
A Trump loyalist who has fiercely criticized the agency he will now lead, Patel will inherit an FBI gripped by turmoil as the Justice Department over the past month has forced out a group of senior bureau officials and made a highly unusual demand for the names of thousands of agents who participated in investigations related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Patel has spoken of his desire to implement major changes at the FBI, including a reduced footprint in Washington and a renewed emphasis on the bureau’s traditional crime-fighting duties rather than the intelligence-gathering work that has come to define its mandate over the past two decades as national security threats have proliferated.
But he’s also echoed Trump’s stated desire for reprisal, raising alarm among Democrats for saying before he was nominated that he would “come after” anti-Trump “conspirators” in the federal government and the media.
In a statement posted after the vote on the social media platform X, Patel wrote that he was honored to be confirmed as the ninth director of the FBI, an institution he said had a “storied legacy.”
“The American people deserve an FBI that is transparent, accountable, and committed to justice. The politicalization of our justice system has eroded public trust — but that ends today,” he wrote. He said his mission as director was to “let good cops be cops — and rebuild trust in the FBI.”
Republicans angry over what they see as law enforcement bias against conservatives during the Democratic Biden administration, as well as criminal investigations into Trump, have rallied behind Patel as the right person for the job.
“Mr. Patel wants to make the FBI accountable once again -– get back the reputation that the FBI has had historically for law enforcement,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said this week before Patel was confirmed. “He wants to hold the FBI accountable to Congress, to the president and, most importantly, to the people they serve — the American taxpayer.”
Democrats complained about Patel’s lack of management experience compared with previous FBI directors and they highlighted incendiary past statements that they said called his judgment into question.
“I am absolutely sure of this one thing: this vote will haunt anyone who votes for him. They will rue the day they did it,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat.
He added: “To my Republican colleagues, think about what you will tell your constituents” and family “about why you voted for this person who will so completely and utterly disgrace this office and do such grave damage to our nation’s justice system.”
About a half-dozen Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee gathered outside FBI headquarters earlier Thursday in a last-ditch plea to derail his confirmation.
“This is someone we cannot trust,” said Sen. Adam Schiff of California. “This is someone who lacks the character to do this job, someone who lacks the integrity to do this job. We know that, our Republican colleagues know that.”
Patel’s eyebrow-raising remarks on hundreds of podcasts and in other interviews over the past four years include referring to law enforcement officials who investigated Trump as “criminal gangsters,” saying some Jan. 6 rioters were “political prisoners” and opining that FBI headquarters should be shut down and turned into a museum for the so-called deep state.
At his Senate hearing in January, Patel said Democrats were taking some of his comments out of context or misunderstanding the broader point he was trying to make. He also denied the idea that a list in a book he authored of government officials who he said were part of a “deep state” amounted to an “enemies list,” calling that a “total mischaracterization.”
“I have no interest, no desire and will not, if confirmed, go backwards,” Patel said as he vowed that there would be “no politicization at the FBI” and “no retributive actions taken.”
He said at the hearing that “the only thing that will matter if I’m confirmed” is a “de-weaponized, de-politicized system of law enforcement completely devoted to rigorous obedience to the Constitution and a singular standard of justice.”
Patel was selected in November to replace Christopher Wray, who was picked by Trump in 2017 and who resigned at the conclusion of the Biden administration to make way for his chosen successor. Wray infuriated Trump throughout his tenure, including after FBI agents searched his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in August 2022 for classified documents in one of two federal investigations that resulted in indictments against Trump that were dismissed after his election win.
FBI directors are given 10-year terms as a way to insulate them from political influence and keep them from becoming beholden to a particular president or administration. But Trump fired the FBI director he inherited, James Comey, after Comey had spent over three years on the job and replaced Wray after more than seven years in the position.
Since Wray’s resignation, the FBI has been led by interim leaders, who have clashed with the Justice Department over its demands for details about the agents who investigated the Capitol riot — a move seen as a possible prelude to broader firings. Patel denied having any knowledge of discussions about potential firings, but a letter from Durbin last week that cited information that he said had come from insiders suggested that Patel may have been covertly involved in that process.
Trump has said that he expects some of those agents will be fired.
Patel is a former federal defender and Justice Department counterterrorism prosecutor. He attracted Trump’s attention during the president’s first term when, as a staffer on the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee, Patel helped produce a memo that showcased surveillance-related errors during the FBI’s investigation into ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Patel later joined Trump’s administration, both as a counterterrorism official at the National Security Council and as chief of staff to the defense secretary.

Nearly 30,000 people on LI’s North and South Forks lost power Thursday morning when a truck hit a large utility pole in Southold, causing the outages.
PSEG Long Island was able to restore power for all customers later in the day.

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Aaron Boone and the New York Yankees agreed Thursday to a two-year contract extension through the 2027 season.
Boone is entering his eighth season as manager. The team had exercised his 2025 option in November.
“No other place I want to be. No other team, organization, group of people that I want to be doing this with,” Boone said. “And to get to do it in New York in front of passionate New York Yankee fans, this is the end result that I certainly wanted and glad it was able to work out.”
Boone has led the Yankees to a 603-429 record, three AL East titles and one pennant. New York reached the World Series last year for the first time since 2009, losing to the Los Angeles Dodgers in five games.
Boone became the third Yankees manager to lead the team to the postseason in six of his first seven years after Casey Stengel and Joe Torre but hasn’t delivered a title and understands the criticism, saying “if you can’t handle that, then it ain’t for you” and “I came in eyes wide open.”
“I don’t like that we haven’t won a championship yet, so that bothers me,” Boone said. “But I know what I signed up for when I got into this. We talk about it all the time, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. The fact that it matters as much as it does here and that there’s such a high standard and there’s so much expectations, that so much beats the alternative in my view. I’m confident in what I’m doing. I feel that I’m pretty good at this.”
Boone succeeded Joe Girardi after the 2017 season and was given a three-year contract with a team option for 2021. He agreed in October 2021 to a three-year contract with a team option for 2025.
He was a major league third baseman from 1997 to 2009 and an All-Star in 2003, when New York acquired him from Cincinnati at the trade deadline. His 11th-inning home run off Boston’s Tim Wakefield in Game 7 of the AL Championship Series won the pennant.

NEW YORK (AP) — New York City Mayor Eric Adams told a federal judge Wednesday that he is innocent and doesn’t fear corruption charges could be refiled if a Justice Department request to dismiss them is granted.
Judge Dale E. Ho ended the hearing by saying he wouldn’t “shoot from the hip” and rule immediately but he was aware that “it’s not in anyone’s interest here for this to drag on.”
During the hearing, Ho asked the mayor questions to ensure he understood that if the charges were dropped, they could later be reinstated.
“I have not committed a crime,” Adams said. “I’m not afraid of that.”
Deputy U.S. Attorney General Emil Bove said the request to drop the corruption charges against the mayor resulted from “a straightforward exercise in prosecutorial discretion guided” by President Donald Trump’s executive order on weaponization of the justice system and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s memorandum outlining the same.
Bove said he believed the request to drop charges, when tied to Trump’s order and Bondi’s conclusions, made it “virtually unreviewable in this courtroom.”
Bove said he also believed “the continuation of this prosecution is interfering with both national security and immigration enforcement initiatives being carried out by the executive branch.”
Ho ended Wednesday’s hearing by saying he wouldn’t “shoot from the hip” and rule immediately but he was aware that “it’s not in anyone’s interest here for this to drag on.”
Ho scheduled the hearing after three Trump administration lawyers, including Bove, made the dismissal request on Friday. Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor resigned after she refused an order to do so.
The judge indicated that the hearing probably would not settle the matter, writing in an order Tuesday that one subject on the agenda would be a discussion of the “procedure for resolution of the motion.”
An indictment charges the first-term Democrat with accepting more than $100,000 in illegal campaign contributions and lavish travel perks from a Turkish official and business leaders seeking to buy Adams’ influence while he was Brooklyn borough president. Adams has pleaded not guilty. He faces multiple challengers in the Democratic primary in June.
Closely watching the judicial proceedings is Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is considering whether to remove Adams from office amid concerns that he reached a deal to have the case dropped in exchange for the mayor’s political fealty to Trump.
Early last week, Bove told prosecutors in New York to drop the charges because the prosecution “has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime.” Bove said charges could be reinstated after November’s mayoral election.
Two days later, then-interim U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon told Bondi in a letter that dismissing the charges in return for Adams’ assistance in enforcing federal immigration laws would betray Bondi’s own words that she “will not tolerate abuses of the criminal justice process, coercive behavior, or other forms of misconduct.”
“Dismissal of the indictment for no other reason than to influence Adams’s mayoral decision-making would be all three,” said Sassoon, a Republican. She said it amounted to a “quid pro quo” deal and disclosed that prosecutors were about to bring additional obstruction of justice charges against Adams.
Bove, in accepting Sassoon’s resignation, accused her of “pursuing a politically motivated prosecution despite an express instruction to dismiss the case.” He informed her that two other prosecutors assigned to the case were being suspended with pay and that an investigation would determine if they would keep their jobs.
One prosecutor, Hagan Scotten quit the following day, writing in a resignation letter that he supported Sassoon’s actions. Scotten told Bove that it would take a “fool” or a “coward” to meet Bove’s demand to drop the charges, “but it was never going to be me.”
In all, seven prosecutors, including five high-ranking prosecutors at the Justice Department had resigned by Friday.
Shortly before Wednesday’s hearing, Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, took to social media to defend the department’s dismissal request, citing an argument over a point of law 10 days after Bove said a decision to drop charges was reached “without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.”
In a series of posts on X, Mizelle argued that in the Adams case, prosecutors’ “expansive reading” of the public corruption law was unlikely to fare well before the U.S. Supreme Court, which has overturned the convictions of high-profile, white-collar defendants.
“The case against Mayor Adams was just one in a long history of past DOJ actions that represent grave errors of judgement,” Mizelle wrote.
Sassoon and her colleagues have found support for their stand from a small army of former prosecutors.
On Friday, seven former U.S. attorneys in Manhattan, including James Comey, Geoffrey S. Berman and Mary Jo White, issued a statement lauding Sassoon’s “commitment to integrity and the rule of law.”
On Monday, three former U.S. attorneys from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut submitted papers to Ho suggesting that he appoint a special prosecutor if he finds the Justice Department acted improperly or that he order all evidence be made available to state and local prosecutors.
A former Watergate prosecutor filed papers separately, telling the judge to reject the government’s request and consider assigning a special counsel to explore the legal issues and ultimately consider appointing an independent special prosecutor to try the case.
Also Monday, Justice Connection, an organization advocating for Justice Department employees, released a letter signed by more than 900 former career prosecutors that said they have “watched with alarm” as values “foundational to a fair and justice legal system” have been tested.
On Tuesday, Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Adams, said in a letter to the judge that “there was no quid pro quo. Period.”

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump’s administration on Wednesday ordered a halt to New York City’s congestion pricing system, which thins traffic and funds mass transit by imposing high tolls on drivers entering some parts of Manhattan.
Launched on Jan. 5, the city’s system uses license plate readers to impose a $9 toll on most vehicles entering Manhattan neighborhoods south of Central Park. In its early days, transit officials say the toll has brought modest but measurable traffic reductions.
In a statement, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy announced the federal government has rescinded its approval of the program, calling it “slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners.”
Duffy said his agency will work with the state on an “orderly termination of the tolls.”
Trump, whose namesake Trump Tower penthouse and other properties are within the congestion zone, had vowed to kill the plan as soon as he took office. He previously characterized it as a massive, regressive tax, saying “it will be virtually impossible for New York City to come back as long as the congestion tax is in effect.”
Similar tolling programs intended to get people into public transit by making driving cost-prohibitive have long existed in other global cities, including London, Stockholm, Milan and Singapore, but the system had never before been tried in the U.S.
The head of the state’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the city’s subway and other public transit, has already filed a lawsuit aimed at keeping the congestion pricing program alive, according to MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber.
“It’s mystifying that after four years and 4,000 pages of federally-supervised environmental review — and barely three months after giving final approval to the Congestion Relief Program — USDOT would seek to totally reverse course,” Lieber said.
New York planned to use the revenue from tolls to issue bonds that would fund billions of dollars in improvements and repairs for the city’s creaky and cash-strapped transit system, which carries some 4 million riders daily.
The tolling system has been divisive. Transit advocates and environmentalists have heralded it as an innovative step to reduce air pollution from vehicle exhaust, make streets safer for pedestrians and bikers, while speeding up traffic for vehicles that truly need to be on the road, like delivery trucks, police cars and other first responders.
But the high tolls are hated by many New Yorkers who own cars, particularly those that live in the suburbs or parts of the city not well-served by the subway system.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, had fought the tolls and court and wrote a letter Trump on Inauguration Day imploring him to kill the program.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, also had misgivings. Last June, she abruptly halted the tolling system’s planned launch, citing concerns about its impact on the local economy. The Democrat then revived the toll in November following Trump’s election, but reduced the toll for passenger vehicles from $15 to $9. Since then, she has lauded it as a win for the city and has discussed the issue multiple times with the president.
A spokesperson for Hochul did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
The Trump administration order to halt the program kicked off a wave of criticism from congestion pricing supporters in New York City.
“By blocking this successful policy, Trump will be directly responsible for more traffic, more crashes, more polluted air, slower buses and less funding for our transit system,” said state Sen. Andrew Gounardes, a city Democrat.
The tolling plan was approved by New York lawmakers in 2019, but stalled for years awaiting a required federal environmental review during Trump’s first term before being approved by the administration of President Joe Biden.
As in other cities, the New York congestion fee varies depending on the time and the size of the vehicle. Trucks and other large automobiles pay a higher rate, and the fee goes drops to $2.25 for most cars during the quieter overnight hours.
The toll survived several lawsuits trying to halt it before its launch, including from the state of New Jersey, unionized teachers in New York City, a trucking industry group and local elected leaders in the Hudson River Valley, Long Island and northern New Jersey.