WASHINGTON >> The Senate on Thursday narrowly confirmed Kash Patel as the next director of the FBI, installing a hard-line critic of the bureau whose unwavering loyalty to President Donald Trump has raised questions over the independence of the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency.

The 51-49 vote, with two Republican defections, means that Patel will now oversee the vast surveillance and investigative powers of the FBI, whose mission is seeking out the truth even if it angers the president. As its director, Patel will take over as the bureau has entered a particularly turbulent period, with the forced departures of some of its top officials.

Democrats in the Senate had hoped to slow his nomination, citing Patel’s repeated promises to enact a campaign of revenge on Trump’s behalf, his pledge to reshape the agency and his refusal to say that Trump lost the 2020 election. But they had little success swaying their colleagues across the aisle, who are wary of eliciting the political wrath of Trump or his powerful allies like Elon Musk.

Specific objections

This month, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, accused Patel of improperly directing a slew of forced departures at the bureau without having been confirmed as its leader. Durbin added Thursday that Patel’s apparent involvement stood at odds with his claim during his hearing that he was unaware of any political retribution at the FBI that was unfolding as he testified.Patel’s financial disclosures also raised eyebrows, but none of those concerns substantially shifted his support, allowing him to essentially glide through the confirmation process.

In the end, two centrist Republicans opposed Patel’s nomination: Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine.

Collins pointed to the recent upheaval across the Justice Department, including the FBI.

“There is a compelling need for an FBI director who is decidedly apolitical,” she said in a statement released before the vote. “While Mr. Patel has had 16 years of dedicated public service, his time over the past four years has been characterized by high-profile and aggressive political activity.”

On the floor, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the majority leader, praised Patel, saying he looked forward to working with him “to restore the integrity of the FBI and get it focused on its critical mission.”

At Patel’s confirmation hearing last month, Democratic senators pressed him about incendiary comments he had directed at the FBI, including a so-called enemies list published at the end of his book, “Government Gangsters.” Patel disputes that description, calling it “a total mischaracterization.”

Regardless, Republicans eagerly embraced Patel, who played down his more bombastic statements

“I have no interest, no desire, and will not, if confirmed, go backwards,” he said in his testimony. “There will be no politicization at the FBI. There will be no retributive actions taken by any FBI, should I be confirmed as the FBI director.”

He later promised, “There should be no politics in the FBI.”

All about Trump

In an earlier era, Patel would have had trouble surviving the confirmation process, but Trump and his loyalists see him as a disrupter who will weed out supposed anti-conservative bias and shake up the bureau’s culture. Their hostility toward the agency stems largely from the investigations it opened into Trump, including his 2016 presidential campaign and its potential ties to Russia; his handling of classified documents after he left office; and his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Patel has repeatedly cast aspersions on the Russia investigation. To portray the inquiry as politically motivated, he has falsely described the facts and circumstances by which the FBI decided to open it.

Patel’s confirmation comes as deep anxiety has rippled across the FBI, with the Trump administration moving swiftly to impose its will on the agency. Since Trump took office, his appointees have forced out several FBI executives and demanded a list of employees who worked on the investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Emil Bove, the Justice Department’s interim No. 2, has already clashed with the bureau’s acting director and deputy, accusing them of insubordination for refusing to turn over names of FBI personnel whom many fear could be fired for simply investigating violations of federal law.

Even as Patel vowed during his hearing that his tenure would not be guided by politics, the Justice Department has dismissed a wave of prosecutors who worked on cases involving Trump or the Jan. 6 attack and established a so-called weaponization working group. Bove’s demand that the Justice Department move to drop charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York because the case hindered Adams’ cooperation on immigration prompted at least seven career prosecutors to resign last week.

An early signal of how closely Patel will stick to his promises, agents believe, is whether he permanently installs the acting deputy director, Robert Kissane, and allows the acting director, Brian Driscoll, to return to Newark, New Jersey, where he ran the field office. If Patel ousts both men, he is likely to fuel further suspicion that he will act as an extension of the White House.

Scope of authority

As the ninth director of the FBI, Patel would oversee a vast global operation of about 38,000 employees with a proposed 2025 fiscal budget of more than $11 billion. In leading the agency, he would be asked to protect the country from terrorism, dangerous criminals and political corruption, along with the threats posed by global rivals like China and Russia.

A former trial lawyer in the Justice Department’s national security division, Patel worked as a congressional investigator and then bounced around national security jobs in quick succession in the previous Trump administration, including serving as the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council.

Given his relative lack of experience, Patel had hoped to lean on a group of former agents who were brought to the FBI to form a director’s advisory team. But that group has already shrunk. Two of them, former senior executives, have bailed on Patel because of the upheaval.