Patel Plays the Familiar Role of Pugilist at a Senate Hearing

Kash Patel has been hounded in recent days by questions about his capacity to run the F.B.I. amid an exodus of top agents, allegations he oversaw political firings ordered by the White House and his face-plant social media post during the hunt for the killer of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Yet on Tuesday, Mr. Patel appeared to find his happy place: the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Patel, who has embraced President Trump’s attack-the-attacker style with bellowing brio, had no intention of being lured into traps set by Democrats, or conceding major error, or sometimes even furnishing answers to their informational queries.

He was there to brawl, perhaps to convince Mr. Trump he still had the attributes that endeared him to the president’s inner circle in the first place — that unique hybrid of public defiance and personal compliance demanded of those placed in positions of power.

“I’m not going anywhere!” Mr. Patel declared near the start of the periodic F.B.I. oversight hearing before the committee, presaging more than four hours of attack and counterattack in a half-full marble-lined committee room.

The Republicans on the panel rallied to his side, offering at most only faint chiding that masked the serious grievances against Mr. Patel of some Trump allies since Mr. Kirk’s death. They defused questions for now over whether a larger rebellion against Mr. Patel might be brewing, allowing the proceedings to fall into a familiar partisan groove that played to the F.B.I. director’s pugilistic instincts.

As much as Democratic senators like Cory Booker of New Jersey and Adam B. Schiff of California tried to match his tone and volume, Mr. Patel refused to cede much ground. He has never been a decorous congressional guest, but on Tuesday, he abandoned any pretense of courtesy beyond calling his targets “senator.”

His targets were not much more polite.

“Here’s the thing, Mr. Patel: I think you’re not going to be around long,” Mr. Booker said, taunting the director about reports that senior White House officials were unsatisfied with his job performance. “Because as much as you supplicate yourself to the will of Donald Trump and not the Constitution of the United States of America, Donald Trump has shown us in his first term and in this term, he is not loyal to people like you.”

Mr. Patel glared at Mr. Booker and barked that the senator was an “embarrassment,” and the two began shouting over each other.

Mr. Schiff called Mr. Patel an “internet troll” during a scrap over the Epstein files.

The witness quickly responded by calling the senator “an utter coward,” a “political buffoon” and “the biggest fraud to ever sit in the United States Senate.”

In a lawsuit filed last week, former top bureau officials described Mr. Patel as an out-of-his-depth neophyte, a cartoonish figure who cared more about handing out oversized challenge coins and hyping everything he did on social media than digging into investigations.

But he seemed to gain his footing in the committee room, with Republicans remaining in line and Democrats lining up to wrestle. He has a second chance to spar on Wednesday, when he is set to appear before the House Judiciary Committee.

Whether his performance before Congress matters is another story.

Even if Mr. Patel’s job is safe, as Mr. Trump has said, the White House recently installed Andrew Bailey, the former Missouri attorney general and a more experienced law enforcement official, to help run the day-to-day operations of the bureau.

All of the conflict on Tuesday obscured the fact that Mr. Patel either flatly refused, or evaded, tough questions about the state of the bureau’s work force, particularly the loss of up to 5,000 experienced field agents driven out through purges or retirements.

He forcefully denied that those losses had affected the F.B.I.’s effectiveness, and also pushed back on claims, made in the lawsuit, that he had fired agents under orders from the White House as part of a retribution campaign against the teams that investigated Mr. Trump, his allies and Jan. 6 rioters.

Mr. Patel’s fluent, albeit unabashedly combative, appearance on Capitol Hill was a stark reminder that he has always been relatively comfortable in the arena of political warfare, a role he played in his guise as a congressional staff member and as a podcaster after he left government service.

But his agility in front of the committee stood in contrast to his halting performance during the recent manhunt for Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old man arrested in the Kirk shooting. Hours after the killing last week, Mr. Patel suggested that the F.B.I. had taken a main suspect into custody, only to admit that the person had been released a few hours later.

When Mr. Robinson finally turned himself in to local law enforcement, Mr. Patel spoke at a news conference in Utah. He opened by thanking Mr. Trump — which struck current and former law enforcement officials as inappropriate — and finished with a bizarre vow to see Mr. Kirk, a Christian and charismatic Trump ally Mr. Patel considered a friend, in the pagan afterlife of Valhalla.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Mr. Patel defended his actions during the Kirk investigation, reiterating claims that he had personally instructed agents to conduct operations often regarded as routine, including the distribution of photos of the gunman and the gathering of evidence.

That did not stop Democrats from attacking his handling of the investigation.

In perhaps the sharpest blow, Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee, said Mr. Patel had violated a cardinal rule of criminal inquiries: Do not upstage your subordinates on the ground.

“Shut up and let the professionals do their job,” Mr. Durbin said.