Patel Testifies Before Senate Appropriations on the FBI, May 12, 2026
May 12, 2026 · Reuters · 2:08:41
Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube
What happened
FBI Director Kash Patel testified on May 12, 2026, before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies — the subcommittee that funds the Bureau — at its hearing on the FBI, carried live by Reuters. The statement from this hearing that entered the permanent record came in the oversight questioning: Patel stated that the FBI was targeting and investigating no journalists, a formulation Senator Cory Booker quoted back to him verbatim four months later at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s September 15, 2026 oversight hearing, when Booker set it against the July grand jury subpoenas served on New York Times reporters and withdrawn by the Justice Department on July 23.
That afterlife is why this hearing is paged in full: appropriations testimony is where a director’s commitments are made on the record to the committee that controls his budget, and Patel’s no-journalists statement became the benchmark against which the summer’s leak investigation was publicly judged — by the committee that heard it, by the federal judge who said he would throw out the subpoenas, and by the Justice Department itself, which called parts of the subpoena effort an error when it withdrew them, as the Associated Press reported.
Why it matters
Patel’s appropriations appearances are the budget half of his oversight record: the requests, the staffing and field-posture claims, and the pledges — like this one — that later hearings test. Paged alongside the September 15, 2026 Judiciary oversight hearing, this is the first half of the paired record on the journalist question that defined his 2026 testimony.
Scoreboard watch
This is a candidate item for the weekly scoreboard: Patel’s May 12, 2026 appropriations testimony, including his statement that the FBI was targeting and investigating no journalists — as stated at the hearing, to be checked against the July 2026 reporter subpoenas and their July 23 withdrawal.
Sources: Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies, hearing on the Federal Bureau of Investigation, May 12, 2026 (full hearing as carried live by Reuters, embedded above); Senate Committee on the Judiciary, “Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” September 15, 2026; Associated Press, July 23, 2026. All characterizations as stated by Director Patel and committee members at the hearing.
On this page