Not as the Animal

On Tuesday Kash Patel, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee for five hours and was asked, by a Republican, whether a person who has had sex with an animal can now become an FBI agent. He was asked it several ways. The senator was John Kennedy of Louisiana, who said he was only trying to understand, and by the end of the exchange he was the only man in the room who did.

Fairness first, because the policy is real and somebody wrote it on purpose. On June 16 the bureau sent its vetting staff an internal communication revising the list of things that end an application on the spot. As recently as 2023 the FBI's own materials listed "engagement in prostitution or bestiality" as automatic disqualifiers. Under the new rules, hiring a prostitute is survivable if it happened fewer than three times and more than ten years ago. Stealing from an employer is survivable after three years. And bestiality is survivable if the applicant was under eighteen at the time. CBS News broke the memo in early September. The bureau's answer was that "any polygraph changes reflect a clear difference between a disqualified applicant who has engaged in criminal behavior, versus an applicant who may be subject to further evaluation based on rare exigent circumstances," and that over the years some applicants who had been sexually abused had failed the polygraph "through zero fault of their own." That is a coherent sentence. Hold onto it, because nobody said it again.

The Director's version, delivered to Senator Durbin, was that the language predated him, that he was skeptical when it was presented for his approval, and that his staff "explained to me and showed me cases in which people were forced into it." "We did not want to punish victims of bestiality," he said, "victims who were trafficked." Some of those people, he said, had gone on to become police officers and then applied to the bureau.

Then Senator Kennedy asked him to say what the old rule was. "It automatically disqualified any individual who participated on either side of it," the Director said. "Either side of what?" Kennedy asked. "The bestiality? So you disqualified the animal?" The Director of the FBI replied, "We have great canines, but we're not going to disqualify them." Kennedy asked why the bureau would get into bestiality at all. "We're not into bestiality," the Director said, which is the sort of thing an agency should not have to say into a microphone but did. Kennedy tried a hypothetical. "If Joe participated in bestiality, not as the animal but as the human, don't you think he ought to be disqualified?" "If he voluntarily did it, sure," the Director said. "But if he was trafficked into it." Kennedy asked how a person does it involuntarily. The Director said traffickers "force you into that kind of conduct," into "degrading acts of all kinds," and that this happens in "a lot of these cases."

It does not, or at least no one can find it. Elizabeth Nolan Brown, a senior editor at Reason who has covered federal trafficking prosecutions for more than a decade, wrote the next morning that she could not "recall a single case where this was even alleged." The paper looked too and came back with the same nothing. Coerced degradation is a real feature of trafficking, and a policy written to spare its victims would be a decent policy. But the policy the bureau actually wrote does not mention trafficking. It mentions a birthday. Sources told CBS that the new rule does not distinguish between an applicant who was forced and one who was willing; it distinguishes between seventeen and eighteen. The rationale the Director gave under oath and the rule his bureau wrote down are about two different things.

Kennedy closed by asking the question plainly. "You're not telling us that if a human being had sex with an animal they can still be an FBI agent, are you?" "They cannot," the Director said. "They ought to be in jail, right?" "They all are." So the memo says one thing, the Director's explanation says a second, and the Director's final answer says a third, which is the old rule. Somewhere in the bureau there is a piece of paper that contradicts its own Director, and it is the piece of paper that governs hiring.

The paper would let this go as one bad afternoon if it were the first time this administration had been asked a simple question about animals or sex and answered as though the question were the strange part. It is not. The woman who ran Homeland Security until March, and who now holds a title involving something called the Shield of the Americas, wrote in her 2024 memoir that she walked her fourteen-month-old dog Cricket to a gravel pit and shot her for being bad at hunting, that she "hated that dog," and that she then shot a goat, went back to the truck to reload, and finished it. She put this in a book to seem decisive. The Secretary of Commerce, asked by two committees of Congress this year why he took his wife and four small children to lunch on Jeffrey Epstein's island in 2012, told the Senate in February that "nothing untoward" happened and he could not recall why they went, and told the House in May that it was "inexplicable." The Justice Department's own Epstein files show the two men trading emails from 2009 to 2018, signing a stock deal together, and Epstein writing a fifty-thousand-dollar check to a dinner in the Secretary's honor. Ro Khanna called him "largely evasive" and said he "did not appear credible." That was a Democrat. Kennedy is not.

And the President. He signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November and then his Justice Department blew the deadline Congress set. When a further batch came, in March, they included FBI interview notes in which a woman said she was introduced to him by Epstein and assaulted by him when she was between thirteen and fifteen, in the 1980s. The Miami Herald's Julie K. Brown, who knows this case better than anyone alive, reported that Justice Department officials found the woman credible enough to interview four times. The White House called her a "sadly disturbed woman" with a criminal record and the accusations "completely baseless." That is an allegation, denied, and the paper prints it as exactly that. It sits in a file next to a 2003 birthday letter the President says he did not write, a 2002 quote in which he said his friend liked women "on the younger side," and a 2023 civil verdict that found him liable for sexual abuse. The Secretary of War settled a 2017 sexual assault allegation he denies. The first man nominated to be Attorney General withdrew after the House Ethics Committee found he had paid for sex, including with a seventeen-year-old, which he denies. None of this is bestiality. All of it is the same government, and the same reflex: asked a question with a one-word answer, it reaches for a paragraph.

So the paper will say the thing plainly, since it appears to be the only party in this story that can. This paper does not believe the President's cabinet is running an animal sex ring. It has no evidence of one. It notes only that a normal government answers "should FBI agents have had sex with animals" with the word no, and that this one produced a memo, a trafficking theory nobody can find a case for, a joke about canines, and a Director who ended up agreeing with the rule he had just replaced. When every simple question about sex gets a weird answer, people stop assuming the questions are the problem. The bureau says it is not into bestiality. Fine. Its Director had a chance to say so in one word, and it took a Republican from Louisiana four minutes to get it out of him. Five clowns, and the paper is counting only the humans.