Democrats on the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee claimed their GOP counterparts would ‘rue the day’ they confirm FBI Director nominee Kash Patel, who is slated for a final vote Thursday afternoon and is expected to be approved. 

‘There’s no question here he is unqualified and unprepared,’ Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said outside the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Thursday morning. 

‘The only question is whether my Republican colleagues will do the right thing.’

He warned that a vote in favor of Patel’s nomination ‘will haunt you.’

‘You will rue the day of this vote if it’s in favor of Kash Patel, because the American people will hold you accountable, and we will make sure that the American people know about this vote,’ he concluded. 

The Senate will vote to end debate on Patel’s nomination in the late morning and conduct a final confirmation vote in the afternoon.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the Judiciary Committee ranking member, led the morning press conference, telling reporters, ‘My Senate Republican colleagues are willfully ignoring myriad red flags about Mr. Patel, especially his recurring instinct to threaten retribution against his perceived enemies.’

‘This is an extremely dangerous flaw for someone who seeks to lead the nation’s most powerful domestic investigative agency for the next 10 years,’ he added. 

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., added, ‘Kash Patel, mark my words, will cause evil in this building behind us, and Republicans who vote for him will rue that day.’

Durbin and the committee’s Democrats echoed claims they made earlier in the month about Patel directing terminations at the FBI already and allegedly lying during his confirmation hearing about it. 

They said ‘highly credible’ whistleblower reports pointed to Patel ‘personally directing the ongoing purge of FBI employees prior to his Senate confirmation for the role.’

But a representative for Patel’s nomination effort categorically denied the accusation and pushed back on Durbin’s claims that Patel had any involvement. 

The direction to begin terminating some FBI employees and identify all current and former bureau personnel assigned to Jan. 6 and Hamas cases for an internal review was handed down to acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll last month, the day following Patel’s confirmation hearing. 

Democrats pointed to the fact that Patel denied during the hearing having any knowledge about planned terminations of those involved in investigations involving former President Donald Trump.

According to a senior transition team official for Patel, the nominee had departed the capital the night of his hearing, flying home to Las Vegas, where he had ‘been sitting there waiting for the process to play out.’

‘Mr. Patel has been going through the confirmation process, and everything he has done since his nomination has been above board,’ the official said in an interview earlier this month with Fox News Digital. ‘And any insinuation otherwise is false.’

In addition to his trip home to Vegas, Patel has also spent time hunting away from Washington, the official said, providing photographic evidence of Patel’s activities. 

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is planning to slash approximately 7,000 probationary workers in Washington, D.C., and across the U.S. starting Thursday, according to reports. 

The layoffs will affect probationary workers who have been employed for one year or less and have not been able to secure full civil service protection, The Associated Press reported, citing a person familiar with the plans.

Reuters also reported about the expected layoffs, citing a person familiar with the matter who said about 6,700 IRS workers, or 7% of the tax agency’s roughly 95,000-person workforce, would be eliminated. 

The source told Reuters that those employees on the chopping block included those holding positions that ranged from revenue agents, to specialized auditors to IT specialists across all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.

It is unclear how the layoffs will affect tax collection services at the IRS, which is expected to receive more than 140 million returns this year, according to the AP.

The source told Reuters that the IRS will keep several thousand probationary employees who are considered critical for processing tax returns, including workers tasked with supporting and advocating for taxpayers. 

The AP’s source, meanwhile, reportedly said the job cuts will largely impact the employees in compliance. The compliance department oversees whether taxpayers are filing their returns, paying their taxes and meeting other tax obligations in full and on time by the April 15 due date.

The IRS has not confirmed the reported layoff plan. Fox News Digital reached out to the IRS and the Department of Treasury for comment Thursday but did not immediately hear back. 

Laying off probationary federal employees comes as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to increase government efficiency and eliminate wasteful federal spending. The Department of Government Efficiency has been tasked with trimming the federal workforce, which includes laying off nearly all recent hires.

The announcement comes after President Donald Trump stated on Jan. 29 that federal employees must return to in-person work by early February or face termination. 

IRS employees involved in the 2025 tax season were also told earlier this month that they were not eligible to accept the Trump administration’s buyout offer until mid-May, after the taxpayer filing deadline, the AP reported.

Trimming the workforce will partially undo the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which devoted $80 billion to employing 87,000 new IRS agents, according to a September 2023 report from the House Oversight Committee. 

The funds were used to hire agents who specifically targeted middle-class Americans, the oversight committee claimed. 

The Biden administration, however, argued that staffing up the IRS would help the federal government better ensure wealthy Americans were paying their fair share of taxes.

Service performance and phone wait times at the IRS have improved in the past two filing seasons, according to a statement from the IRS in January.

‘This has been a historic period of improvement for the IRS, and people will see additional tools and features to help them with filing their taxes this tax season,’ IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel wrote in the statement. ‘These taxpayer-focused improvements we’ve done so far are important, but they are just the beginning of what the IRS needs to do. More can be done with continued investment in the nation’s tax system.’

Fox News’ Alexandra Koch and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., will not run for re-election in 2026 and will instead retire, the longtime senator announced Thursday.

McConnell has served in the Senate for decades, including as Senate majority leader under President Donald Trump’s first administration. McConnell is the longest-serving Senate party leader in U.S. history, and he announced his retirement on his 83rd birthday.

‘Seven times, my fellow Kentuckians have sent me to the Senate,’ McConnell said in prepared remarks to the Senate floor. ‘Every day in between, I’ve been humbled by the trust they’ve placed in me to do their business here. Representing our commonwealth has been the honor of a lifetime. I will not seek this honor an eighth time. My current term in the Senate will be my last.’

McConnell was first elected in 1984, and he plans to serve out the rest of his term ending in January 2027.

The announcement comes after a series of health scares for McConnell, who has frozen up during statements to the public on multiple occasions.

His office never provided an explanation for the episodes.

Most recently, McConnell fell while exiting the Senate chamber earlier this month. He also fell during a GOP lunch in December.

McConnell’s announcement comes roughly a year after he ceded his role as Republican leader in the Senate, ultimately to be replaced by Sen. John Thune, R-S.D.

‘One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to move on to life’s next chapter,’ he said in floor remarks at the time. ‘So I stand before you today… to say that this will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate.’

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Moderate GOP Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, revealed she will not back President Donald Trump’s nominee to be director of the FBI, Kash Patel. 

‘The nomination of Kash Patel to serve as Director of the FBI comes to the Senate against the backdrop of recent personnel actions at the Department of Justice, including the resignations of several career federal prosecutors who felt they were being instructed to act in a manner inconsistent with their ethical obligations,’ she said in a Thursday statement released just before a key procedural vote. 

‘While I strongly support efforts to ensure all federal employees perform their responsibilities ethically and in accordance with the law, Mr. Patel’s recent political profile undermines his ability to serve in the apolitical role of Director of the FBI,’ she added. 

Trump’s controversial FBI nominee cleared his last procedural hurdle on Thursday morning, despite losing Collins’ support. 

Key Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., are backing Patel for the role. 

Tillis, who held out on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s nomination, was one of the first to get behind Patel, helping to shepherd him through the Senate. 

Moderate Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, has not said if she will vote to confirm Patel, but she did vote ‘yes’ on the last procedural hurdle, indicating she would do so on the final vote. 

Patel will have a final confirmation vote on Thursday afternoon. 

Collins also opposed Hegseth, alongside Murkowski and former Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. Vice President JD Vance needed to break the tie in the Senate and confirm Hegseth. 

With full attendance, Patel can only afford to lose three Republican votes, assuming that all Democrats will oppose him. 

Collins is notably up for re-election in 2026 in Maine. She was an exception during her last bid when she won the state alongside then-President Joe Biden, as a result of split-ticket voting. 

The Senate voted to advance the confirmation of FBI director nominee Kash Patel on Thursday. 

A vote to invoke cloture and begin up to 30 hours of debate on the nominee passed 51 to 47. 

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee voted earlier this month, 12 to 10, to advance Patel to the full floor for a vote. 

Still, Patel faced a somewhat rockier path to confirmation, even in the Republican-majority chamber, after Democrats on the panel used their political weight to delay Patel’s confirmation vote earlier this month. 

Top Judiciary Democrat Dick Durbin claimed on the Senate floor that Patel had been behind recent mass firings at the FBI, citing what he described as ‘highly credible’ whistleblower reports indicating Patel had personally directed the ongoing purge of FBI employees prior to his confirmation.

But that was sharply refuted by Senate Republicans, who described the allegation as a baseless and politically motivated attempt to delay Patel’s confirmation, and by a Patel aide, who described Durbin’s claim as categorically false.

This person told Fox News Digital that Patel flew home to Las Vegas after his confirmation hearing and had ‘been sitting there waiting for the process to play out.’

Patel, a vociferous opponent to the investigations into President Donald Trump and one who served at the forefront of Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims, vowed during his confirmation hearing last month that he would not engage in political retribution against agents who worked on the classified documents case against Trump and other politically sensitive matters.

But his confirmation comes at a time when the FBI’s activities, leadership, and personnel decisions are being closely scrutinized for signs of politicization or retaliation.

Thousands of FBI agents and their superiors were ordered to fill out a questionnaire detailing their roles in the Jan. 6 investigation, prompting concerns of retaliation or retribution. 

A group of FBI agents filed an emergency lawsuit this month seeking to block the public identification of any agents who worked on the Jan. 6 investigations, in an attempt to head off what they described as potentially retaliatory efforts against personnel involved. 

‘There will be no politicization at the FBI,’ Patel told lawmakers during his confirmation hearing. ‘There will be no retributive action.’

But making good on that promise could prove to be complicated. 

Trump told reporters this month that he intends to fire ‘some’ of the FBI personnel involved in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riots, characterizing the agents’ actions as ‘corrupt,’ even as he stopped short of providing any additional details as to how he reached that conclusion.

‘We had some corrupt agents,’ Trump told reporters, adding that ‘those people are gone, or they will be gone— and it will be done quickly, and very surgically.’

The White House has not responded to questions over how it reached that conclusion, or how many personnel could be impacted, though a federal judge in D.C. agreed to consider the lawsuit.

And in another message meant to assuage senators, Patel said he didn’t find it feasible to require a warrant for intelligence agencies to surveil U.S. citizens suspected to be involved in national security matters, referring to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

‘Having a warrant requirement to go through that information in real time is just not comported with the requirement to protect American citizens,’ Patel said. ‘It’s almost impossible to make that function and serve the national, no-fail mission.’

‘Get a warrant’ had become a rallying cry of right-wing conservatives worried about the privacy of U.S. citizens, and almost derailed the reauthorization of the surveillance program entirely. Patel said the program has been misused, but he does not support making investigators go to court and plea their case before being able to wiretap any U.S. citizen. 

Patel held a number of national security roles during Trump’s first administration – chief of staff to acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, senior advisor to the acting director of national intelligence, and National Security Council official. 

He worked as a senior aide on counterterrorism for former House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, where he fought to declassify records he alleged would show the FBI’s application for a surveillance warrant for 2016 Trump campaign aide Carter Page was illegitimate, and served as a national security prosecutor in the Justice Department. 

In public comments, Patel has suggested he would refocus the FBI on law enforcement and away from involvement in any prosecutorial decisions. 

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, he suggested his top two priorities are to ‘let good cops be cops’ and transparency, which he described as ‘essential.’

‘If confirmed, I will focus on streamlining operations at headquarters while bolstering the presence of field agents across the nation,’ he wrote. ‘Collaboration with local law enforcement is crucial to fulfilling the FBI’s mission.’

Patel went on: ‘Members of Congress have hundreds of unanswered requests to the FBI. If confirmed, I will be a strong advocate for congressional oversight, ensuring that the FBI operates with the openness necessary to rebuild trust by simply replying to lawmakers.’

The Senate votes late Thursday morning to break a filibuster on the nomination of Kash Patel to run the FBI. 

Senators will vote to confirm him around 1:45 p.m. ET, with the final result due after 2 p.m ET. He will be confirmed along party lines. 

Then the Senate returns to the budget framework to advance parts of President Donald Trump’s policy agenda.

The Senate began its 50-hour debate on the the budget Tuesday night.

The budget process is lengthy and arduous. It culminates in a marathon vote series – known as a vote-a-rama Thursday night through Friday – if not the wee hours of Saturday morning.

The last such vote-a-rama consumed 41 consecutive votes and took more than a day in real time to complete. 

This onerous exercise is all to get to that final product that enables Republicans to bypass the Senate filibuster later. However, the proposal must be fiscal in nature and not add to the deficit over a 10-year period.

Here’s something important to know:

The mechanics just spelled out create nothing more than a shell. This is a legislative ‘chassis.’ BOTH the House and Senate must have this in place to eventually debate substantive and ‘binding’ provisions of legislation down the road – be it border security or massive tax cuts. No ‘chassis,’ then no final bill.

So this is an important phase in moving the president’s agenda, but not the end result. 

House Republicans will try to advance their own plan next week. It focuses more on tax cuts and has the blessing of the president. But the House and Senate must still get on the same page. And so far, they are working at cross purposes. 

An influential conservative group is throwing its weight behind Elbridge Colby’s nomination to serve in a top position at the Defense Department. 

The Heritage Foundation said, in a memo obtained by Fox News Digital, that Colby is ‘without question the most influential defense policy thinker in over twenty years.’

‘For far too long, the United States has employed the Department of Defense – and the men and women of the U.S. military – to engage in activities that were not central to American interests,’ the letter read. 

‘From peacekeeping operations in far-flung theaters, to nation-building among cultures riddled with ethno-sectarian and religious strife, to democracy building in areas with no history of the rule of law, the Department of Defense has spent much of the post-Cold War era expending resources and American lives in conducting operations that are tangential to U.S. interests.’

MAGA loyalists have muscled Republicans who are hesitant of Colby’s nomination to serve as undersecretary of defense for policy, mostly over his realist worldview. 

Colby has suggested that the U.S. living with a nuclear Iran is more plausible than countering the country’s nuclear assets, a position that has reportedly prompted concern for Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., a member of the Armed Services Committee, which will vote on Colby’s nomination first. 

Colby is ‘the single best person to implement President Trump’s and Secretary Hegseth’s policies within the Department of Defense and ensure that American lives and resources are used judiciously against prioritized threats,’ according to Heritage.

The current acting undersecretary of defense for policy, Alex Velez-Green, was plucked for the administration while working as a policy advisor for the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense.

Vice President JD Vance expressed support for the Trump nominee, writing, ‘Bridge has consistently been correct about the big foreign policy debates of the last 20 years.’

‘He was critical of the Iraq War, which made him unemployable in the 2000s era conservative movement. He built a relationship with [the Center for a New American Security] when it was one of the few institutions that would even hire a foreign policy realist,’ Vance said. 

Colby, who worked at the Pentagon during Trump’s first term, has long asserted the U.S. should limit its resources in the Middle East and refocus on China as the bigger threat. 

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, told Roll Call that Colby’s nomination posts ‘a concern to a number of senators.’ 

Colby served in the first Trump administration as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development and was the primary author of the 2018 U.S. National Security Strategy. 

Donald Trump Jr. wrote of Colby in an op-ed for Human Events on Tuesday: ‘He starts off in exactly the right place – with the concrete interests of the American people, not abstractions like ‘the rules based international order’ or spreading democracy in the Middle East.’ 

Meanwhile, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk accused Cotton over the weekend of ‘working behind the scenes’ to kill Colby’s nomination. 

‘Colby is one of the most important pieces to stop the Bush/Cheney cabal at DOD,’ Kirk wrote in a post on X. ‘Why is Tom Cotton doing this?’

Elon Musk echoed Kirk’s post: ‘Why the opposition to Bridge? What does he think Bridge will do?’

Cotton will meet with Colby in the coming days before making up his mind on how to vote, sources told Fox News Digital. 

Fox News’ Julia Johnson and Aubrie Spady contributed to this report.

DOGE administrator Elon Musk may soon be taking a page out of the book of legendary TV newsman Geraldo Rivera by hosting a livestream opening up Fort Knox to see if America’s gold is really still there.

Quite well, do those of us of a certain age remember that night in 1986 when Rivera cracked open a long-forgotten vault at a Chicago hotel where notorious gangster Al Capone had lived, only to find, with no small degree of embarrassment, that it was all but empty.

In those days, without Netflix or 62,000 cable channels, 20 million Americans tuned in live, there were medical examiners present in case bodies were found, IRS agents on hand to seize any ill-gotten treasure. But in the end, all they found was the biggest sad trombone moment in the history of television.

Fast-forward to Fort Knox, where a reported $425 billion worth of government gold is reportedly stored.

In 1936, the federal government decided to send about half of the physical gold that our nation owns to a fortified facility in Kentucky for safe-keeping. Almost instantly it became a metaphor for two things, one, wealth, as in, ‘all the gold in Fort Knox,’ and the other, security, as in, ‘harder to get into than Fort Knox.’

Nobody really doubts the security of the compound. It almost certainly remains as impregnable as ever, even to Musk. But are the guards there to protect the gold, or to hide an embarrassing secret?

Now let’s be clear, there is no reason, beyond conspiracy theories, to believe that the gold isn’t there, or that Treasury employees are busy painting red bricks yellow in anticipation of the DOGE visit. 

Newly minted (so to speak) Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has assured Americans that ‘All the gold is present and accounted for.’ But some Republicans, like Kentucky Senator Rand Paul want more, as he told Fox News, ‘the more sunlight the better, the more transparency the better.’

President Donald Trump concurs. At a gaggle on Air Force One on Wednesday, he told reporters, ‘We hope everything is fine with Fort Knox, but we’re going to go into Fort Knox, the fabled Fort Knox, to make sure the gold is there.’

The fabled Fort Knox indeed. Get your popcorn. Lights, camera, action.

It would be pure historical poetry if Geraldo Rivera was once again tapped to host the live coverage of the unearthing of the Fort Knox vault, and with such an amusing twist, for this time, it’s not a full vault that would be the big story, but an empty one.

It’s actually difficult to comprehend what would happen if sometime in the next few days cameras show us that the gold is gone, not just for the financial system, but for our general faith in the government. It’s the kind of lie that you can’t really come back from.

Hundreds if not thousands of people would have to be complicit in this canard, including powerful figures such as Bessent. If there’s no gold at Fort Knox then Katy bar the door, because everything the government told us after would be deeply suspect, as if it isn’t already.

Even if the outcome of this special live event is banal and expected, even if we are simply treated to the vision of shimmering stacks of glorious gold that are supposed to be there, Sen. Paul is right that such transparency would put a lot of conspiracy theories to bed.

In and of itself, Trump’s dedication to radical transparency is a great move forward for a country that has lost faith that its leaders are telling them the truth, that will no longer simply take for granted that things really are the way they are supposed to be.

It can be argued that this distrust of the government, so pervasive on all political sides, is actually the greatest threat we as Americans face. Not the border, not China, not inflation, but a total lack of confidence that our will is being done in the halls of power.

So bring on the telestream, live from Fort Knox, build up the fanfare and line up the pundits, let us all see together if the good word of The Treasury Department should be given our full faith and credit, or if the biggest scam of the past century has somehow occurred.

And I’m serious, who better to guide us through it than the original himself? It’s time for Geraldo to get another bite at the apple and see if this time he actually finds the treasure.