FBI chief Kash Patel spars with top Democrat over allegations of excessive drinking on the job – US politics live | Trump administration

The Senate listening to with Kash Patel, the embattled FBI director, has simply concluded.

Before we transfer on to different developments, it’s value pausing for a second to clarify that one half of Patel’s earlier testimony, when he accused the Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen, of “slinging margaritas in El Salvador on the taxpayer dollar” with Kilmar Ábrego García, was a reference to an obvious hoax the Democrat mentioned was staged by an aide to El Salvador’s far-right president, Nayib Bukele.

Last April, when Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to satisfy with Ábrego García, who had been wrongly deported to the Cecot mega-prison there, El Salvador’s president tried to make gentle of considerations about the deported man’s security by sharing pictures on X of the assembly at a resort, with a caption that claimed the two males have been “sipping margaritas”.

When he returned to Washington, Van Hollen accused the authorities of El Salvador of creating the hoax he called “Margarita-gate”, by inserting a pair of cocktail glasses on the desk between himself and Ábrego García as they met the night time earlier than, to make it look as if they have been having fun with drinks.

But the senator said the drinks have been positioned there throughout the assembly by somebody from the Salvadoran authorities earlier than the pictures have been taken and that neither he nor Ábrego García had touched them.

Speaking to reporters on his return, Van Hollen identified that there was visible proof for this in the pictures: the rims of each glasses have been lined in salt or sugar, however it was clear from the photos that neither glass had been drunk from, since the rims have been undisturbed.

Van Hollen himself shared a photo of the meeting on X taken earlier than the glasses have been positioned there, during which there have been simply cups of espresso and glasses of water on the desk.

“This is a lesson into the lengths that president Bukele” will go to, Van Hollen mentioned, “to deceive people about what’s going on”.

That didn’t, nonetheless, cease Trump administration officers, and partisan, pro-Trump information shops from endlessly repeating Bukele’s false assertion that the males drank margaritas. The hoax was said as reality at the time by a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, the House Republican conference and a correspondent for the pro-Trump outlet Newsmax, amongst others.

As the Politico columnist Jonathan Martin noted on Tuesday, Patel repeating this false declare reveals how “modern information silos” work. “Patel and everyone else in the biz knows the margarita thing was staged but assumes no penalty in saying it as fact,” since the rightwing media Trump supporters devour has handled the hoax as actual for greater than a yr.