We're used to some unusual Friday news dumps, but last Friday saw one of the weirder ones yet—and given the current climate, that is saying something.
The FBI has reportedly relaxed hiring standards that previously automatically disqualified applicants who admitted to hiring prostitutes, engaging in bestiality, or stealing from an employer.
Oh, okay—wait, huh? Want to run that by us again?
In June, the FBI quietly lowered some of the standards it uses when it conducts background checks on would-be federal agents and other personnel. According to multiple sources briefed on the matter, the FBI did so to facilitate hiring in some cases, even if candidates acknowledged they engaged in sexually deviant activities or stole from an employer.
The move comes as the FBI has lost scores of employees through firings, retirements and resignations since the start of the Trump administration.
Ah, well there we go. With Trump's former lawyers purging everyone in the FBI who dared investigate either Trump, Trump's friends, or Trump's violent insurrectionists and under Kash Patel's drinky-shouty jetsetting "leadership," the nation's top law enforcement agency is now facing a severe hiring squeeze. Nobody with any integrity wants to join an agency that will fire you the moment you start investigating somebody the president's goons have an agreement with; if you're not already on board with the grotesque corruptions of the Trump administration, you're not going to sign up.
So that just leaves Trump's own supporters or people who are indifferent to the Trumpian crime spree, and apparently the new FBI leadership has been running into problems because a whole bunch of those people got as far as the "have you ever had sex with an animal" part of background check, started sweating, and that was the ball game.
I guess my first and most obvious question has to be: How'd Patel's team come up with this specific list of things that were no longer showstoppers? If the FBI is suffering from a dearth of qualified candidates willing to work under "Ka$h" and the rest of Trump's cast of horrors, how did it specifically get decided that it was a prohibition on animal molestation that had to go?
You can see why the Trump-installed team would no longer think "stole from an employer" was disqualifying for federal agents; "stole from an employer" is this administration's whole vibe. This is the administration that boasts it's stolen the entire oil output of Venezuela, headed up by the guy who fleeced his own supporters out of a billion bucks just with memecoins alone. Drive away from your last job in a U-Haul stuffed with stolen office equipment? In the "Ka$h" regime, that's not a reason for rejecting your application. That's the sort of thing that deserves a signing bonus.
Likewise, you can immediately see why (Epstein) this particular administration (Epstein) would want to waive previous rules about solicitation and prostitution. It's something near and dear to the boss. This is the administration that sent Jeffrey Epstein's child sex trafficking co-conspirator to Tennis and Puppies Camp after she complained that being in normal bad person jail was too stressful for her. Ka$h don't care. Todd Blanche don't care. Nobody cares. Nobody's going to judge you for engaging in some sex trafficking before signing up with the agency tasked with stopping that sex trafficking, apparently.
However.
We can begin to see how all of this went down. Patel and his team are tasked with staffing an agency that's been purged of anyone who ever did anything decent, and is now staring at an applicant pool that's 99% Trump supporters. But those Trump-supporting applicants keep failing the background checks and polygraph tests, which means they can't be hired.
Okay, Patel's team thinks! We can fix this! We're gonna say that from now on we're going to accept white collar criminals and sex offenders. Now we'll be able to get those Trump supporters hired, and our problem will be solved.
"Excuse me, sir, but that's not going to be enough," someone pipes up from the corner.
"What? Why not? What the hell are all these pro-Trump applicants getting disqualified over if it's not the prostitution or the office thefts?"
[whispers]
"..."
"..."
"Damn it! Fine, that too!"
All I am saying here is if you have to write a special memo specifically calling out that having sex with livestock is no longer a FBI recruitment dealbreaker after many many years of it being a bold-text, underlined deal breaker, and if this memo comes specifically in response to a change in your applicant pool that's bringing in Trump supporters and only Trump supporters, we are allowed to make some inferences there, you sedition-loving freaks.
But there are other questions, too. Is this going to be the new rule for the indefinite future, or is it more of a short-term tweak to solve the current hiring problems? A sort of bestiality jubilee?
A moobilee, as it were?
Also, why is Kash Patel sounding so pleased about this?
In a video interview with Patel posted on July 27 with former FBI agent John Nantz, Patel discussed some of his efforts to overhaul older hiring standards to entice new recruits.
"We are losing too many qualified candidates to the rigors of the requirements from yesteryear," he said, citing as one example a new and more relaxed rule on hiring people with prior law enforcement experience.
Refraining from sex with animals is one of those rigors of "yesteryear" now? It's one of those old-timey prohibitions that Kash Patel, modern man, is bravely doing away with because heeey, cutie, we're all more relaxed now?
Huh? What?
Former FBI agents say questions about this type of behavior are also important to ask because having such a history could make an agent more vulnerable to blackmail by criminals or a foreign power.
Are we trying to hire in only people vulnerable to blackmail now? Because that's already what it looks like, as Pete "The Shakes" Hegseth and Nervous Laugh Bessent and Steve "I Didn't Bite The Head Off That Bat, It Was Like That When I Got Here" Miller dodge press questions and write their weird little memos.
ProPublica previously reported that some of Patel's hires, including his personal assistant, did not clear their polygraph tests and required waivers in order to be able to work at the bureau.
Oh, there we go. That's a useful little tidbit. So maybe these particular rule relaxations are meant to solve a couple of very specific problems, is that it? We didn't just randomly land on the "you know what, we have to get rid of those archaic no-animal-sex rules" after spinning the FBI wheel of crimes, maybe Kash penciled that one as a specific favor.
It wouldn't be the craziest thing to happen in this administration, if that's how it is. It wouldn't even break the top fifty craziest things.
Now, to a certain set of people I know this is going to be a welcome change. For many years, if you were a goat raper or cattle sodomizer who wanted a career in law enforcement you were limited to the U.S. Border Patrol. No other agency would have you; it was Border Patrol or nothing.
But a few decades of that has given the Border Patrol its ... unique ... culture, and I don't mean that in a good way. So if you're going to hire livestock buggerers to government positions, sure, maybe it's better to spread it out a bit. Maybe it's better to have them sitting behind a Treasury Department desk instead of driving their big green SUV around the Rangelands of Temptation. I don't know.
Honestly, I really want to know the full story behind this? And I also really, really don't want to know the story behind this?
Oof. Tough call.
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