A donkey, a hen and an FBI agent walk into a bar.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Also, stop me if you are 18 years or younger. No one should be reading the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Barnyard Recruitment Manual without appropriate ID. Not even the donkey.
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Especially not the donkey.
We speak now of the love which dare not say its name, other than the occasional surprised “baa.”
I am guessing that it was J. Edgar Hoover who made sure FBI applicants were automatically barred if they had sex with animals. I am guessing that it was J. Edgar because that purple lace thingy in his top desk drawer didn’t get there by itself. Our G-man knew. Our G-man walked on the wild side.
But leave it to current FBI Director Kash Patel to put the beast back into bestiality, and also, the bestiality back into the “No prob” employment screening list.
“I’m trying to understand why you did this,” a genuinely baffled Sen. John Kennedy asked Patel in a Senate hearing. “The person who recommended it, why didn’t you just say ‘what planet did you parachute in from?’”
Not Earth, certainly.
Why? Perhaps it involved a (documented) locker room keg, or perhaps support for Department of Homeland Security head honcho and self-celebrated MMA fighter Markwayne Mullin, who, it can now be revealed, (reportedly) spent cage match time with an opponent named Huggie Bear. Or perhaps it’s an offshoot of agency devotion to the cloven-hoofed ghost of Jeffrey Epstein and his files.
“Applicants who have engaged in bestiality means that they were victims of bestiality,” explained Patel, except, he hastily added, when they are not. “If he voluntarily did it, sure,” the applicant should be disqualified from the FBI, said Patel. “But if he was trafficked into it …”
Friends, if your mind just conjured up herds of trafficked beasties thundering across the open range and into Department of Justice HR waiting rooms, then congratulations! You are not a U.S. Senator.
A U.S. Senator would have imagined something else. And did.
“Okay, how do you involuntarily do it?” Kennedy asked.
I believe it was at this point that I put myself into a self-induced coma, waking up just in time to hear Patel explain that the previous rules unfairly disqualified those engaged in sex with animals “on either side.”
“Either side of what?” asked Kennedy, before I could squeeze my eyes shut again. “So you disqualified the animal?”
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“Well, we have great canines, but I don’t think we’re going to disqualify them,” Patel chuckled.
As the previous owner of an FBI-eligible German Shepherd, I am going to go out on a limb and say the agency canines were not amused by Patel’s little GovernmentJoke™. They are loyal, hardworking and could beat half of Trump’s Cabinet at chess. Also, they tell better jokes. Also, their friends the sheep aren’t laughing.
A ruby-red Louisiana Republican, Kennedy wasn’t grilling Patel because he wanted to make points with voters back home on the bayou. He wanted to hammer home the fact that Patel created a controversy when the agency is already under fire for — well, pick a letter of the alphabet: S is for James Comey’s seashells on the seashore, Law & Order edition.
F is for firing experts on Iran, just before the bombs started falling. N is for National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, dissolution of. T is for Toadies on Parade.
“Why would you even get into bestiality?” asked Kennedy.
“We’re not into bestiality,” replied Patel, mistaking a question about public relations with workplace romance.
Or maybe it’s all just D for Distraction from M for the Midterms.
“Do you pledge that you will not in any way interfere in the will of the America people when they go to the polls in November?” asked Vermont Sen. Peter Welch when Kennedy finally gave up.
“I pledge unequivocally that I will not participate in your charade of lies,” Patel responded.
Somewhere over at FBI headquarters, the big dogs growled, and not at the senator.
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Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist and editorial writer.