By John A. Tures, Professor of Political Science, LaGrange College
Growing up, our Cub Scout Pack Leader went on to become the FBI Director. A classmate joined the agency. And I teach about the growth and importance of the FBI in the 1930s. That’s why the recent news about the FBI is so hard to take on new hiring procedures.
“FBI Director Kash Patel defended Tuesday a recent policy change to allow some applicants who have engaged in prostitution and bestiality to be considered for employment, insisting that the move was made to enable victims of those acts to apply for a job without fear of automatic disqualification,” reported Eric Tucker with the Associated Press.
It reminds me of a legendary tale about LBJ where he allegedly wanted to imply that an opponent was guilty of having relations with an animal. When pressed that the information was false, Johnson supposedly said “I know, but I just want to see him on TV denying it.”
Tucker adds “Under questioning, Patel denied that the changes reflected a lowering of employment standards and insisted they were designed to prevent victims who’d been forced to engage in that conduct from being automatically disqualified. ‘We did not want to punish victims of bestiality, victims who were trafficked. We did not want to make it an automatic disqualification for the FBI to consider you if you were a victim of these awful, heinous acts,’ Patel said. “We are not going to target victims and prevent them from serving in their capacity to serve this country.’ The questioning spanned partisan lines, with Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana grilling Patel about the rationale for a change that the FBI director said was proposed to him by subordinates. ‘When you saw bestiality, I say this with respect: The person who recommended it, why didn’t you just say what planet did you parachute in from?’ Kennedy asked.”
So did most of us in the country when this came across. I actually thought it was a hoax. I had to watch it to believe it.
Now if we had 1,000 job openings and only 600 applicants, I can see where the agency might be hard up for recruits. But according to the FBI’s Assistant Director of Training, on February 2, 2024, “Last year, we graduated almost 900 new agents; in 2022, we graduated about 1,000. In those two years, we received a total of more than 48,000 special agent applications.” So we’re not hurting for applicants. Other years, the average is between 3% and 6% on acceptances. The FBI can afford to be quite selective.
When it comes to bestiality, I didn’t see any year where more than 350 people are prosecuted for the crime. It’s pretty rare to have someone with that on their record.
But there’s a very good reason for treating bestiality as a serious concern. “There are especially strong indicators of a link between sexual abuse of animals and of people, especially children,” the Human Rescue Alliance reports. “A 2008 study of over 44,000 adult men evaluated for sexual misconduct found that bestiality abuse was the largest single risk factor, and the strongest predictor, of increased risk to commit sexual abuse of children.” That’s a big problem.
There are other former crimes one can commit and still be considered for the FBI. Sarah N. Lynch with CBS adds “For employment theft, a person can be considered if the theft took place more than three years ago.”
People who engaged in bestiality or even prostitution or stealing from one’s employer need probably need help and counseling, and some form of rehabilitation. That doesn’t mean they should be given a path to one of our nation’s most important intelligence units where standards are supposedly among the best in the world.
John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu or on “X” at @johntures2. His first book “Branded” a thriller novel where corporate greed, media manipulation and academic intrigue collide in a deadly game of product placement, has been published by the Huntsville Independent Press (https://www.huntsvilleindependent.com/product-page/branded). His second novel, “Independent Thought,” about a third-party candidacy that brings America to its knees, is published by HIP (https://www.huntsvilleindependent.com/product-page/independent-thought).