GOP's FBI talk on Texas sparks firestorm with Democrats

Claims by Texas Republicans that the FBI is getting involved in efforts to track down and possibly detain Democratic state lawmakers who fled Texas to stop a partisan redistricting effort is getting strong pushback from Democrats in Congress.

Democratic lawmakers are investigating how involved the FBI is in the Texas redistricting battle, but lawmakers who have weighed in on the matter say that FBI intervention would be an egregious politicization of the nation’s top law enforcement agency.

Claims that FBI Director Kash Patel is helping to track down state-level Texas Democrats come after Senate Democrats received information that the Justice Department ordered 1,000 FBI personnel to come through 100,000 Jeffrey Epstein-related documents in March to flag mentions of President Trump.

Democrats say that if Patel is taking sides in the Texas redistricting fight, it would be a misuse and politicization of the FBI — something they warned about during Patel’s Senate confirmation proceedings earlier this year.

“Shouldn’t the FBI be tracking down terrorists, drug traffickers and child predators? The Trump administration continues to weaponize law enforcement to target political adversaries,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) said in a statement on social media.

Responding to a claim by Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R) that the FB I will help find Texas Democratic lawmakers who fled the Lone Star State, Jeffries said: “These extremists don’t give a damn about public safety.”

“We will not be intimidated,” he declared.

Jeffries said in a Thursday interview with ABC News Live that the FBI lacks the legal authority to intervene in a state-level political dispute.

“There would be no authority for the FBI to target Democrats from the Texas legislature in connection with an act that Democrats have taken that is authorized by the Texas Constitution,” he said.

He said the redistricting effort in Texas is “a clear power grab because Donald Trump and House Republicans are desperate to try to hold on to their thin majority in the House of Representatives.”

The FBI declined to comment on Republican claims that the agency was assisting Texas law enforcement in tracking down Democratic state lawmakers who have taken refuge in Illinois and other states.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called out the Trump administration for abusing its power and misusing law enforcement personnel.

“This ridiculous misuse of federal law enforcement for political ends should be rejected by any fair-minded person,” Whitehouse said.

Whitehouse, the ranking member of the Judiciary panel’s Federal Courts Subcommittee, said in December that there was “a lot of quiet concern about Kash Patel” and how he would lead the FBI.

“You really don’t want an FBI director who wants to use that position to try to direct, intimidate and control the American media, and you really don’t want one who comes in with an enemies list of his own that he wants to pursue without justification,” Whitehouse told MSNBC in an interview at the time.

Democratic lawmakers warned the FBI to step back from the Texas redistricting fight after Cornyn, the senior Republican senator from Texas, who faces a tough primary fight against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton next year, urged Patel to help track down Texas Democrats and investigate them for the potential crimes.

“I am proud to announce that Director Kash Patel has approved my request for the FBI to assist state and local law enforcement in locating runaway Texas House Democrats,” Cornyn said in a statement Thursday morning.

“I thank President Trump and Director Patel for supporting and swiftly acting on my call for the federal government to hold these supposed lawmakers accountable for fleeing Texas,” Cornyn said.

Democrats called the development a potentially “dangerous” politicization of the FBI.

“The FBI should be working to keep our communities safe, not getting involved in the political thuggery of Texas Republicans. What legal grounds they could possibly have to play a role in this escapes me – but if they were to get involved, it would certainly set a dangerous precedent for the politicization of the Bureau,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) told The Hill. 

Van Hollen sponsored an amendment to the Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations bill for fiscal year 2026 that would have blocked the Trump administration from spending money to relocate the FBI headquarters to anyplace other than Greenbelt, Maryland, the site chosen by the General Services Administration in 2023.

The amendment was initially adopted to the spending bill but then stripped on a party-line Republican vote.

Democratic sources say the growing politicization of the FBI will likely become an issue in the upcoming September government funding negotiations.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) kept the Commerce, Justice, Science spending bill out of a three-bill appropriations package that passed the Senate on Friday after Democrats objected.

Thune was doing events in South Dakota on Thursday and did not comment on the latest partisan back-and-forth of the FBI’s involvement in the Texas redistricting battle.

Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) office did not respond to a request for comment.

Cornyn, who faces a tough fight with Paxton that will decide the future of his long Senate career, has spearheaded the push to bring the FBI into the political food fight over Texas redistricting.

Democrats suspect Cornyn is jumping into the fray to win points with the Republican base ahead of next year’s primary at a time that some polls show him trailing Paxton.

Cornyn sent a letter to Patel Tuesday to “encourage” the FBI to “take any appropriate steps to aid in Texas state law enforcement efforts to locate or arrest potential lawbreakers who have fled the state.”

He argued the departure of state lawmakers from Texas was designed to “avoid legislative responsibilities” and a “violation of their oath of office.”

Cornyn said he is specifically “concerned” that Democratic legislators “solicited or accepted funds to aid in their efforts to avoid their legislative duties” and “may be guilty of bribery or other public corruption offenses.”

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said on Thursday that “Texas DPS and the FBI are tracking down derelict Democrats.”

“They will be taken directly to the Texas Capitol,” he wrote in a social media post on X.

Not Above the Law, a coalition of left-of-center activist groups, said that Cornyn’s efforts to push the FBI into the Texas political fight threatened political rights and freedoms “core to our democracy.

“Federal law enforcement must never be weaponized as a political tool of the president or manipulated by state-level politicians to serve partisan agendas. Using federal agents to encroach on state matters sets a dangerous precedent that threatens the rights and freedoms of every Americans,” the group said in a statement.

The signatories to the statement include Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, Praveen Fernandes, vice president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, Kelsey Herbert, campaign director at MoveOn, and Brett Edkins, managing director for policy and political affairs at Stand Up America.