FBI reportedly relaxes hiring rules to admit new agents who engaged in bestiality, ‘as long as the incidents took place before the age of 18’

The FBI has historically taken a negative view of prospective agents who admit to having sex with animals. As per CBS News, this has now changed under Kash Patel’s leadership, with the agency reportedly now willing to consider them as candidates for the highest tier of law enforcement.

CBS says the FBI has “quietly lowered some of their standards” when it comes to things they find in an applicant’s background checks. These include admitting to hiring sex workers, stealing from their employer, or engaging in bestiality.

They say they’ve confirmed these changes with an FBI spokesperson, who said that, yes, some changes to the people eligible to be agents have changed, but only within “a narrow set of circumstances.”

“How can this not be reflective of a recruiting problem at the FBI?”

Those appear to be that they’ll give any would-be FBI agent who has had sex with an animal a pass, “as long as the incidents took place before the age of 18”, with the agency arguing that the current no-bestiality rule is unfair to people who were sexually abused with animals as a child. However, CBS points out that the rules do not distinguish between candidates who were forced to have sex with animals and those who did so of their own free will.

When it comes to paying for sex, the rules are that they can’t have done it three or more times, that they must not have done it within the last ten years, and that an exception may be made if “a person may have hired a sex worker in a location where prostitution is legal.” Similarly, they’ll now consider admitting a new FBI agent who’s stolen from a past employer so long as they did that more than three years ago.

The report says this change to the rules comes after the FBI has lost “scores” of employees under Patel’s leadership, departing through firings, retirements and resignations. Washington lawyer Mark Zaid, who regularly represents FBI agents, said these new rules represent the agency “lowering the standards”: “How can this not be reflective of a recruiting problem at the FBI if you are lowering your standards on issues like bestiality and prostitution?”

CBS News also quotes Supervisory Special Agent Katherine Schweit, who underlined that prospective agents will still face a polygraph examination where they will be quizzed about any “sexually deviant behavior” in their past: “Part of the polygraph process is a conversation with the person who is going to be polygraphed and the polygrapher to explore and explain and discuss anything in their background in a private manner that may be concerning to them.”

Polygraphs are, of course, junk science that cannot tell when a person is lying, which is why they are inadmissible as evidence in court. Patel has not commented directly on the new standards for FBI agents.