FBI Director Kash Patel, joined at right by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, answers questions Wednesday as the House Intelligence Committee holds a hearing on worldwide threats, at the Capitol, in Washington. The Associated Press

FBI Director Kash Patel was not part of a Signal chat in which other Trump administration national security officials discussed detailed attack plans, but that didn’t spare him from being questioned by lawmakers this week about whether the nation’s premier law enforcement agency would investigate.

Patel made no such commitments during the course of two days of Senate and House hearings, declining to comment on the possibility and testifying that he had not personally reviewed the text messages that were inadvertently shared with the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic who was mistakenly included on an unclassified Signal chat.

That Patel would be grilled on what the FBI might do was hardly surprising.

Even as President Donald Trump insisted “it’s not really an FBI thing,” the reality is that the FBI and Justice Department for decades have been responsible for enforcing Espionage Act statutes governing the mishandling — whether intentional or negligent — of national defense information like the kind shared on Signal, a publicly available app that provides encrypted communications but is not approved for classified information.

The Justice Department has broad discretion to open an investigation, though Attorney General Pam Bondi, who introduced Trump at a Justice Department event this month, signaled at an unrelated news conference on Thursday that she was disinclined to do so. She repeated Trump administration talking points that the highly sensitive information in the chat was not classified, though current and former U.S. officials have said the posting of the exact launch times of aircraft and times that bombs would be released before those pilots were even in the air would have been classified.

She also quickly pivoted to two Democrats, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Joe Biden, who found themselves under investigation but never charged for allegedly mishandling classified information. Indeed, the department has conducted multiple high-profile investigations in recent years, albeit with differences in underlying facts and outcomes.