FBI Director Kash Patel testifies earlier than a Senate Judiciary Committee listening to on oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 16, 2025.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
FBI Director Kash Patel on Monday morning filed a lawsuit searching for $250 million in damages from The Atlantic journal for defamation from an article that alleges he abuses alcohol.
Patel, over the weekend, had vowed to sue The Atlantic for the article printed on Friday, which carried the headline “Kash Patel’s Erratic Habits May Value Him His Job.”
“The FBI director has alarmed colleagues with episodes of extreme consuming and unexplained absences,” the article’s subhed says.
Patel’s 19-page go well with was filed in U.S. District Court docket in Washington, D.C.
Along with The Atlantic, the civil criticism names the article’s writer, Sarah Fitzpatrick, as a defendant.
Patel’s go well with stated it seeks to carry the defendants “accountable for a sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece.”
“Defendants are in fact free to criticize the management of the FBI, however they crossed the authorized line by publishing an article replete with false and clearly fabricated allegations designed to destroy Director Patel’s status and drive him from workplace,” the go well with alleges.
The criticism says the journal and Fitzpatrick printed the article “with precise malice, regardless of being expressly warned, hours earlier than publication, that the central allegations have been categorically false.”
Patel’s go well with lists 17 particular claims made by the article as being among the many allegedly “quite a few false and defamatory statements of reality” about him.
They embody claims that he “is thought to drink to the purpose of apparent intoxication, in lots of circumstances on the personal membership Ned’s in Washington, D.C., whereas within the presence of White Home and different administration workers;” that he “drinks to extra on the Poodle Room in Las Vegas, the place he ceaselessly spends components of his weekends;” and that on a number of events prior to now yr, “members of his safety element had issue waking Patel as a result of he was seemingly intoxicated.”
The Poodle Room is a members-only social membership atop the Fontainebleau Las Vegas lodge.
The Atlantic additionally reported {that a} “request for ‘breaching gear’ — usually utilized by SWAT and hostage-rescue groups to shortly achieve entry into buildings — was made final yr as a result of Patel had been unreachable behind locked doorways,” the go well with notes.
“Director Patel doesn’t drink to extra at these institutions or wherever else, and this has not, and has by no means been, a supply of concern throughout the federal government,” the go well with says.
Patel, in a press release issued by his attorneys on the Binnall Regulation Group, stated, “The Atlantic’s story is a lie.”
“They got the reality earlier than they printed, and so they selected to print falsehoods anyway,” Patel stated. “I took this job to guard the American folks and this FBI has delivered probably the most prolific discount in crime in US historical past. Pretend information will not report it, and their toxicity won’t ever erode nor cease our Mission.”
The Atlantic, in a press release to CNBC, stated, “We stand by our reporting on Kash Patel, and we’ll vigorously defend The Atlantic and our journalists in opposition to this meritless lawsuit.”
Public figures, reminiscent of Patel, have a excessive authorized bar in lawsuits that allege defamation.
The Supreme Court docket, in a landmark 1964 ruling within the case referred to as New York Instances Firm v. Sullivan, stated {that a} public determine should present that the writer acted with precise malice to prevail in a defamation declare.
The courtroom in that opinion outlined precise malice as making a press release “with data that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether or not it was false.”
