FBI director Kash Patel has sued The Atlantic and reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick over a story that alleged Patel has “alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.”
The defamation suit, filed Monday morning in US District Court in the District of Columbia, seeks $250 million in damages.
The Atlantic says nuh-uh.
We can be pretty confident that the Atlantic didn’t just wave the story through without making sure it was safe.
The defamation suit says statements in Fitzpatrick’s article “falsely assert” that Patel “is a habitual drunk, unable to perform the duties of his office, is a threat to public safety, is vulnerable to foreign coercion, has violated DOJ ethics rules, is unreachable in emergencies, has required the deployment of ‘breaching equipment’ to extract him from locked rooms, allows alcohol to influence his public statements about criminal investigations, and behaves erratically in a manner that compromises national security.”
And now lots more people know that: far more people than those who read the Atlantic piece.
Fitzpatrick wrote that she interviewed “more than two dozen people” about Patel’s conduct, “including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers.”
The sources were known to Fitzpatrick but were granted anonymity “to discuss sensitive information and private conversations.” She wrote that they “described Patel’s tenure as a management failure and his personal behavior as a national-security vulnerability.”
Other than that he’s a gem.
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