FBI Director Kash Patel has threatened to sue over bombshell claims reported in a magazine profile that the Trump administration official is deeply paranoid about being fired and often drinks to excess, alarming officials at the law enforcement agency and beyond.
The alleged conduct, which Patel has called “false reporting,” has left officials alarmed about what would happen if the FBI was needed in a national crisis such as a terror attack.
“That’s what keeps me up at night,” one unnamed official told The Atlantic, which published the claims Friday evening.
The piece details a host of concerning incidents and allegations.
On April 10, according to the magazine, the director flew into a paranoid “freak-out” when faced with a technical issue with a computer system. The report claims Patel thought it was a sign he was being fired and he began calling aides and allies in a panic.
Word of the alleged meltdown reportedly spread quickly through Washington D.C. and the White House got calls about who was really leading the FBI, according to The Atlantic.
The most explosive allegations in the article are regarding Patel’s alleged excessive drinking.
The official is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication at clubs in Washington and his home city of Las Vegas, according to the piece, violating FBI conduct standards and potentially leaving the nation’s top law enforcement official vulnerable to coercion or exploitation.
Early in his time leading the bureau, meetings had to be rescheduled to later in the day to accommodate his nighttime drinking, the report claims.
On multiple occasions, according to the outlet, Patel’s security detail had trouble waking him because he was seemingly intoxicated, and at one point a request went in for emergency “breaching equipment” normally used in SWAT raids and hostage situations.
Patel has vowed to sue over the claims in the article, which he and the FBI say are all false.
FBI officials and other Trump administration members have reportedly questioned whether alcohol factored into missteps by the director, including his claim shortly after the shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk that a “subject” was in custody, only for the individual to be released and a different suspect, Tyler Robinson, to ultimately be arrested.
The director’s drinking reportedly angered the president himself, who is sober and whose brother died from alcoholism-related health issues. President Trump called Patel after the director was seen chugging beer with members of the victorious U.S. Olympic hockey team to express his displeasure, according to the profile.
The Independent has contacted the White House for comment.
Patel, as well as the FBI itself, have characterized The Atlantic’s reporting as entirely false, and the FBI director has vowed to sue the magazine and reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick, the author of the article. Patel suggested in a social media post that the article met the high legal bar to qualify as defamation.
”See you and your entire entourage of false reporting in court,” Patel wrote on X on Friday. “But do keep at it with the fake news, actual malice standard is now what some would call a legal lay up.”
In his post, Patel attached an email from FBI communications official Benjamin Williamson to Fitzpatrick, which called the article “completely false at a nearly 100 percent clip” and alleged the FBI was only given about two hours to respond to the exposé’s numerous claims.
Erica Knight, an adviser to Patel, wrote on X that far from being an absentee leader, Patel has worked more days than his predecessors. Knight alleged that the magazine’s reporting was based on claims that “every real D.C. reporter chased, couldn’t verify, and passed on.”
Jesse Binnall, Patel’s attorney, called the article “categorically false and defamatory” in a post on X, and shared a letter he said he sent to The Atlantic before the story published.
The letter called the magazine’s reporting false and suggested it relied “solely on vague, unattributed sourcing” and did not allow enough time for the FBI to provide relevant information that would disprove its claims.
The letter suggested that the claim about breaching equipment being requested in case it was needed to reach Patel appeared to be based on “no corroborating public record” or “drawn from a single hostile and unreliable source.”
Binnall suggested the magazine’s reporting was similar to 2025 MSNBC claims that alleged Patel was spending too much time drinking, allegations that have prompted ongoing litigation.
Fitzpatrick, the Atlantic reporter, insists her story is entirely factual.
“I stand by every word of this reporting,” she told MS NOW on Friday.
Fitzpatrick added that the FBI is not a place where people are eager to leak to the press, so the volume of sourcing in her piece — which relied on more than two dozen interviews, including with current and former FBI officials — suggested real internal alarm about Patel’s stewardship of the bureau.
The allegations were all the more striking, she continued, because Patel has made it a mission to purge agents deemed disloyal or part of the anti-Trump “deep state,” and has made liberal use of polygraph tests on agents to identify suspected leakers.
“These are not the types of people who are willing to speak out outside of the FBI, especially right now,” Fitzpatrick added on MS NOW. “Because Kash Patel is going after people with polygraphs in a way that has never happened at the bureau. So for it to be this level of alarm, this is people genuinely concerned that America is in danger as a result of this conduct. I feel a real responsibility to take care of that reporting incredibly carefully.”
The Independent has contacted The Atlantic for comment.
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