FBI Director Kash Patel’s $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic did little to dampen the disturbing allegations in what he calls its “hit piece” against him — and instead sparked a firestorm of broadsides from his critics.
Patel’s federal court filing – which included a plethora of typos – summarized the report’s nearly 2,200 words of somewhat dense prose into a concise list of 17 easy-to-read sentences about the damning information provided by more than two dozen anonymous sources, some of them current and former FBI officials or staffers at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies.
The allegations cited include that Patel “is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff,” that he’s “also known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends” and that “members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated” multiple times over the past year.
“If the goal of Kash Patel’s lawsuit was to get me to read (author Sarah Fitzpatrick’s) story about him, mission accomplished,” Minneapolis talk radio host Jason DeRusha wrote on X.
Patel, a former public defender in Miami, has denied the article’s central allegations as “categorically false” and he said in a statement, “Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court — bring your checkbook.”
But his lawsuit confirmed a key element of the anecdote that begins the Atlantic report, with Fitzpatrick describing how Patel “struggled to log on to an internal computer system” while getting ready to leave work for the weekend earlier this month.”
“On April 10, 2026, Director Patel had a routine technical problem logging into a government system, which was quickly fixed,” according to the court papers.
The Atlantic reported that Patel panicked over the possibility he was intentionally locked out and began “frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired,” with two of nine sources familiar with the incident calling it a “freak-out.”
The lawsuit also easily broken down some other highlights of Patel’s alleged behavior. The suit mentioned that a SWAT team equipment was requested “because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors” and that the FBI director “recently expressed frustration with the look of FBI merchandise, complaining that it isn’t intimidating enough.”
Lawyers also reference reporting that his alleged alcohol abuse “has become a threat to public safety” and presents a national security liability while Patel is “deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy,” has a “spotty” attendance record, and is often so unreachable that “delays resulted in normally unflappable agents ‘losing their s***.’”
Patel’s lawsuit, filed Monday against The Atlantic Monthly Group and Fitzpatrick in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., came one week after a federal judge in Florida dismissed President Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation case against the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch over a report that said Trump sent a lewd 50th birthday greeting to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump has vowed to file an amended version of his lawsuit on or before Monday.
U.S. Rep Dave Min, D-CA, told journalist Scott MacFarlane said that Patel appeared to be “trying to act like a little Mini-Me version of Trump.”
“Like, whatever Trump says, whatever he does, he’s like a little version of that trying to do the same thing,” Min said in a video MacFarlane posted on Substack. “And this seemed like a desperate attempt to kind of follow Trump’s lead — and maybe have some of the same kind of outcomes Donald Trump has had.”
Min, a former law professor at the University of California, Irvine, also called Patel’s complaint a “bulls–t lawsuit.”
“Let’s be honest. Like, based on what I know out there, Kash Patel has a well-earned reputation for wasting taxpayer money, for being completely irresponsible on the job, for being AWOL on the job and for being drunk in public. And we’ve seen all that,” he said.
Min appeared to be in part referencing a viral video clip in which Patel is shown guzzling beer, pumping his fist and wildly jumping up and down during a locker-room celebration after the US men’s hockey team beat Canada to win a gold medal in the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Other Democratic lawmakers were eager to see Patel try to press his claims in court.
“Does Bozo Patel know he is subject to deposition, answering questions, under oath, asked by real lawyers?” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, said on X. “Bring popcorn.”
Rep. Ted Lieu, D-CA, wrote: “The deposition of Kash Patel is going to be awesome.”
“And the attorneys for the Atlantic should all be holding beers while doing the deposition,” he added.
But in response to a conservative publisher and writer in Tennessee who called Patel’s case “very strong,” Lieu later predicted that Patel would “drop the lawsuit before he gets deposed.”
“You can bookmark this tweet,” he said.
The non-partisan civil liberties group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression released a statement that said Patel’s lawsuit appeared to be the latest in a series filed by Trump and his administration to punish its critics “by driving up the cost of speaking.”
“We deserve to know the truth about how our government works. If news outlets knowingly publish false information, they will be held responsible by courts and by the readers they serve,” FIRE Senior Attorney Adam Steinbaugh said. “But unless Patel can meet the First Amendment’s high standard, debate on important issues must remain — as the Supreme Court said — ‘uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.’”
Joyce Vance, a University of Alabama law professor, MS Now legal analyst and former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, wrote on Substack that Patel’s lawsuit “starts by touting Patel’s virtues as director, including claims that he has overseen the capture of eight of the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted fugitives and more than 40,000 violent crime arrests, which the complaint says reflects a 112 percent increase in violent crime arrests.”
“So we get a full recitation of work Patel claims as his own, like locating 6,300 child victims and arresting more than 2,200 child predators, a claim that might be more compelling if he’d investigated outstanding leads in the Jeffrey Epstein matter, including the 10 people identified as potential coconspirators in a memo written by Southern District of New York prosecutors in one of the documents released as part of the Epstein Files,” she said.
Newsweek also made a point of finding a series of spelling errors in the filing: “feable” instead of “feeble,” “politices” instead of “policies” and “dicussed” instead of “discussed.”
“The presence of simple typos in the complaint does not undermine its legal claims, but it does stand out in a filing that centers on alleged journalistic negligence,” the magazine said. “Court filings are typically reviewed by multiple attorneys before submission, making such errors notable — particularly in a high‑profile case involving the director of the FBI and one of the country’s most-prominent magazines.”
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