FBI Director Kash Patel filed a $250 million defamation suit against The Atlantic and writer Sarah Fitzpatrick on Monday, claiming a story chronicling his tenure at the agency was a “sweeping, malicious and defamatory hit piece.”
The story chronicled concerns among unnamed current and former FBI employees that Patel’s tenure has been “erratic” and has included excessive drinking.
In his lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., Patel’s legal team wrote that The Atlantic’s journalists “are of course free to criticize the leadership of the FBI, but they crossed the legal line by publishing an article replete with false and obviously fabricated allegations designed to destroy Director Patel’s reputation and drive him from office. Indeed, Fitzpatrick could not get a single person to go on the record in defense of these outrageous allegations, instead relying entirely on anonymous sources she knew to be both highly partisan with an ax to grind and also not in a position to know the facts.”
The Atlantic said in a statement, “We stand by our reporting on Kash Patel, and we will vigorously defend The Atlantic and our journalists against this meritless lawsuit.”
Patel’s attorneys wrote, “Defendants published the Article with actual malice, despite being expressly warned, hours before publication, that the central allegations were categorically false; despite having abundant publicly available information contradicting those allegations; despite obvious and fatal defects in their own sourcing; despite The Atlantic’s well documented, long-running editorial animus toward Director Patel; despite a request for additional time to respond that Defendants refused to honor; and despite deliberately structuring the pre-publication process to avoid receiving information that would refute their narrative. Defendants cannot evade responsibility for their malicious lies by hiding behind sham sources.”
Patel’s lawsuit includes a a list of accomplishments as FBI director, including a drop in crime, while alleging that The Atlantic’s previous reporting that his job was in jeopardy showed “an editorial predisposition to cast his tenure as failing.”
The lawsuit cited as “false and defamatory” 17 different claims made in the article, including that he was known to drink “to the point of obvious intoxication” at the private Ned’s Club in Washington, and that early in his tenure, “meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights.”
Patel’s legal team also cited The Atlantic’s reporting that members of his security detail had trouble waking Patel up because he was “seemingly intoxicated.” In one instance, according to The Atlantic, there was a request for breaching equipment “because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors.”
His attorneys also claimed that, prior to publication last week, The Atlantic “imposed an arbitrary and unreasonable deadline of 4:00 PM EDT—less than two hours—for the FBI to respond to nineteen detailed allegations concerning complex issues of national security, personnel files, security-detail logs, internal facilities logs, and personal conduct.”
More to come.
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