FBI Director Kash Patel
White House officials are “openly discussing” who will be the next director of the FBI, following a bombshell report about alleged excessive alcohol consumption and other worrying behavior by the agency’s current leader, Kash Patel.
The director of the FBI, Kash Patelthreatened to sue the magazine The Atlantic after a report by the journalist Sarah Fitzpatrick having claimed that the FBI director is deeply paranoid regarding the possibility of being fired, and that drinks excessively frequently.
The report, titled “FBI Director is Missing in Action,” alarmed officials inside and outside the United States’ main federal criminal investigation and counterintelligence agency.
“We have excellent lawyers“, said Fitzpatrick in response to Patel’s threat of legal action. “I stand by every word of the report”, added the journalist.
“People close to the director said that he himself expressed the conviction that is about to be fired or is imminent“, Fitzpatrick revealed to CNN on Friday.
“That is widely discussed, I believe, in Washington, behind closed doors. In fact, there are senior administration officials who are openly discussing who will be the next director of the FBI“, he added.
In a statement sent to , the White House spokeswoman, Caroline Leavittdid not directly respond to the firing allegation, but praised Patel’s leadership at the FBI.
“Under the leadership of President Trump and Director Patel at the FBI, the crime across the country has fallen to the lowest level in more than 100 years and many high-profile criminals have been put behind bars,” Leavitt said.
“Director Patel continues to be a fundamental element on the Administration’s public order team,” Leavitt adds in the note. The FBI referred The Independent to Patel’s most recent social media post, in which he called The Atlantic’s report “an attack article“.
“No amount of bullshit What you write will stop this FBI from making America safe again and catching the criminals you love so much,” Patel on Saturday, on the X social network.
The Atlantic’s report, published on Friday, states that Kash Patel is known in Washington nightclubs and in his hometown of Las Vegas for drinking until you get drunkviolating FBI rules of conduct.
According to the report, this type of behavior could leave Patel, the country’s highest law enforcement official, vulnerable to coercion or extortion.
The director’s alcohol consumption will angry President Donald Trumpknown for being teetotal, and whose brother died due to health problems related to alcoholism.
Trump called Patel to express his displeasure after the director was seen drinking beer by the bottle with members of the United States men’s Olympic ice hockey team, which recently won a gold medal at the Olympics, the report says.
WilliamTurton / X
Kash Patel celebrates the US ice hockey team’s victory at the Olympics. Donald Trump didn’t like this
Patel’s alleged conduct at the head of the FBI alarmed those responsible as to what would happen if the agency were needed in a national crisislike a terrorist attack. “This is what keeps me up at night“, said a person responsible who was not identified.
Other allegations contained in the report outline a unflattering portrait by Patel. On April 10, says the magazine, the director had a paranoid “outbreak” due to a technical problem in a computer system. Patel thought it was a sign that was being fired and began calling advisors and allies in a panic.
The news of the alleged collapse will have quickly circulated around the White Housewho received phone calls asking who was really leading the FBI.
Patel has vowed to sue The Atlantic and Sarah Fitzpatrick, suggesting in a social media post that the article met the legal criterion to be considered defamation.
“See you and all your entourage of fake reporting in court,” Patel in an X Network post on Friday. “But keep up the fake news; the actual malice standard now give me what some would call a victory on a platter in court.”
Actual malice standardor, in a rough translation, “malicious intent”, is a very specific legal concept in American law, established in 1964 by the US Supreme Court in the case New York Times vs. Sullivan.
It means that for a public figure to win a defamation case, they must prove that the publication was made with the knowledge that it was false or with reckless indifference as to its veracity — and it’s not easy to prove.
