FBI Director Kash Patel’s lawsuit against The Atlantic has hit another speed bump.
Sarah Fitzpatrick, the journalist who authored the bombshell article in which sources described Patel as a paranoid, excessive drinker, revealed on Thursday that she has been “inundated” by more insiders willing to corroborate her reporting.
“Since the moment that I published this story, I have been inundated, truly inundated, with new sourcing that goes to the highest levels of the government, who are offering corroborating information,” she said.
If true, that gives Fitzpatrick and The Atlantic fresh ammunition against Patel, who accused the magazine of defaming him in a lawsuit filed Monday. He is demanding $250 million in damages.
Reached for comment, the FBI referred the Daily Beast to the denials Patel has already made regarding the initial Atlantic piece, including a social post in which he wrote, “Memo to the fake news—the only time I’ll ever actually be concerned about the hit piece lies you write about me will be when you stop. Keep talking, it means I’m doing exactly what I should be doing.”
The FBI’s national press office also referred the Beast to a post by Erica Knight, a longtime personal publicist to the FBI director, who claimed that the Atlantic piece was “fabricated.”
“The Atlantic published a ‘bombshell’ on Director Patel tonight that every real DC reporter chased, couldn’t verify, and passed on,” she said.
The Atlantic’s initial report, published Friday, detailed an episode in which Patel is said to have “struggled to log into an internal computer system” a week earlier and subsequently had a “freak-out,” believing he had been fired by President Donald Trump.
Sources told the magazine that Patel began frantically making calls and revealing his fate—but, in reality, it was merely a technical error that had locked him out. He was still director of the FBI.
Patel slammed The Atlantic’s anecdote as “hit piece lies” and “BS.” However, his own lawsuit acknowledged that he was, in fact, unable to access a government system that day, confirming a key detail of the piece.
Fitzpatrick said on Radio Atlantic that sources described Patel’s drinking binges as an open secret in Washington.
“This includes examples of drinking to what his colleagues perceive as excess in public or semipublic places,” she said, after which his security detail allegedly struggled to get to him behind locked doors.
“It was known throughout the FBI, known to members of the Justice Department, and known to members of the White House that his security detail had trouble reaching him behind closed doors,” she continued. “And that’s what I think, really, was causing alarm throughout the security establishment.”
Fitzpatrick said she sensed real fear among the sources who confided in her about Patel’s alleged drinking and unexplained absences—risking their own jobs to speak out. She alleged that Patel is “extremely vindictive” and would target anyone who spoke against him to the press.
“These types of people that I was speaking to are people that have—[they] are not easily upset,” she said of her sources. “They are not prone to exaggeration. They do not want to talk to a reporter, ever, and they were alarmed.”
She continued, “I had so many conversations in which I could tell a level of, not just panic, but, like, emotion, like, grown men who have done nothing but counterintelligence and solving some of the worst-of-the-worst crimes who are not easily scared, intimidated, concerned—they were frightened.”
Fitzpatrick added that she stands by “every single word” of her bombshell report.
Trump has publicly defended Patel to this point, but, behind the scenes, sources tell CNN he has griped about Patel’s behavior at the Winter Games, including him chugging a beer in the locker room after Team USA’s gold-medal-winning men’s hockey game.
The Daily Beast previously revealed that the president raised the controversy with Patel directly.
John Sullivan, a former FBI senior executive and intelligence analyst who retired during Patel’s first few months at the bureau, told The Daily podcast that the 46-year-old director is obsessed with his optics, to the point he is willing to pull resources from elsewhere at the FBI to prop it up.
Sullivan alleged that Patel was taking “resources and time and money and energy” to film his social media videos to make himself look “tough” in the early days of MAGA 2.0.
“To many people, those videos, myself included, looked completely childish,” Sullivan said. “The director, the leader of the FBI, is representing the organization in a juvenile manner. And the work that we do and did was supremely serious.”
