LISTEN: How Long Can the Ridiculous Drunken Fanboy in Charge of the FBI Last?
Scott joins Ian Masters on California Public Radio to discuss how long "ridiculous Trump fanboy in charge of the FBI, Kash Patel" is going to last in his position.
After Sarah Fitzpatrick’s laid out Kash Patel’s alarming and excessive drinking habits in The Atlantic, he sued the publication for defamation.
On Wednesday, Scott of Horton-Kaiser fame joined Ian Masters on Background Briefing to discuss the exposé and how long Patel might last in his job.
Scott starts at 40:50.
What Even Is Going On with Kash Patel?
On Friday, April 17th, The Atlantic published investigation into current director of the Federal Bereau of Investigation, Kash Patel.
Journalist Sarah Fitzpatrick found that Patel has “alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.” Fitzpatrick writes:
On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log on to an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”
Agency officials told The Atlantic that Patel is “deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy.” And that it is in part because of “bouts of excessive drinking.”
Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he 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. He is also known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room, in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends. Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.
On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.
Within 24-hours of publication, Patel filed a defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic for publishing a “hit piece.” The lawsuit attacks Fitzpatrick for “relying entirely on anonymous sources she knew to be both highly partisan with an ax to grind,” and gives a summarized list of her findings. The Independent reports:
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.
This isn’t the first time Patel has sued a reporter for libel. The prior suit languishes in Texas, effectively unpursued and was filed as a sort of alternative press release. Time will tell with this latest lawsuit. If it becomes active, however, the discovery could be amazing.