Let’s start with the logic, because the logic here is doing something genuinely spectacular. The FBI - the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, the institution entrusted with counterterrorism, organized crime, public corruption, and the full weight of federal criminal law -has deployed its insider threat unit to solve the following mystery: who told a reporter that the guy running the FBI might have a drinking problem.
Take a moment. Let that settle. The FBI is investigating the FBI director’s behavior. Using the FBI.
The investigation targets Sarah Fitzpatrick, the Atlantic journalist whose April 17 piece, headlined “The FBI Director Is MIA,” was sourced to more than two dozen people… current and former FBI officials, law enforcement and intelligence agency staff, hospitality industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers. Twenty-four-plus sources from multiple industries and institutional vantage points, all apparently coordinating their fabrications with the precision of a Swiss watch to destroy the reputation of a man who had previously been photographed chugging a beer and spraying it in the air while the President of the United States was on speakerphone.
The article reported that Patel drinks to the point of obvious intoxication at a Washington private club called Ned’s, in the presence of White House and other administration staff. That he drinks to excess at the Poodle Room in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends. That early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day because of his alcohol-fueled nights. That on multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking him because he was seemingly intoxicated. And that at least once, a request was made for breaching equipment - the kind normally deployed by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to gain rapid entry into buildings - because the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was unreachable behind a locked door.
Breaching equipment. To start Kash Patel’s morning. We are a serious country. This is not a serious cabinet.
Patel’s response was immediate and multidirectional. He filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick personally, declaring the piece a “sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece” filled with “false and obviously fabricated allegations.” His lawyer sent a threatening letter to the magazine before publication warning them not to print the claims. The Atlantic printed them anyway, then stood by every word, then reported receiving additional corroboration after publication. Fitzpatrick went on the Radio Atlantic podcast and said she had been “inundated” with new sources reaching out to confirm her reporting since Patel sued her.
That is what happens when you get it right. The sources multiply.
Now here is where the logic becomes truly gorgeous in its self-destruction.
A leak investigation is a search for the person who told the truth to the wrong person. It is not a tool you reach for when a reporter invented something out of whole cloth. If Sarah Fitzpatrick fabricated this entire story - if these two dozen sources are, as Patel’s lawsuit claims, “partisans with axes to grind” who are “not in a position to know the facts” - then there is nothing to leak. You cannot investigate the disclosure of something that never happened. The information either escaped from somewhere real, or it didn’t exist. Patel cannot have it both ways: the story is either lies, in which case there is no leaker to find, or it is the truth, in which case there is no defamation lawsuit to win. He has filed both. Simultaneously. In America. With a straight face. Sober? Who knows.
The FBI spokesperson tried his best. Ben Williamson told NBC News the investigation was “completely false,” that “no such investigation like this exists,” and that the reporter “is not being investigated at all.” Two people directly familiar with the matter then confirmed to NBC News that the investigation absolutely does exist. Sources, again, are proving remarkably easy to come by when you start looking.
The investigation itself - an “insider threat” probe run out of Huntsville, Alabama - is described by people familiar with it as highly unusual, because leak investigations of this kind typically stem from disclosures of classified national security information. You know. Actual state secrets. The kind that get people killed. Not the kind where someone told a journalist that the FBI director keeps missing morning briefings. The agents assigned to this matter are, per sources, deeply uncomfortable with the whole enterprise. One told NBC that the agents involved feel trapped: proceed with an investigation they know they shouldn’t be running, or lose their jobs. In Kash Patel’s FBI, that is what passes for institutional morale.
To be precise about what this investigation can do: it gives FBI agents the authority to obtain Fitzpatrick’s phone records, run her name through FBI databases, and examine her social media contacts. The full machinery of federal law enforcement, pointed at a journalist, to find the people who said true things to her about the person controlling that machinery. This is not subtle. This is not a gray area. This is a federal official using a federal agency to punish federal employees for cooperating with a free press… during a period when the same administration has raided a Washington Post reporter’s home, opened a stalking investigation into a New York Times reporter for covering Patel’s girlfriend’s security detail, targeted journalists who covered a church protest, and launched FCC proceedings against broadcast stations whose coverage has offended the president personally.
None of these are isolated incidents. Each one is a message. Taken together, they are a policy.
The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg called it what it is: an outrageous, illegal, and dangerous attack on the First Amendment, carried out by people who have apparently decided that the cure for embarrassing reporting is not better behavior but the systematic destruction of anyone willing to document it.
Kash Patel did not want you to know about the Poodle Room. He did not want you to know about the rescheduled briefings, the unreachable mornings, the locked doors, the SWAT equipment deployed as an alarm clock for the director of the nation’s top law enforcement agency while the country wages a war. He sued to make it go away. When it didn’t go away, he opened a criminal investigation to find the people who noticed.
The answer is two dozen people. And growing.
If the story was fake, he’d be looking for a liar. He’s looking for a leaker. There’s a difference. And Kash Patel, in his furious scramble to make this stop, just explained it to everyone.
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