Democrats Demand Kash Patel Take Alcohol Disorder Test

House Judiciary Democrats want to force FBI Director Kash Patel to take the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test after The Atlantic reported that his drinking was “a recurring source of concern across the government.”

“There are numerous accounts that you consume alcohol to the point of illness, direct profanity-laced outbursts at support staff, and pass out drunk behind locked doors in episodes making you so unreachable that agents have had to fetch SWAT-level breaching equipment to awaken you,” the Democrats wrote in a letter to Patel on Tuesday. “These glimpses of your relationship to alcohol would be alarming to see in an FBI agent; for us to see them in the FBI Director himself is shocking and indicative of a public emergency.”

The Atlantic article is pretty damning. A litany of sources detailed Patel’s excessive drinking in private clubs across the country with White House staff, which often led him to push meetings for his hangovers and in one instance even forced the FBI to request SWAT-level “breaching equipment” because he was unresponsive behind a locked door. Patel of course has denied all of these allegations, stating that he’d never been drunk on the job and filing a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic.

Patel has yet to respond to House Judiciary Democrats’ demand, which had a deadline of 5 p.m. Tuesday.