The Kash Patel Fallout

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In a recent story, the Atlantic staff writer Sarah Fitzpatrick writes about how FBI Director Kash Patel’s colleagues are alarmed by what they describe as erratic behavior and excessive drinking. Sources told Fitzpatrick that, on multiple occasions, members of his security detail had trouble waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated. Last year, Fitzpatrick reports, a request was made for “breaching equipment,” normally used by SWAT teams to break into buildings, because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors.

Patel called the story a “lie” and earlier this week sued The Atlantic for defamation. When asked about it at a press conference Tuesday, he said, “I can say unequivocally that I never listen to the fake-news mafia. And when they get louder, it just means I’m doing my job.”

Since publishing the story, Fitzpatrick has been “inundated” with sources corroborating her reporting, she says on this week’s Radio Atlantic: “I stand by every single word of this report.”

Although Patel’s erratic behavior has been an “open secret” in the FBI and other parts of the administration, according to Fitzpatrick, sources have been reluctant to express concerns through traditional channels because Patel has contributed to a climate of fear within the department by making employees take polygraph tests and waging an alleged retribution campaign against the president’s perceived political enemies. Patel has fired agents involved in investigations into Donald Trump and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Fitzpatrick joins Radio Atlantic to talk about her reporting inside the FBI, and how sources she spoke with are concerned about the agency keeping Americans safe during a time of heightened threats. And we talk to our staff writer Quinta Jurecic about the state of Trump’s Justice Department after Pam Bondi’s firing.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Last week, Atlantic staff writer Sarah Fitzpatrick wrote about FBI Director Kash Patel. She talked to more than two dozen sources, including colleagues of his who are alarmed by what they say is erratic behavior and excessive drinking.

Sarah Fitzpatrick:  It was people who felt that not only was this conduct embarrassing, unbecoming, but that it was a national-security vulnerability and that Americans were perhaps less safe as a result.

Rosin: Sarah’s story opens with a stark illustration of his paranoia: a “freak-out,” according to multiple sources, that happened on April 10.

Fitzpatrick:  It’s a Friday, late on a Friday. And he attempts to log in to an FBI internal system. And he’s unable to do so. And almost immediately, without waiting for verification, he begins calling allies, staff, and saying, I’ve been fired.

[Music]

 And it set off this panic in Washington. Now, granted, because it was—people within the FBI were calling the White House asking, Is Kash Patel still the FBI director? And if not, who is in charge of the FBI?

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

At a Department of Justice press conference on Tuesday, a reporter asked about Sarah’s story. Here’s Patel’s response.

FBI Director Kash Patel: I can say unequivocally that I never listen to the fake-news mafia. And when they get louder, it just means I’m doing my job.

Rosin: Today on the show, I’m talking to Sarah about her reporting.

Rosin (in interview): Sarah, welcome to the show.

Fitzpatrick: Thank you for having me.

Rosin: Sarah, you wrote that the concerns about Patel’s conduct go beyond what’s been previously publicly reported. Can you give us some examples of what you learned?

Fitzpatrick: So, these include examples of unexplained absences. This includes examples of drinking to what his colleagues perceive as excess in public or semipublic places.

This includes examples of him not being available to be involved in very specific high-level determinations that only the director can sign off on. 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.

And that’s what I think, really, was causing alarm throughout the security establishment.

Rosin: So what these sources are telling you is that he’s locked behind a closed door, or what were they saying?

Fitzpatrick: There have been multiple occasions on which his security detail, which is responsible for two things—protecting him and being able to move him quickly—were unable to do so. And this actually—at one point, the alarm became so great that a request was made for additional equipment that is used to breach doors, because there had been a concern about this.

Rosin: So, like, a battering ram or some object that would help you get through a locked door.

Fitzpatrick: The FBI has a lot of different types of things that can be used for this nature, but yes, there was a request for additional resources.

Rosin: And had you ever heard something like this before as a reporter?

Fitzpatrick: No. (Laughs.) I had never heard anything like this as a reporter, and I think I spent a very long time, a very diligent amount of time checking it out because it was so explosive. And I think the fact that this was known throughout the FBI, throughout the Justice Department, that it reached the White House is because it was so alarming. And people were really frightened.

Rosin: What kind of people did you talk to for this story?

Fitzpatrick: I spoke to dozens of people: everyone from current and former FBI officials, Justice Department officials, people close to the White House, people who are involved in intelligence agencies, people who are lawyers, lobbyists, hospitality workers. It was people that had seen it with kind of a 360-degree view and had seen it over an extended period of time.

Rosin: And as you were going through this reporting process, what stood out most to you?

Fitzpatrick: The thing that stood out the most to me was the incredibly high levels of alarm that I would describe as bordering on panic for these sources. These types of people that I was speaking to are people that have—are not easily upset. They are not prone to exaggeration. They do not want to talk to a reporter, ever, and they were alarmed.

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. And that really stuck with me. And that was an added element of the responsibility of this reporting and the care that I had to take to it. But it also was a signal of, this is an alarm that’s coming from within the building, and that, we need to take seriously.

Rosin: And how long did these sources say they’d been concerned?

Fitzpatrick: So, I began hearing concerns about Patel even before he became the FBI director, before his nomination and then during his nomination. I would say that the frequency and intensity of those concerns has increased exponentially, and particularly since the beginning of the Iran war.

That has led a lot of people at various levels of government—because Iran is one of the United States’ adversaries that, one, targets the FBI director and other key members for counterintelligence, hacking, threats on their lives. That’s a major focus, and especially in a moment of—they are particularly adept asymmetric warfare, and this would be a moment.

Two, there’s a perception among those specifically in traditional military as well as counterintelligence, that this is a moment in which the United States is uniquely vulnerable. There are multiple wars, there are multiple things that are all happening at once, and there’s an expectation-slash-anticipation for many people who work in the national-security space that something could happen here at home.

They’re most concerned about a terrorist attack. And how would the FBI director be able to respond in the event that that happened? Given this behavior, they did not have a high degree of confidence, and that was keeping them awake at night.

Rosin: After the story was published, Patel’s response in an interview with Reuters was, “The Atlantic’s story is a lie.” And then, as you know, on Monday morning, Patel sued The Atlantic for defamation. What is your response to that?

Fitzpatrick: My response is that I stand by every single word of this report. We were very diligent. We were very careful. It went through multiple levels of editing, review, care. And I think one of the things that has been most gratifying, after—immediately after the story published was, I have been inundated by additional sourcing going up to the highest levels of the government, thanking us for doing the work, providing additional corroborating information.

So this was an open secret in Washington, unfortunately, and we took great care to bring it to light.

Rosin: You’ve mentioned that people were scared, maybe to the point of panicked. What did they say was at stake?

Fitzpatrick: At stake is the security of American citizens. There are so many things that the FBI plays a really important role in—from monitoring potential terrorists to responding to mass-casualty events. And then there’s other things too. There are questions about allocation of resources, how you keep in personnel.

Patel has been very involved at the direction of the president in pursuing an effort to get certain people to leave the FBI, either voluntarily or by firing them. And so there’s been a mass exodus—truly—of staff at every level, from the field office to the executive level, and that exodus has also resulted in a loss of expertise.

And now you have an agency that is severely understaffed and being asked to do more with less, and that is a recipe for something very bad to happen if you’re not having a leader that is alert.

Rosin: This week, another Cabinet member, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-Deremer, stepped down. She’s been under investigation after staffers filed formal complaints alleging professional misconduct. She denies any wrongdoing. Now, that is an entirely different set of issues than what we are talking about here. But I was wondering, in the case of the FBI, why haven’t we seen some of these concerns being raised more publicly and under people’s own names?

Fitzpatrick: The thing you have to understand about this is Patel in particular is known to be extremely, extremely vindictive. He feels a responsibility and openly kind of is proud of the fact that he’s on a bit of a retribution campaign on behalf of the president. He wrote a book, which identified a list of people that he felt needed to be purged from the government.

And so I think there is a real fear at every level—not just of the FBI, of the Justice Department, people who work in the White House—that this is a person who is going to come after. If you speak out, if you are perceived as not being 120 percent behind this FBI director or behind the president, there is a concern that you are going to lose your job. But not just that, that you are going to be bankrupted and your family is going to be bankrupted with litigation. And we have seen him, we have seen him personally go after people that he perceives as being problematic.

Rosin: I mean, despite this loyalty, you reported that officials around him expected Patel to be fired shortly after Pam Bondi at the Justice Department. What exactly did you hear?

Fitzpatrick: My colleague Ashley Parker and I reported in a piece at the time that there was a list of other officials that were going to be fired imminently. Kash Patel was one of those people.

It’s also clear by his behavior on the April 10 episode—he himself was telling people, the director of the FBI is telling people that he believes he’s been fired. You know, this is really openly discussed, about who is gonna be the next FBI director. So his fear was well founded.

Rosin: When he came in, Patel seemed to really share Trump’s views. You’ve mentioned the “enemies” list, also that some FBI people were deep-state agents who needed to be purged. So how did they diverge? Like, how did he end up on this list?

Fitzpatrick: I think, unfortunately, this is this behavior that we are talking about in this article. I think there may be other things. But the president is known—his own brother, of course, suffered from alcoholism. Trump has talked very openly about that. I also think that this conduct has also not gained him many, you know, a lot of support from other people within the Cabinet or within the government.

Patel has complicated other people’s ability to do their jobs, and it’s a distraction. And I think that especially—I have reported prior; my colleagues have also reported this—that there was a, a very clear note what’s called the no-scalps policy within the White House. That no one—they knew they had problems, they knew people were gonna be out, but the plan was to do that shortly after the midterms, that there would be no, because it was viewed as an admission of weakness if they let anybody go.

And that was a lesson that they very actively learned during the first Trump administration. However, I think that a combination of factors, including information about the polling that was happening out in the field that was finally making it to the White House, made it clear that if there was gonna be a change, they had to do it quickly.

Rosin: On Tuesday of this week, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche held a press conference at the DOJ. Patel was there with him in what you could interpret as a vote of confidence. What do you think happens next for the FBI director?

Fitzpatrick: I think that we are seeing evidence of someone who is experiencing a lack of confidence from the president all the way on down. I think we are seeing impulsive behavior, which has been a pattern of his, but we are seeing it increased. We’re watching it now on television. I think we are—in private, my sources have described this as the entire building is panicking. The entire building is freaking out.

People are just waiting for the moment when he will be fired, and it’s creating—unfortunately, it creates a lot of chaos and a lot of instability. There are really key, important, life-or-death decisions that need to be made that—the entire staff of the FBI, you want to be focused, you want to be clear on who their leader is, and unfortunately that’s not happening.

Rosin: And it sounds like you two are following up or hearing from new sources.

Fitzpatrick: 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. So if you’ve reached out to me and I haven’t gotten back to you, it’s because I just haven’t made it there yet. But I am going to call you—don’t worry.

[Music]

Rosin: When we come back, I’ll be joined by staff writer Quinta Jurecic to get a wider look at the FBI and the Justice Department under Trump—starting with a new indictment announced this week. That’s in a moment.

[Break]

Rosin: Quinta, welcome back to the show.

Quinta Jurecic: Thank you for having me.

Rosin: This week, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche held a press conference with Kash Patel. Can you explain what they were announcing?

Jurecic: Blanche and Patel were announcing an indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which listeners may be familiar with as kind of a racial-justice, social-justice organization.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche: Good afternoon. Today, a few minutes ago, in the Middle District of Alabama, a grand jury returned an 11-count indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Jurecic: The allegations center on the suggestion that it essentially constituted wire fraud for the SPLC to engage in a practice of paying confidential informants within extremist groups.

The argument that Blanche is making is that when the SPLC paid those informants, it was actually, in that sense, funding the groups that it had told its donors it was working to combat. I think another way to look at it would be that the SPLC’s use of paid informants was part of their work trying to combat these extremist groups.

Rosin: Yeah, we should mention that the SPLC has called these allegations false and said its paid-informant program has been used to monitor violent threats. But Quinta, as you were watching this press conference, what were you noticing?

Jurecic: What jumped out to me was how this fits into a pattern that other reporters have noticed before. There’s a report that came out recently from MS NOW by Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian essentially noting that often when there are headlines that have negative press about Kash Patel, a day, a few days later, there will be stories about how Patel has fired agents in the FBI, alleging that they were involved in persecution of Trump, they were involved in the investigations against him, that kind of thing.

There’s a quote in the article from a former FBI agent, his name is Rob D’Amico, saying, when he gets jammed up on something, he literally fires people right after. So to me, this is obviously not a firing, but it does seem to be consistent with that reported pattern where there are headlines about Patel that are negative or unflattering to him in some way, then immediately after that there’s kind of an action that MAGA can look at and say, He’s our guy, he’s doing something that we like. And in this case, the indictment—in that context, I think you could certainly read it as kind of giving some red meat to the base.

Rosin: Right. And I just want to note that the FBI denies conducting firings this way. But that pattern you mentioned is important. I bring up that press conference because there’s a broader concern that leaders in the FBI and the Justice Department are acting in a way that focuses on President Trump’s priorities and not necessarily on the priorities that we would expect from the FBI. For example, they’re the federal agency in charge of domestic national security.

The U.S. is currently at war with Iran, which is considered a state sponsor of terrorism. And we’ve heard reports about counterterrorism experts leaving or being forced out. What do you know about that?

Jurecic: The people I know who are formerly at DOJ and FBI, who worked on counterterrorism and counterintelligence issues, are absolutely worried about how prepared the United States is right now for the current situation. Iran—since the Iranian Revolution, the Iranian [Islamic] Revolutionary Guard Corps has really invested in sort of international terrorism as one of its capabilities.

So keeping an eye out for potential IRGC-linked terror attacks is something that, under normal circumstances, given that we are now at war with Iran, you would expect that the U.S. national-security apparatus would be taking extremely seriously, and trying to protect Americans and people in the U.S., particularly Jewish communities, from potential Iran-linked attacks.

As you say, what’s disturbing is that, over the last year, many people who were experts in the Iran space, and in the counterterror and the counterintelligence spaces, were pushed out. So shortly before the war began, a number of agents and analysts at the FBI who were working in the counterintelligence unit in the Washington field office, who were monitoring threats from Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East—they were fired by Director Patel for their involvement in the investigation into classified records held improperly at Mar-a-Lago.

Rosin: Right. And we should say, Patel claims that these firings were for quote “ethics violations.” It’s a situation, though, where the FBI’s priority seems to be loyalty. And that trumped everything else, basically. Like, it didn’t matter what subject expert you were—if you happened to have been caught up in an investigation that the administration didn’t like, you were let go.

Jurecic: That’s certainly what it looks like. And as you say, you know, these are not people who are out there saying, you know, I have a great idea. Let’s go down to Mar-a-Lago and see if there are any classified documents. These are called line agents—you know, people who are told what to do and what to investigate.

And as you say, I think it, it has certainly seemed like DOJ and FBI are more concerned with getting rid of people who are associated in any way with these now politically toxic investigations than they are with making sure that, you know, the jobs that these people are assigned to do are actually carried out.

Rosin: And how does it normally work within the FBI? Because the FBI is a domestic agency. We go to war with another country. What would it look like at another time? Like, what would these counterintelligence agents be doing?

Jurecic: The difference between counterintelligence and counterterrorism is a tricky one.

Counterterror, I think, is something that is more instinctively understandable to people. It’s, you know, the agents and analysts at the bureau who are trying to make sure that, you know, whoever is out there plotting attacks, the FBI is trying to prevent them from being able to carry them out. Counterintelligence is what people probably would understand as kind of spy versus spy. You know, your goal is to, if you’re focusing on Iran, say, see what kind of intelligence operations Iran is running and then keep an eye on them or push back on them. And so the FBI is this kind of weird hybrid organization where it is a domestic law-enforcement organization, as you say, but it also has this counterintelligence apparatus that it engages in, even when things are related to stuff that happens on U.S. soil.

Rosin: And you said that you’ve heard from sources that people are worried that we’re not prepared. How worried? What does that mean? Does that mean there’s just a lack of expertise on Iran specifically? Like, what does it actually translate into?

Jurecic: There are a lot of different reasons. One is, as you say, you know, the people who are experts in this kind of work, both the prosecutors who know how to bring these cases, the agents who know how to investigate them—a lot of them are not there.

Agents have been reassigned from working on counterterrorism and counterintelligence cases to immigration cases. I think there was some reporting, I believe in The Washington Post, in the fall, that nearly a quarter of the FBI’s agents had been reassigned to immigration enforcement.

That’s a huge number. In D.C., we have had people at FBI and DOJ who might have normally been working on counterintelligence, counterterrorism issues who were out patrolling the streets because of the president’s directive to increase federal law enforcement’s presence in the city. And so there aren’t as many people. A lot of the experts are gone. The people who are there are stretched thin, and their work has been directed onto other issues that might take their attention away.

Rosin: So the FBI is part of the Department of Justice, obviously, so I want to talk about the DOJ more broadly. It’s been about three weeks since Trump fired Pam Bondi as the attorney general. What is your sense of the mood in the Department of Justice these days?

Jurecic: There was this period after Bondi was fired where it seemed like things were really up in the air. There was a question of, you know, who would take her role. There was reporting that it might be Lee Zeldin, who’s currently leading the EPA.

There was reporting that the No. 3 at DOJ, who’s a guy named Stan Woodward, would step down and that Harmeet Dhillon, who’s running the civil-rights division, would take his place. It seems like things have kind of stabilized a little bit for the time being. So currently, Todd Blanche, who was the deputy attorney general—that’s the No. 2—is the acting attorney general, and I, at least, have not seen any indication that Trump plans to nominate anybody imminently.

So it seems like this is Todd Blanche’s show for the time being.

Rosin: And what do we know about him?

Jurecic: Blanche is, unlike Bondi, someone who does not have a long history in Republican politics. He, however, was Trump’s criminal-defense lawyer for various criminal investigations into him and is very, very closely tied to Trump.

Overall, I think the common thread with, you know, some quirks here or there is really the people in charge at DOJ are people who are very happy to do things that Donald Trump has directed them to do, or that they think Donald Trump or his supporters would like. It’s very much a DOJ that is in line with the president’s particular vision, and Pam Bondi was pushed out, it seems, mostly because she wasn’t able to operationalize that agenda to Trump’s particular taste.

Rosin: So another big issue is election interference. It was the FBI that raided the Fulton County election office in Georgia. Do you have a sense of how Trump could use the FBI to interfere with elections? Like, what are you hearing about those efforts that might not be in the headlines in this exact moment?

Jurecic: It’s a little hard to say because anything that he would ask the FBI to do would be probably illegal—certainly far, far outside the bounds of anything that a president has ever asked the FBI to do in the past.

And so it’s a little bit like speculating about something that’s just so completely off the map. People are definitely worried about this. Dhillon has certainly been active recently. She has been sort of on this quest to obtain voter rolls from states and recently also sent a request to Michigan to get ballots from the Detroit area from 2024.

It’s not really clear what the goal is of getting these voter rolls. Nobody seems to have a firm idea. I think that that kind of adds to this sense that I’ve described that, you know, something bad might happen, but it’s really hard to specify what specifically, just because there’s no obvious set of levers to pull, if that makes sense.

And the reason is, I should say, just that the federal government doesn’t have a role or has a very, very, very limited role in administering elections at all. So there’s just not much to do.

Rosin: Okay. Is there anything else, as you’re looking at the future of the DOJ, FBI, understanding Trump’s priorities, that you are watching?

Jurecic: I’ve been keeping an eye on the prosecutions of Trump’s opponents and the investigations of them. That was one of the things that Trump was really angry at Bondi about, that they hadn’t moved quickly enough. And we’ve actually seen some news since Bondi was pushed out, that of, you know, the investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan moving forward.

DOJ swore in Joseph diGenova, who listeners may recall, was, used to be a sort of Fox News personality. He was very vocal around the 2020 election, and I believe publicly apologized after saying that Chris Krebs, who was the director of CISA [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency], an agency that ran sort of election-integrity issues, that Krebs should be, and I quote, “taken out at dawn and shot.”

So Joseph diGenova is now leading the investigation of John Brennan. That doesn’t fill me with hope that this will be a fair and evenhanded investigation, but clearly, DOJ, for whatever reason, maybe trying to make Trump happy, is trying to move full speed ahead. The problem that they have had, and I would certainly anticipate that they’ll run into this in the Brennan investigation, is that it turns out the American justice system is, actually, I would say surprisingly good at preventing a totally, you know, 100 percent politicized, made-up prosecution.

The prosecutions of James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were thrown out. DOJ is now trying to get them back into court again, but they’ve had a difficult time of it. With Brennan, I frankly would be a little surprised if they’re able to actually bring an indictment, especially because diGenova has reportedly moved the probe to D.C., and D.C. grand jurors have not looked particularly kindly on the administration as of late. So I think the question in my mind is, you know, DOJ is clearly trying to move more aggressively on these kinds of cases and investigations of Trump’s enemies that are really a priority for Trump.

Will they actually have any more success or is this a circumstance where in three to six months, we’re gonna be talking about how Todd Blanche was fired because Trump was angry that he wasn’t able to move these prosecutions forward enough?

Rosin: Right. So more efforts, more aggressive efforts—and I suppose the thing to worry about there is, they divert resources and time from other things that the DOJ or the FBI should be doing—but not necessarily more success.

Jurecic: That’s right. And I should say, I mean, one of the U.S. attorney’s offices that was very involved in the Comey and James prosecutions was the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia, which has historically, because it’s where the CIA is located, played a really significant role in counterterrorism and counterespionage prosecutions.

And some people in that office have quit or been pushed out because they didn’t want to be involved. So that’s just another example of how the, sort of, ability of the federal government to counter actual, real, existing threats as opposed to people Trump doesn’t like has really been hollowed out.

Rosin: Well, Quinta, thank you so much for helping us to understand all these complicated entanglements.

Jurecic: Thank you for having me.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes and Jinae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Miguel Carrascal engineered. Fact-checking by Marie-Rose Sheinerman, Sara Krolewski, and Isabel Ruehl. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.