Tipsheet

Kash Patel Did What? Did The Atlantic Publish Another Fake News Piece Again?

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  April 18, 2026 7:00 AM

The Atlantic is likely to face a lawsuit for publishing a piece that could be defamatory of FBI Director Kash Patel. It focuses on how Patel’s job security might be at risk due to his alleged excessive drinking. We won’t go into too much detail here, but this isn’t the first time this publication has released false information in an attempt to attack the Trump administration (via The Atlantic):

On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log into 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.”

Patel oversees an agency that employs roughly 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify information that can be presented under oath in a court of law. News of his emotional outburst ricocheted through the bureau, prompting chatter among officials and, in some corners of the building, expressions of relief. The White House fielded calls from the bureau and from members of Congress asking who was now in charge of the FBI.

It turned out that the answer was still Patel. He had not been fired. The access problem, two people familiar with the matter said, appears to have been a technical error, and it was quickly resolved. “It was all ultimately bullshit,” one FBI official told me.

But Patel, according to multiple current officials, as well as former officials who have stayed close to him, is deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy. He has good reasons to think so—including some having to do with what witnesses described to me as bouts of excessive drinking. My colleague Ashley Parker and I reported earlier this month that Patel was among the officials expected to be fired after Attorney General Pam Bondi’s ouster, on April 2. “We’re all just waiting for the word” that Patel is officially out of the top job, an FBI official told me this week, and a former official told my colleague Jonathan Lemire that Patel was “rightly paranoid.” Senior members of the Trump administration are already discussing who might replace him, according to an administration official and two people close to the White House who were familiar with the conversations.

[…]

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.

And you’re wondering why The Atlantic is the first to publish this—it’s because, supposedly, every other DC reporter tried to dig into it but couldn’t find any solid evidence. 

“Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court—bring your checkbook,” the FBI replied to The Atlantic. 

The anonymous sources are at it again, and well, if you’re going to accuse the FBI director, the head of America’s leading law enforcement and domestic intelligence agency, of being a drunkard, you’d better have evidence to support it.