Kash Patel has filed a lawsuit over a profile piece. But, by suing, the FBI director only brings more light to allegations about his behaviors and risks future embarrassment
FBI Director Kash Patel’s $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic did little to dampen the disturbing allegations in what he calls its “hit piece” against him — and instead sparked a firestorm of broadsides from his critics.
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.
In his most prolific writing era, Stephen King would wake up, chug a bottle of NyQuil, snort a fat line of coke, and write and drink the rest of the day (peppering in some additional drug use throughout the day, of course). He doesn’t even remember writing entire books but they came out in a coherent form. It’s almost like even if the magic spell checking software doesn’t work, you can just hire a sober editor to make check your work.
Kinda amazingly, the work he has absolutely no memory of writing was Cujo, which was written before he purchases a word processor and was therefore written entirely on a typewriter.
My brain immediately went to Clippy popping out of a wand and saying “It looks like you are trying to cast a spell, do you need help with that?”