Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are demanding that FBI Director Kash Patel fill out a screening test used to assess “harmful patterns of alcohol consumption and routinely used by individuals to help identify hazardous drinking behaviors,” following allegations published in an Atlantic article.
Subscribe to read this story ad-free
Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.
In a letter to Patel on Tuesday, ranking member Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and more than a dozen other Democrats suggested the alleged behavior could harm U.S. national security.
Some of the screening questions, attached to the letter, ask “How many drinks containing alcohol do you have on a typical day when you are drinking,” “How often during the last year have you failed to do what was normally expected from you because of drinking,” and “How often during the last year have you been unable to remember what happened the night before because you had been drinking?”
The Democrats also ask that Patel fill out a sworn statement that his answers are true, under penalty of perjury.
Citing the Atlantic report about Patel’s alleged excessive drinking and unexplained absences at the agency, Raskin wrote, “it is no surprise that your purported drinking habits and erratic schedule have had demonstrably disastrous effects on your performance of duties as FBI Director.”
Raskin told Patel that the Atlantic report about his drinking created serious concerns.
“Your inability to control your impulses has reportedly undermined high-stakes criminal investigations.”
But Democrats aren’t in the majority and lack unilateral subpoena power, and it’s not likely Republicans will act if Patel refuses.
Patel sued The Atlantic this week over the story, with his attorneys calling it a “sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece.” The FBI director is seeking $250 million from the magazine. In a statement on Monday, he said the magazine was “given the truth before they published, and they chose to print falsehoods anyway.”
Ben Williamson, a spokesman for Patel, called the Democrats’ probe “as baseless and meritless as virtually every other investigation Mr. Raskin has spent his time in Congress pursuing.”
An attorney who filed Patel’s lawsuit did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Raskin’s letter.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week that Patel remained a critical player in the administration. Trump has previously conveyed his displeasure to Patel about his locker room activities, as well as his use of a government plane to fly to the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, after videos of the FBI director chugging beer circled on social media, NBC News reported in February.
During Trump’s transition to the White House, Patel disclosed a decades-old arrest during a college basketball game. He was arrested in 2001 on charges of misdemeanor public intoxication by police in Richmond, Virginia, where he was attending college, according to public records. Three days later, the records show, he was found guilty of the misdemeanor offense. A Trump transition spokesman said at the time that the case was dug up by the media as an effort to smear Patel.
On Wednesday, a Patel spokesperson said: “This is not new, it’s a 25-year-old college incident that was disclosed to the Senate Judiciary Committee during the confirmation process. Frankly, it’s embarrassing that NBC is spending time on it.”
Last week, The Atlantic reported that Patel “frantically” called aides and allies on April 10 after he was unable to log into an internal computer system and believed he had been fired. The Atlantic story cited nine people familiar with Patel’s outreach. NBC News and other news outlets had asked administration officials that day about rumors of Patel’s firing, but officials had swiftly said they weren’t true.
Patel’s lawsuit says he “had a routine technical problem logging into a government system, which was quickly fixed” on April 10. The suit says it was “false” that Patel engaged in a “freak-out” or was “deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy” after the tech issue.
When NBC News asked Patel to explain the login issue during a press conference on Tuesday, he said he “was never locked out of my systems” and that “anyone that says the opposite is lying.” He broadly accused the press of reporting “false lies” and raising “baseless questions,” and said he would serve in his position as long as Trump and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche wanted him to do so.
Erica Knight, a communications strategist who has worked with Patel, wrote on X that he was “never locked out of any systems” but that an “iPad briefly didn’t load an attachment, which required tech support.”
“He was not locked out,” Patel attorney Jesse Binnall said in an email to NBC News on Tuesday night. “There was a technical problem using a government system.”
Binnall added: “Outside of the minor technological glitch, the rest of the reporting is fantasy.”
A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed another lawsuit filed by Patel against a commentator over statements made on MSNBC’s – now MS Now’s “Morning Joe.»
Patel sued former FBI assistant director-turned-intelligence analyst Frank Figliuzzi for defamation over his comments, including “reportedly, he’s been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.”
The judge found that no reasonable viewer would interpret the remarks as facts about Patel.
