Policy / April 20, 2026
If the FBI director’s alleged drunkenness prevents him from implementing Trump’s agenda, perhaps that’s not such a bad thing.
(Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Normally, SWAT teams rely on specialized “breaching equipment” to break down doors in an emergency when criminals are holed up in a heavily fortified bunker. But last year, FBI agents allegedly almost used breaching equipment not to capture a dangerous offender but to try to wake up their boss, Kash Patel.
Friday, Sarah Fitzpatrick, writing in The Atlantic, reported that the FBI director was often so incapacitated by excessive alcohol consumption that he was unable to do his job. According to Fitzpatrick, “on several occasions over the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was apparently intoxicated…A request for ‘breach equipment’…was made last year because Patel was inaccessible behind locked doors.” »
Fitzpatrick’s article, based on interviews with numerous government officials granted anonymity, paints a detailed and disturbing portrait of a senior official prone to “obvious drunkenness and unexplained absences.” Fitzpatrick notes,
Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking was a recurring source of concern within the government. They said he was known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at Ned’s private club in Washington, D.C., in the presence of White House and other administration staff. He is also known for drinking excessively at the Poodle Room in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends part of his weekend. Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day because of his drinking nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.
The White House and Patel disputed Fitzpatrick’s reporting in its entirety, and on Monday morning, Patel filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic on his piece. But even before Atlantic History, there was already ample public evidence that Patel was entirely unfit for the job. He has repeatedly large damaged casessuch as the investigation into the murder of Charlie Kirkmaking premature and false statements in an attempt to attract media attention. He was also accused of using an FBI plane for private businessincluding meetings with his girlfriend.
There is no doubt that Patel is a buffoon. The only factual uncertainty is whether he is an often drunken jester or a largely sober jester.
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Patel is already on ice in the White House after his incompetence was ridiculed by Republicans and Democrats alike. THE Atlantic The talk is perfectly designed to turn things around and get him fired, given that drug addiction is one of the few transgressions that Donald Trump, a famous longtime teetotaler who saw his older brother, Fred Trump Jr., drink himself to death, cannot tolerate in his subordinates. This helps explain why Patel reacted with fierce indignation.
But even though Patel’s alleged drinking problem poses a potential disaster for him, it could ironically turn out to be good news for the rest of us. Indeed, anything that hinders Patel’s ability to execute Trump’s agenda is likely a net bonus, especially since the president is eager to turn the FBI into a private police force that punishes his political enemies.
In truth, Patel, whether drunk or sober, has been all too effective in reshaping the FBI along Trumpian lines. In January, The New York Times published a detailed reportbased on interviews with 45 current and former FBI employees, who made clear that under Patel’s leadership, the agency has become deeply partisan.
The two big changes concern the FBI’s mandate and its personnel. Like the Times notes that, under Patel’s predecessor, Chris Wray (who was appointed by Trump in 2017), the FBI had eight major goals: “to combat terrorism, organized crime, espionage, public corruption, white-collar crime, cybercrime, and violent crime, and to protect civil rights.” Under Patel, there are four major priorities: “defending the homeland, restoring public trust, crushing violent crime, and ensuring strict organizational accountability.” »
It’s troubling that two of these priorities (rebuilding public trust and strengthening organizational accountability) are nothing more than euphemisms for firing FBI agents for political reasons. Meanwhile, “defending the homeland” means making the FBI complicit with ICE in immigration enforcement.
During Senate hearings to confirm his nomination, Patel was asked whether he would fire the agents investigating Donald Trump. Patel replied that “no one will be fired for case assignments.”
Patel was lying. He has in fact fired many agents for political reasons. Like the Times documents, agents have been fired or forced to resign for being assigned to the Jan. 6 investigation and various other Trump-related investigations. One agent, David Maltinsky, was fired for having a Pride flag on his desk, which his supervisor had already assured him was acceptable. A group of agents were fired for kneeling during a Black Lives Matter protest, which they did to defuse tensions. Spencer Evans, who ran the Las Vegas field office, was fired because a podcaster criticized him for being too rigorous in his requirements for Covid testing of agents.
Jill Fields, a former violent crimes intelligence analyst at the Los Angeles field office, was forced to resign because she resisted her superiors who wanted to target lawful anti-ICE protesters. Fields’ account of his experience is striking:
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I was directed to have members of my team conduct a pre-assessment of certain anti-ICE protesters who may have prevented an immigration arrest. FBI policy states that an investigation cannot be initiated based on activity protected by the First Amendment. The investigative team that analyzed the video determined that the protesters did nothing wrong; the police told them to stay back, and they did.
I was told they had to open an investigation anyway. I pushed back, and they said, Jill, you can either be fired today or in four years, which is when another administration comes in and starts investigating constitutional violations. And I said to myself: then fire me today.
As Fields and other former FBI agents make clear, Patel transformed the FBI, which was already a conservative institution, into a dangerously right-wing agency with enormous power to hurt its political enemies. Focused on punishing Trump’s opponents (real or imagined), Patel’s FBI is also incapable of dealing with real problems, whether political corruption, organized crime or terrorism.
Trump may fire Patel soon, but the damage done will outlast Patel’s term because he has the full support of the president and the Republican Party. The real problem is not Patel’s alleged drunkenness but the deep corruption of the nation’s most important law enforcement agency.
Damn Lord Jeet Heer is national affairs correspondent for The nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, Time of the Monsters. He also writes the monthly column “Morbid symptoms.” The author of Art lovers: the adventures of Françoise Mouly in comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: reviews, essays and profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American perspective, The Guardian, The New RepublicAnd The Boston Globe.