With Malice

Kash Patel’s FBI is going after reporters and news organizations for routine newsgathering practices.

On Sunday, April 20, Kash Patel, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, appeared on Fox News for an interview with Maria Bartiromo. They spoke about an unflattering article in The Atlantic detailing his alleged “conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences.” Drawing on interviews with more than two dozen bureau insiders, the April 17 report by Sarah Fitzpatrick claimed, among other things, that Patel’s security detail had trouble waking him up “because he was seemingly intoxicated,” and that an unhappy Donald Trump had called up to express his displeasure following his beer-chugging antics with the US men’s Olympic hockey team. Sources told Fitzpatrick that Patel was “a national-security vulnerability.”