Recently The Atlantic magazine ran a lengthy investigative piece detailing the excessive drinking of FBI director Kash Patel. (I wrote about it here.) Patel was enraged and immediately rushed to file a $250 million defamation lawsuit against the magazine and the article author Sarah Fitzpatrick. Legal observers said that Patel’s lawsuit was not well-founded and likely to lose, and thus would be yet another waste of taxpayer funds. But filing lawsuits is what the members of the Trump clown car do for the flimsiest of reasons.


Fitzpatrick and the magazine were defiant and indeed she said that since the lawsuit she had heard from a great many current and former FBI officials who wanted to provide more dirt on Patel. The results of the fresh outpouring have been released in another article by Fitzpatrick that makes Patel look even worse, someone who seems incredibly childish and obsessed with branding his name.

After my story appeared, I heard from people in Patel’s orbit and people he has met at public functions, who told me that it is not unusual for him to travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon. The bottles bear the imprint of the Kentucky distillery Woodford Reserve, and are engraved with the words “kash patel fbi director,” as well as a rendering of an FBI shield. Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: ka$h. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with “#9” there as well. One such bottle popped up on an online auction site shortly after my story appeared, and The Atlantic later purchased it. (The person who sold it to us did not want to be named, but said that the bottle was a gift from Patel at an event in Las Vegas.)
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In March, Patel and his team brought at least one case of bourbon to the FBI’s training facility in Quantico, Virginia, for a “training seminar,” where Ultimate Fighting Championship athletes provided mixed-martial-arts instruction to aspiring FBI agents and senior staff. At one point at least one bottle went missing, which caused the director to “lose his mind,” according to clients of Kurt Siuzdak, a retired agent who has assisted FBI agents, including whistleblowers, with legal issues. Siuzdak told me that multiple agents contacted him for legal guidance after Patel began threatening to polygraph and prosecute his staff over the missing bottle. “It turned into a shitshow,” Siuzdak said. Other attorneys told me they received similar calls from FBI employees regarding concerns about Patel’s bottles.

His obsession with bourbon will undoubtedly be brought up during his defamation lawsuit if it ever goes to trial, his purchasing of bottles in wholesale quantities undermining his claim to be a model of sobriety. But Patel’s immature behavior did not extend just to his bottles of bourbon.

Patel’s enthusiasm for self-branded merchandise is also well documented. “He is known as being very merch forward,” one DOJ employee told me. Even before he was confirmed as FBI director, Patel sent out Ka$h-branded merch boxes that included hats, socks, and other items depicting the comic-book character the Punisher, one person who received such a box told me. As my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro reported in 2024, before Patel became FBI director, he previously sold “Justice for All” #j6pc tees in honor of those arrested for their actions on January 6, 2021.
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Jensen’s lawyer, Margaret Donovan, told me in a statement that “there are line agents out there spending their nights and weekends trying to finish warrants, write reports, plan arrests. Yet the FBI Director apparently has the time to design logos, go to hockey games, sit for multi-hour podcast interviews. This is one of the most serious jobs in the country, not a vehicle for self-promotion and branding.”

When reading about Patel throwing a fit because of a missing bourbon bottle, my mind immediately went to that excellent 1954 film The Caine Mutiny where Humphrey Bogart plays Captain Queeg, the commander of a US navy ship, who becomes increasingly paranoid over time, obsessing over trivialities, and at moments of stress, takes out of his pocket a pair of steel marbles and starts rolling them around in his hand. Patel going berserk over a missing bottle of bourbon reminded me of the famous scene when Queeg goes ballistic over some missing strawberries.

That obsession surfaces again during a court martial scene.

Patel, like Queeg, seems to have absolutely no sense of proportion and may have already lost his marbles.

Even given the extremely low standards of Trump officials, Patel’s absurd behavior would seem to be a bit much. The countdown started some time ago as to how long it will take before Trump finally gets fed up and fires him. The only thing in his favor is that he is a guy, since Trump seems to be more willing to fire women. In an opening skit on Saturday Night Live, comedian Aziz Ansari playing Patel defends himself by saying that he is a trailblazer in that he is the first Indian-American to really suck at his job.

It will be interesting to see if he can last longer than a head of lettuce, which former UK prime minister Liz Truss famously (and hilariously) failed to do.