FBI Director Kash Patel has ordered a criminal investigation into The Atlantic reporter who wrote about his drinking, according to two sources familiar with the matter — an inquiry the bureau publicly denied exists.
MS NOW broke the story on Wednesday, writing that agents from an insider threats unit in Huntsville, Alabama are reviewing journalist Sarah Fitzpatrick’s contacts and potentially her phone metadata and social media records, with the inquiry opened at Patel’s direction.
This was flatly denied by FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson, who said, “This is completely false. No such investigation like this exists and the reporter you mention is not being investigated at all.”
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Leak investigations typically target disclosures of classified information. Fitzpatrick’s April 17 story contained none — sourced from more than two dozen current and former FBI officials, it reported that Patel drinks to the point of intoxication, misses briefings, and on at least one occasion required SWAT-level breaching equipment to rouse him from behind locked doors.
“They know they are not supposed to do this,” one agent assigned to the case told MS NOW. “But if they don’t go forward, they could lose their jobs. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
“The FBI’s probe would be outrageous even if The Atlantic reported classified information, which it didn’t,” Seth Stern of the Freedom of the Press Foundation said. Adding a sharper point about Patel’s concurrent $250 million defamation lawsuit, which characterizes Fitzpatrick’s sources as fabricated. “It doesn’t make much sense for Patel’s FBI to investigate leaks from what Patel’s lawsuit over the same reporting called ‘sham sources.’ Fake sources can’t leak.”
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Editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg called the investigation, “if confirmed to be true,” “an outrageous attack on the free press and the First Amendment itself,” saying The Atlantic would “not be intimidated by illegitimate investigations or other acts of politically motivated retaliation.” Fitzpatrick has said she stands by every word of her reporting.
This is the third known instance of Patel’s FBI scrutinizing a journalist over unflattering coverage. The bureau previously opened an inquiry into New York Times reporter Elizabeth Williamson after her February 28 story on Patel directing FBI resources to his girlfriend’s security detail — the FBI said it was not pursuing that case.
Agents also executed a search warrant on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home in January — seizing her devices in connection with a leak investigation into a government contractor, not targeting her directly — and her reporting on federal workforce upheaval won a Pulitzer Prize days after the raid became public.
Before taking the director’s post, Patel publicly described the media as “the most powerful enemy the United States has ever seen.”
A federal judge dismissed Patel’s separate defamation suit against former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi on April 21 — one day after Patel filed the Atlantic suit — ruling his comment about Patel spending more time in nightclubs than at FBI headquarters was rhetorical hyperbole, not defamation.
Related: Congressional Democrats Order Kash Patel to Submit Alcohol Screening Test Under Oath
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