On October 25, 2025, the federal government was on day 25 of what would become the longest shutdown in American history. FBI agents were working without pay. And Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, boarded a bureau jet and flew to State College, Pennsylvania, to watch his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, sing the national anthem at a pro wrestling event. The plane then flew on to Nashville, where Wilkins lives.
Six days later, Patel fired Steven Palmer, a 27-year FBI veteran who oversaw the bureau’s air fleet.
That was the beginning.
The reporting that Patel is now suing to bury
On Friday, the Atlantic published a report by Sarah Fitzpatrick, a former senior investigative producer at 60 Minutes and a professor at Columbia. She interviewed more than two dozen people, including current and former FBI officials, members of Congress, hospitality workers, and others close to Patel. They described a director who drinks to the point of “obvious intoxication” at Ned’s in Washington and the Poodle Room in Las Vegas, who forces his staff to move early-morning meetings after late-night drinking, and whose behavior has left colleagues worried about how he would handle a domestic terror attack.
Psaki: Patel’s advisor said a lawsuit is being filed.
Fitzpatrick: I stand by every word of this reporting. We have excellent attorneys. pic.twitter.com/BHBMHkV9ss
— Acyn (@Acyn) April 18, 2026
One detail has traveled faster than the rest. On at least one occasion last year, according to the reporting, members of Patel’s security detail were unable to reach him behind locked doors and put in a request for “breaching equipment,” the kind of gear tactical teams use to force entry. They were trying to wake him up.
On Monday morning, Patel filed a $250 million defamation suit against the Atlantic. The Atlantic said in a statement that it stands by its reporting. Fitzpatrick, speaking on MS NOW, said she stands “by every word.”
The mass shooting at Brown University
On December 13, 2025, a former graduate student entered a classroom building at Brown University and killed two students. Nine more were wounded. Two days later, he shot and killed an MIT professor who had been a classmate.
According to a whistleblower account submitted to Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI’s elite evidence response team was ready to fly to Providence that night. They could not. One of the bureau’s two jets was in South Florida with Patel, who was visiting his parents. Patel had ordered the second jet held for the Hostage Rescue Team, a call that caused immediate confusion within the bureau because regional SWAT teams were already positioned to respond.
The evidence team drove from Quantico to Providence through a winter storm. They arrived at 9 a.m. the next morning.
In his letter to the Government Accountability Office and the Justice Department’s inspector general, Durbin cited a credible source describing a meeting Patel had held with FBI field offices the previous year. According to that account, Patel told them that field offices with golf, hockey, fishing, or hunting nearby were going to “see a lot of me.”
The purges
On January 22, 2026, the New York Times published an article quoting current and former FBI employees who described Patel as unserious and said he had demoralized the bureau. The next day, Patel ordered the firing of as many as six agents in the Miami field office, along with senior agents in Atlanta, New York, and New Orleans. Several of the Miami agents had worked on the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago.
An MS NOW analysis later documented four separate instances in which unflattering accounts of Patel’s conduct were followed, within hours or days, by rounds of FBI firings. The FBI Agents Association has called the firings unjustified and illegal.
What Hakeem Jeffries asked out loud
On Monday afternoon, hours after Patel filed his suit, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries stood at a podium at the Capitol and called him “this incompetent, toxic, malignant individual.” Then Jeffries asked the question that has been hanging over the bureau for a year.
“What about the people who confirmed him?”
He listed five names. Kristi Noem. Pam Bondi. Pete Hegseth. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kash Patel.
Two of the five are already gone. Noem was fired on March 5. Bondi on April 2. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, whose name was not on Jeffries’ list, resigned Monday evening.
Patel is still the FBI Director. The Atlantic is standing by its reporting. The Senate that confirmed him has not moved.
Nobody in a position to answer Jeffries has.