Kash Patel Often Too Drunk To Show Up To Work, Which Is His Only Relatable Characteristic

Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, but Patel is trying to prove otherwise.

Well if we don’t have egg on our face. Here we’ve spent the last year making crack after crack about Defense Secretary and beau ideal of white man mediocrity Pete (Hic!) Hegseth being the biggest drunk in Trump Town. But it turns out that while we were imagining raging Pentagon-wide keggers, another high-level Trumpist was boozing it up like an old-timey gold prospector in a Deadwood saloon. (ALLEGEDLY!)

The prospector in this analogy is FBI Director Kash Patel. Late Friday, The Atlantic published a story that reads as if every knife that administration officials had out for him got planted into his back at once. Benders, unexplained absences from the office, meetings that had to be rescheduled because he was too drunk to attend them ... the list goes hilariously on and on.

Even the lede is fantastic. The piece’s author, Sarah Fitzpatrick, claims that just recently, Patel was having trouble logging into an FBI computer system. Anyone who has ever worked with a company computer network — which is to say, everyone in America under the age of 90 — knows that there are a gazillion dumb reasons for such a problem: incorrect password, some administrator somewhere checked a box that was supposed to remain unchecked, gremlins, whatever.

Patel, however, is paranoid and worried about his job security. When he couldn’t log into the computer, he assumed he had been canned:

[H]e panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”

We are reminded of a time, many years ago, when our mother couldn’t get a tape to play on the VCR. She freaked out, hollering and raving about the goddamn VCR not working when all she wanted to do was watch last night’s goddamn L.A. Law and what the hell was wrong with this goddamn machine. And she kept at it, right up to the moment when, summoned to the den, we stopped halfway down the steps and called out, “Okay, first thing: Is the power on?”

Patel had not been fired. Fitzpatrick has two sources who say the problem was a technical issue that was quickly fixed. But that’s just the sort of tantrum that makes us feel so secure about the temperament of one guy who the nation really needs to stay cool during a crisis.

FBI Director Kash Patel Throws Tantrum Because People Noticed Him Being Entitled Penis

The story does not get better from there. We are told that Patel is known to “drink to excess” at a private club in DC and The Poodle Room in Vegas, where he spends whatever weekends he’s not flying the FBI jet to listen to his dipwad girlfriend sing the national anthem at D-list wrestling events.

Then there is this:

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated [...] A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

Let us repeat that: The director of the nation’s largest law enforcement agency was so blackout drunk that his security detail had to knock down a door like the SEALs entering bin Laden’s compound just to make sure that he, soused to the gills, hadn’t choked to death on his own vomit.

Needless to say, actual FBI agents who take their jobs seriously and aren’t just slumming for the clout and to feed an insatiable addiction to attention are worried that Patel’s behavior is a threat to public safety. One agent told Fitzpatrick that since Trump launched his war on Iran, the possibility of a domestic terrorist attack happening when Patel is snookered “keeps me up at night.” And by the sound of it, there is about an 80 percent chance that he is snookered at any given moment.

Hackers Hack Kash Patel's Gmail, Now Have His Love Letters, HIMS Purchasing Receipts

As of Friday night, the administration was standing behind Patel. White House Spokesdip Karoline Leavitt told The Atlantic that “crime across the country has plummeted to the lowest level in more than 100 years,” implying that Patel had something to do with that. (He didn’t.) The public affairs office at the FBI denied everything, calling it “one of the most absurd” stories they had ever heard, and promised a lawsuit.

But the best denials were from Patel, who told the magazine if they printed all these alleged tall tales, he would see it in court and it should bring its checkbook:

Some people would call it that. Those people are morons. We are not lawyers, and even we know the actual malice standard is not a layup. In fact, it is a very, very high bar to clear when it comes to stories about public figures. At least until our wingnut-captured Supreme Court overrules New York Times v. Sullivan.

Is Kash Patel in danger of getting fired? Who knows. Trump still likes how aggressive the FBI director has been in pursuing his enemies and firing every agent with even the remotest connection to any of the investigations of the president from the last decade. But even Trump is going to have his limits with the bad press. And there has been so, so, so very much bad press.

For our money, we kind of hope Patel stays. For one, he gives us lots of material. For two, we’d rather have his bumbling, stumbling, drunken ass doing a poor job than some competent hard-right MAGA guy who can do the job of pursuing retribution against Trump’s enemies with ruthless efficiency. That is a lot scarier to us than having an FBI director who’s a useless lush.

[The Atlantic]

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