Sarah Fitzpatrick, The Atlantic investigative journalist behind last week’s bombshell story about FBI Director Kash Patel, has said she has since been “inundated” with messages from new sources corroborating her reporting.
Fitzpatrick’s story alleged that Patel drinks to excess – so much so that, in one instance, breaching equipment was ordered to break into a locked bedroom when he did not respond to inquiries about his well-being. The profile and also characterized him as deeply paranoid about being fired by President Donald Trump.
Patel has denied the allegations, dismissed the article as a “hit piece,” and, on Monday, launched a $250 million defamation lawsuit against the magazine.
“I can say unequivocally that I never listen to the fake news mafia,” he said at a Department of Justice press conference Tuesday. “And when they get louder, it just means I’m doing my job.”
Speaking to the Radio Atlantic podcast one week after the article, Fitzpatrick was asked about the director’s retaliatory moves and said she was undaunted.
“My response is that I stand by every single word of this report,” she said. “We were very diligent. We were very careful. It went through multiple levels of editing, review, care.
“And I think one of the things that has been most gratifying, after – immediately after the story published was, I have been inundated by additional sourcing going up to the highest levels of the government, thanking us for doing the work, providing additional corroborating information.”
Fitzpatrick said that she used more than two dozen sources for her original report, characterizing the officials she spoke to as “people who felt that not only was this conduct embarrassing, unbecoming, but that it was a national security vulnerability, and that Americans were perhaps less safe as a result.”
Asked about some of the more shocking details in her report, she said: “I had never heard anything like this as a reporter, and I think I spent a very long time, a very diligent amount of time checking it out because it was so explosive.
“And I think the fact that this was known throughout the FBI, throughout the Justice Department, that it reached the White House is because it was so alarming. And people were really frightened.”
She said some of her sources were not merely panicking but profoundly emotional in expressing their concerns to her, describing them as “grown men who have done nothing but counterintelligence and solving some of the worst-of-the-worst crimes who are not easily scared, intimidated, concerned.”
“They were frightened,” she said. “And that really stuck with me.”
Fitzpatrick said that the fact that the United States is currently at war with Iran had left the country facing a “uniquely vulnerable” moment, which is why she felt compelled to bring what she called “an open secret” about Patel to light.
She characterized the FBI director as “extremely, extremely vindictive” but reiterated that she was not concerned by his litigation because of the robustness of her reporting.
As to what happens next, Fitzpatrick answered: “People are just waiting for the moment when he will be fired, and it’s creating – unfortunately, it creates a lot of chaos and a lot of instability.
“There are really key, important, life-or-death decisions that need to be made that… The entire staff of the FBI, you want to be focused, you want to be clear on who their leader is, and unfortunately that’s not happening.”
Patel reacted angrily to The Atlantic’s story, appearing on Fox News host Maria Bartiromo’s show Sunday Morning Futures last weekend and declaring: “We are not going to take this laying down. You want to attack my character? Come at me. Bring it on. I'll see you in court.”
In his lawsuit that followed a day later, his attorneys wrote: “Defendants are of course free to criticize the leadership of the FBI, but they crossed the legal line by publishing an article replete with false and obviously fabricated allegations designed to destroy Director Patel’s reputation and drive him from office.”
The suit is seeking “compensatory, special, and punitive damages” of no less than $250 million, as well as the “disgorgement of all income defendants have earned by virtue of their lies about Director Patel.”
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