Judge Tosses Kash Patel Lawsuit About His Partying Habits

A federal judge has thrown out FBI Director Kash Patel’s defamation claim against former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi.

Patel claimed that Figliuzzi slandered him during interviews on MS NOW, where the legal commentator said that Patel had “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor” of the bureau’s Washington headquarters. That, according to Patel, was not technically true.

Figliuzzi counterargued that the embellishment was sarcastic—a mode of protected speech—and the judge agreed.

“The Court finds that Figliuzzi’s statement is rhetorical hyperbole that cannot constitute defamation,” U.S. District Court Judge George Hanks Jr. wrote in his Tuesday decision. “Accordingly, Dir. Patel has failed to state a claim against Figliuzzi, and his lawsuit must be dismissed.”

Figliuzzi further claimed that the lawsuit was intended to silence him and other criticism of the FBI director, an abusive litigation strategy known as SLAPP, or strategic lawsuit against public participation.

But Figliuzzi’s tongue-in-cheek commentary wasn’t far from the truth: Patel has already sparked several scandals in his position due to his wild habits. Over the last year, Patel has wantonly flown around the country with FBI jets on the taxpayer’s dime. His trips have included a jaunt to Las Vegas, a trip to Nashville, and at least one widely publicized instance in which he flew to Penn State to visit his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, who was performing at a wrestling event.

Patel also ruffled feathers when he appeared at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, where he was caught on video chugging beer and whooping it up with the U.S. men’s hockey team. (He later insisted he was celebrating with his “friends.”)

But the former conspiracy podcaster is trying to litigate his way out of the reports. On Monday, Patel sued The Atlantic, demanding $250 million after the magazine issued a damning report citing numerous internal sources familiar with the director’s drinking habits, which reportedly go “far beyond the occasional beer” and may be contributing to Patel’s erratic, paranoid behavior.

“FBI officials and others in the administration have privately questioned whether alcohol played a role in the instances in which he shared inaccurate information about active law-enforcement investigations, including following the murder of Charlie Kirk,” The Atlantic reported.

Donald Trump, a famed teetotaller, has not been happy with the reports. The president reportedly called Patel after the Olympics stunt to express his unhappiness with the scene.

The result could soon see Patel out of the Trump administration entirely.

“We’re all just waiting for the word” that Patel has been fired, one FBI official told The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick.

The Department of Justice rescinded a number of subpoenas Monday, just days after they were issued as part of the agency’s nascent perjury case against former CIA Director John Brennan.

Over the weekend, prosecutors issued subpoenas requiring witnesses to testify before a grand jury in Washington. This came as a surprise to some veteran prosecutors, as witnesses will typically be interviewed by the FBI before they are brought before a grand jury, according to The New York Times.  

The DOJ did not offer an explanation for the rescission Monday. Law enforcement indicated that they had opted to schedule voluntary interviews instead. 

Last week, Maria Medetis Long, chief of the national security section for the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, was removed from the investigation after she reportedly expressed doubts about the probe. The department then brought in Joseph diGenova, a Trump loyalist who has been outspoken about Brennan’s alleged guilt, to take over the case. He was sworn in on Monday, so it’s unclear whether he was involved in the decision to issue subpoenas. 

The prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida are looking into allegations that Brennan lied to Congress about his role in crafting an intelligence assessment about Russian efforts to interfere on Donald Trump’s behalf in the 2016 presidential election. The U.S. attorney’s office in southern Florida has already issued 30 subpoenas as part of a sprawling conspiracy investigation into Trump’s perceived political enemies. Those cases are set to land on the desk of the same judge who handed the president a get-out-of-jail free card: Aileen Cannon.

This sudden rescission is part of a wider trend of unprecedented prosecutorial missteps by Trump’s Department of Justice, undermining numerous civil and criminal cases. 

Justin Sun, a Chinese national accused of fraud who invested $75 million in President Trump’s crypto firm after his election victory, is now suing the shady venture, which he says is “on the brink of collapse.” 

Sun’s lawsuit alleges that the company unjustifiably froze all of his tokens, blocking him from voting on any proposals, and threatened to burn them. 

Sun noted that he remains an “ardent supporter of President Trump and his Administration’s efforts to make America crypto friendly,” regardless of the lawsuit, even asserting that Trump might not have known, and would have blocked the move if he did.  

“I have tried in good faith to resolve this situation with the World Liberty project team without resorting to litigation. But the project team has refused my requests to unfreeze my tokens and restore my rights as a token holder. They have left me with no choice but to turn to the courts,” he wrote Tuesday on X. 

Sun’s lawsuit also alleges “criminal extortion,” claiming that World Liberty attempted to force ⁠Sun to mint and push its dollar-pegged stablecoin, USD1, on his TRON blockchain network. When Sun refused their advances, WLF retaliated against him, the lawsuit states. WLF has yet to comment. 

This isn’t Sun’s first time dipping his toe into the waters of questionable crypto investment schemes. In 2023, he was charged with marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a cryptocurrency token “through extensive wash trading,” which, as Popular Information puts it, is “the simultaneous or near-simultaneous purchase and sale of a security to make it appear actively traded without an actual change in beneficial ownership.” He was also charged with paying B-list celebrities like Jake Paul, Soulja Boy, and Lindsey Lohan to endorse his crypto token “without disclosing their compensation.” But that all went away when Trump came back into office and asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to end the case. Now it seems like Sun is getting a taste of his own medicine. 

Virginians voted Tuesday to redraw their state’s congressional map, approving a ballot measure to give Democrats as many as four additional seats. Republicans are flipping their lids.

Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham called the result a “Total travesty!!” on X, while MAGA pundit Juanita Broaddrick said, “No fucking way this is legit.” Right-wing troll Phillip Buchanan, known as Catturd on X, said, “What a fcking joke.”

Republican politicians also went into hysterics, with House Speaker Mike Johnson accusing Democrats of showing “how far they will go to break the law, ‘wage warfare,’ and disenfranchise millions of voters in order to force their unwanted, radical agenda down the throats of every American.”

Former Trump Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin took a shot at President Obama, who had thanked Virginia voters for “showing us what it looks like to stand up for our democracy and fight back.”

“Disenfranchising millions of voters and forcing 45% of Virginians to be represented by 1 congressional district and 55% represented by 10 is now ‘standing up for Democracy.’ Is that ‘equity’?” McLaughlin complained on X. “What a farce.”

Islamophobe and Donald Trump confidant Laura Loomer also blamed Obama.

“Democrats are stealing Virginia, compliments of Barack Hussein,” Loomer posted. “Virginia is about to become uninhabitable.”

Conservatives started this fight last year when Trump started pushing Republican-led states to redistrict in order to save his neck from a Democratic Congress. Trump said that Texas Republicans were “entitled to five more seats,” and the state’s GOP obliged. Republicans in Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio all followed suit.

Democrats fired back first in California, and now they have won a 51–49 percent vote in Virginia in a rebuke to Trump and the Republican Party. The GOP can cry disenfranchisement and gerrymandering all they want, but they have only themselves to blame, and Democrats now have a much stronger chance of retaking Congress in November’s midterm elections.

House Judiciary Democrats want to force FBI Director Kash Patel to take the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test after The Atlantic reported that his drinking was “a recurring source of concern across the government.”

“There are numerous accounts that you consume alcohol to the point of illness, direct profanity-laced outbursts at support staff, and pass out drunk behind locked doors in episodes making you so unreachable that agents have had to fetch SWAT-level breaching equipment to awaken you,” the Democrats wrote in a letter to Patel on Tuesday. “These glimpses of your relationship to alcohol would be alarming to see in an FBI agent; for us to see them in the FBI Director himself is shocking and indicative of a public emergency.”

The Atlantic article is pretty damning. A litany of sources detailed Patel’s excessive drinking in private clubs across the country with White House staff, which often led him to push meetings for his hangovers and in one instance even forced the FBI to request SWAT-level “breaching equipment” because he was unresponsive behind a locked door. Patel of course has denied all of these allegations, stating that he’d never been drunk on the job and filing a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic.

Patel has yet to respond to House Judiciary Democrats’ demand, which had a deadline of 5 p.m. Tuesday.