FBI Director Kash Patel is flailing after his $250 million defamation lawsuit ended up lending credence to an allegation he’d trashed as false.
The FBI director’s aides are desperately trying to explain why the lawsuit against The Atlantic over its explosive report on Patel’s alleged excessive drinking and paranoid behavior appeared to substantiate a central detail from the report.
The Atlantic’s report cited one episode in which Patel “struggled to log into an internal computer system” on April 10, and subsequently had what two sources described as a “freak-out,” believing he had been fired by President Donald Trump.
Although Patel initially slammed the allegations as “hit piece lies” and “BS,” his lawsuit acknowledges that he was, in fact, unable to access a government system that day.
“On April 10, 2026, Director Patel had a routine technical problem logging into a government system, which was quickly fixed,” the lawsuit, filed by attorney Jason Greaves of the Binnall Law Group, reads. “Director Patel’s sole focus is on carrying out the administration’s law enforcement priorities.”
Asked about the alleged incident on Tuesday, Patel grew combative and evaded the question before saying, “I was never locked out of my systems. Anyone that says the opposite is lying.”
Amid scrutiny of the apparent contradictions between Patel’s lawsuit and his own public statements, Erica Knight—a friend and longtime personal publicist to the FBI director, according to CBS News—has been working overtime to clean up the narrative.
“He was never locked out of any systems, nor is that what’s written. An iPad briefly didn’t load an attachment, which required tech support,” Knight wrote on X on Tuesday at 9:23 p.m. ET. “Manufactured controversy.”
Knight—whose taxpayer-funded role as Kash Patel’s PR fixer has drawn scrutiny inside the agency and from Democrats, according to CBS News—was back on the defensive again on Wednesday morning, striking a new condescending tone.
“Let me try to break this down as I would for my kindergartener, for the peanut gallery,” she wrote. “The FBI Director, in the most prolific year of crime reduction in U.S. history, operates on numerous systems a day. Despite being completely logged into his government systems, there was a minor glitch in loading a password-protected attachment, for which the software was promptly fixed.”
She continued, “The only people on the planet who thought this equated to him being fired are the same media that gave us Michael Avenatti and Jussie Smollett, who want nothing more than a disruption in accountability.”
Avenatti is the disgraced lawyer who once represented adult film actress Stormy Daniels in her failed defamation case against President Donald Trump, before being convicted for defrauding Daniels. Smollett is the actor who was accused of staging a hate crime.
Meanwhile, Ben Williamson, the assistant director for public affairs at the FBI, wrote on X that the claim that login issues led Kash Patel to believe he had been fired is “false.”
“This was a made-up rumor that only the Atlantic had low enough standards to print,” Williamson wrote on X.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the FBI for comment.
