House Judiciary Committee Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) announced Wednesday that an investigation has been launched into reports of FBI Director Kash Patel’s alleged drinking.
The announcement by Judiciary Committee Democrats follows moves by the Senate to open an investigation into Patel.
Unlike the Senate, the minority party in the House has investigative powers.
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Democrats on the committee announced they would investigate Patel’s alleged drinking and demanded that the FBI director take a drug test for alcohol use disorder.
Judiciary Committee Democrats wrote to Patel:
A damning and explosive report recently revealed that the men and women of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are privately – and sometimes publicly – alarmed by your “episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.”1 There are numerous accounts of you drinking to the point of illness, directing profanity-laced outbursts at support staff, and passing out drunk behind locked doors in episodes that made you so inaccessible that agents had to go look for SWAT level hacking gear to wake you up. YOU.
Having repeatedly and inexplicably disappeared for extended periods of time only to reappear visibly intoxicated, it is not surprising that your alleged drinking habits and irregular schedule had clearly disastrous effects on your performance of your duties as Director of the FBI.
The inability of your staff to reach you has reportedly resulted in delays in urgent decisions to advance investigations into terrorism cases, reportedly including the issuance of FISA arrest warrants.
On the other hand, your inability to control your impulses has allegedly compromised high-stakes criminal investigations, including the manhunt for the Brown University mass shooter and the search for Charlie Kirk’s killer last year. During both investigations, you shared and disseminated inaccurate information.
These claims support what the American people saw for themselves: You carried boxes of alcohol aboard the FBI plane, drank “aperitifs” with foreign dignitaries, and downed beers in the Team USA locker room at the Olympics in Italy in a now-notorious viral video. These insights into your relationship with alcohol would be alarming to see in an FBI agent; for us to see them at the FBI director himself is shocking and indicative of a public emergency.
As you may know, federal law prevents employees in competitive public service jobs from “ordinarily we[ing] intoxicating drinks to excess. The Department of Justice’s Ethics Manual for On-Duty and Off-Duty Conduct applies this rule to all Department employees, including the FBI Director.
It’s surprising that the FBI director potentially being drunk on the job and endangering national security isn’t a bigger story.
As you will see, the investigation aims to shed light on reports of Patel’s alcohol abuse.