This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

Kash Patel, the conservative podcaster whom President Donald Trump appointed as the director of the FBI in 2025, is currently suing The Atlantic for $250 million over its reporting that his predilection for drinking “to the point of obvious intoxication” has been a “recurring source of concern across the government.” In a lawsuit he filed in federal court on April 20, Patel characterized the article as a “sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece.” In an interview on April 23, the writer, Sarah Fitzpatrick, said that in the days since The Atlantic published the story, she’d been “inundated” with new sources corroborating it.

As it turns out, Patel has a history of filing ambitious lawsuits against people who say things on the internet that make him upset. Back in 2023, he sued the blogger Jim Stewartson in federal district court in Patel’s home state of Nevada, alleging that Stewartson was “habitually” defaming Patel and other “prominent conservative figures” on social media and in his Substack newsletter. Among the statements from Stewartson that Patel alleged are part of this “smear campaign”: that Patel is a “Kremlin asset”; that Patel is a........

© Talking Points Memo