House Democrats Demand Kash Patel Answer Questionnaire on Alcohol Use Disorder

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are demanding that the FBI director, Kash Patel, fill out a multiple choice questionnaire about his alleged drinking problem, the lawmakers announced Wednesday. The decision to question Mr. Patel follows a damning report from the Atlantic that accuses the director of erratic behavior and paranoia on the job, which sources claim were a result, in part, of his drinking habits. The Atlantic’s reporting cites several current and former FBI officials who have questioned Mr. Patel’s fitness for the job. On one occasion, a source claims that Mr. Patel’s security detail had to request breaching equipment typically used by SWAT teams to try to reach him behind a closed door. In a $250 million defamation lawsuit against the outlet, Mr. Patel’s lawyers claim that many of the allegations in the report are untrue. “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,” Democrats on the panel, led by Congressman Jamie Raskin, wrote to Mr. Patel. “After repeatedly and inexplicably disappearing for long stretches of time only to reappear conspicuously inebriated, it is no surprise that your purported drinking habits and erratic schedule have had demonstrably disastrous effects on your performance of duties as FBI Director,” they continue. Attached to the letter sent by Democrats is an Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, or AUDIT. The 10-question document includes five potential answers for each query meant to gauge the severity of Mr. Patel’s alleged drinking problem.“How often do you have a drink containing alcohol?” one of the questions asks. “How often do you have six or more drinks on one occasion?” asks another. Five of the queries on the questionnaire ask about a respondent’s drinking habits over the course of the past year. The questions ask about a subject’s ability to stop drinking once he or she has started, how often the subject needs to drink in the morning in order to function, and how often the subject is unable to remember what happened after consuming alcohol the night before. “[T]he American people deserve to hear the facts directly from you now — not your lawyers weeks or months from now,” Judiciary Committee members say in their letter. Mr. Patel has denied having a drinking problem and claims the most salacious details of the Atlantic’s story are untrue. On Tuesday, during a press conference to announce a federal indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mr. Patel got into several contentious back-and-forths with reporters. “Let’s have a survey. How many of you people believe that’s true?” Mr. Patel asked reporters at the press conference after a journalist asked about one of the allegations in the Atlantic’s story. “Did you communicate to anyone that you thought you were fired?” the reporter asked without responding to Mr. Patel’s question. “Don’t cut me off,” Mr. Patel shot back. “The problem with you and your baseless reporting is that [it] is an absolute lie. It was never said, it never happened, and I will serve in this administration for as long as the president and the attorney general want me to do so.”Another reporter asked: “Can you say definitively that you have not been intoxicated or absent during your tenure as FBI director?” “I can say unequivocally that I never listen to the fake news mafia,” the director responded without answering the question.

House Democrats Demand Kash Patel Answer Questionnaire on Alcohol Use Disorder

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