House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) announced on Wednesday that an investigation has been launched into reports of FBI Director Kash Patel’s alleged drinking.
The Judiciary Committee Democrats’ announcement comes on the heels of the Senate taking steps to begin an investigation into Patel.
Unlike in the Senate, the minority party in the House has investigative powers.
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The Democrats on the committee announced that they will be investigating Patel’s alleged drinking and demanded that the FBI Director pass a screening test for alcohol use disorders.
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 at times publicly—alarmed by your “episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.”1 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.
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.
Your staff’s inability to reach you has reportedly led to delays in time-sensitive decisions to advance investigations of terror cases, including apparently the issuance of FISA warrants.
On the flip side, your inability to control your impulses has reportedly undermined high-stakes criminal investigations, including the manhunt for the mass shooter at Brown University and the search for the assassin of Charlie Kirk last year. During the course of both investigations, you shared and broadcast inaccurate information.
These claims corroborate what the American people have seen for ourselves: you have shuttled boxes of alcohol onboard the FBI jet, downed “aperitivo” with foreign dignitaries, and chugged beers in the Team USA locker room at the Olympics in Italy in a now notorious viral video. 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.
As you may be aware, federal law prevents employees in competitive civil service jobs from “habitually us[ing] intoxicating beverages to excess.” The Department of Justice Ethics Handbook for On- and Off-Duty Conduct applies that rule to all Department employees, including the FBI Director.
It is astounding that the FBI Director potentially being drunk on the job and jeopardizing national security is not a bigger story.
As you will see, the investigation seeks to get to the bottom of reports of Patel’s alcohol abuse.
