FBI Director Kash Patel reportedly provides out self-branded bottles of bourbon, together with some with facsimilies of his signature, at public occasions — at the same time as he battles The Atlantic journal over its reporting on his consuming habits.
The bottles bear the bureau’s official defend together with the phrases, “Kash Patel FBI Director.” The whiskey comes from Kentucky-based distillery Woodford Reserve, based on The Atlantic, which bought a bottle on-line from a vendor who claimed to have been gifted it by Patel in Las Vegas.
A bureau spokesperson didn’t deny the apply, however argued it isn’t uncommon and famous an FBI division gave out a branded whiskey bottle three years in the past, through the Biden administration.
“Your story is ‘dumb’ not ‘massive,’” FBI rep Ben Williamson responded on X to Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson Wednesday evening. “Customised gifts like this are commonplace throughout authorities together with the FBI.”
A number of former FBI brokers instructed The Put up that the bureau has used branded bottles of whiskey to have a good time milestones akin to retirements and handed them out as presents lengthy earlier than Patel took the reins. One supply recounted seeing FBI-branded shot glasses, which the bureau sells on-line.
“I received a bottle that appears precisely like that, of Woodford Reserve with an etching, ‘Congrats in your retirement,’” mentioned John Gagliano, a former FBI agent who retired after 25 years in 2016.
“I’m not going to call names, however I’ve sat in a resort room after a protracted day in a harmful space with an FBI director and shared a beer. It’s not past the pale for that to occur.”
A few of the Patel-branded bottles in query have been inscribed with the quantity 9 in an obvious nod to Patel being the ninth Senate-confirmed FBI director.
Eight sources instructed The Atlantic that Patel has given the self-branded bourbon bottles to employees and civilians alike all through his tenure as FBI director, together with on official journeys.
One of many bottles was even left behind on a visit to Milan, the place Patel chugged beer within the locker room of the gold medal-winning US Olympic males’s hockey workforce.
The next month, one of many bottles disappeared throughout a “coaching seminar” at Quantico, at which brokers and prime employees received suggestions from Final Combating Championship fighters — prompting Patel to “lose his thoughts,” claimed retired agent Kurt Siuzdak, who’s repping others with complaints in opposition to the bureau.
Former Assistant Director in Cost of the FBI’s Washington Discipline Workplace Steven Jensen, who oversaw the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot investigations and was fired final August, described seeing the bottles in a wrongful-termination lawsuit final 12 months.
“Jensen … seen a group of whiskey bottles and cigars on Patel’s desk,” Jensen’s lawsuit claimed. “Patel defined that he used to provide his personal model of cigars, however they don’t seem to be in manufacturing anymore.”
“The bottles in query are a part of a practice within the FBI that began effectively over a decade in the past, lengthy earlier than Director Patel arrived,” an FBI spokesperson mentioned.
“Senior Bureau officers have lengthy exchanged commemorative objects in formal reward settings according to ethics guidelines. Director Patel has adopted all relevant moral pointers and pays for any private reward himself.”
Patel is pursuing a $250 million defamation case in opposition to The Atlantic after it reported final month that his colleagues have been alarmed by his consuming and his penchant for dropping out of contact.
The report described Patel as paranoid that President Trump might transfer to fireside him, one thing that’s rumored to have been mentioned within the White Home.
The FBI honcho has adamantly disputed that report.
“We have now to combat again in opposition to the pretend information,” Patel instructed Fox Information’ “Sunday Morning Futures” April 19. “I gained’t tolerate their assaults on me as a result of they’re oblique assaults on the women and men within the FBI that we’ve cleaned up.”
