On April 20, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel sued The Atlantic, demanding $250 million in damages for defamation. The lawsuit concerns the magazine’s April 17 article disclosing Patel’s paranoid behavior and alarming drinking habits, sourced from over two dozen anonymous interviews.
Patel’s lawsuit claimed the article was a malicious attempt to ruin his professional reputation by publishing accounts his lawyers described as obviously fabricated. Under the 1964 U.S. Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, public officials must prove actual malice to win a defamation suit — meaning the publisher needs to have knowingly spread false information or acted with reckless disregard for the truth.
Patel’s attorneys argue that reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick gave the FBI only two hours to respond to 19 claims concerning Patel’s professional and personal misconduct, intending to provoke a no-comment response. They also claimed that Patel sent Fitzpatrick a letter disputing the allegations before it was published, but Fitzpatrick did not include this in the article.
On May 6, MSNBC published two anonymous reports claiming that the FBI launched a criminal leak investigation on Fitzpatrick — though other sources have not yet corroborated this.
“Every presidential administration has tried to control what information gets to the press [and] has tried to investigate leaks,” Constitutional Law teacher Josie Rodberg said. “What I think is different about the Trump administration is that it has been much, much more aggressive about doing that.”
Ashutoh Bhagwat, a professor of law at UC Davis School of Law, noted the potential motivations behind this lawsuit in an interview with The Urban Legend. “No one thinks [Patel] has a realistic chance of winning. So the question then becomes, what’s the purpose of the lawsuit? And it’s really two things,” he said. “One is it’s … him signaling that he really thinks the Atlantic story is not true. And the second … is sometimes to try and intimidate.”
Legal intimidation from officials may lead to self-censorship on the part of journalists. “With … lawsuits like this one, journalists have definitely been encouraged to self-censor. … I would say it’s a general trend that now journalists feel like they have to police themselves more,” Classic Shulman ’28 said.
Additionally, government officials’ open skepticism of journalistic integrity may impact public trust in the news. “For a lot of people, if you’re a supporter of someone like Kash Patel, and you see an article that … he’s suing the Atlantic, you would probably be pretty suspicious of the Atlantic and be on his side,” Sasha Fried ’28 said.
However, mistrust of partisanship in journalism may extend beyond issues of legal conflict. As of 2024, 10 companies own a quarter of all U.S. newspapers, meaning they control these papers’ finances and guide their editorial work. “We don’t know what the motivations are for what people are publishing and reporting, … and that really does undermine our trust in journalism,” Rodberg said. “Large corporations need to stay on the good side … of the Trump administration.”
Joel Ready ’29 commented on navigating partisanship in the news. “[There’s] a big opportunity for people to exercise their critical thinking. … There’s this wide field now for people not to just take things by their word and actually go and look, and cross check [their sources].”