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Kash Patel denies excessive drinking allegations as ‘total farce’ in Senate hearing | Trump administration
Embattled FBI director Kash Patel has denied under oath recent allegations of excessive drinking and unexplained absences on the job, dismissing them as “baseless” during a fiery congressional hearing.
Democrats challenged him over the “extremely alarming” reports, first reported in the Atlantic mid-April, which they argued would a mount to a “gross dereliction” of duty. The FBI director has sued the magazine, and the author of a story it published, filing a defamation lawsuit in US district court for the District of Columbia that seeks $250m in damages.
In his opening remarks, Chris Van Hollen, ranking member of the Senate appropriations committee, said: “What we are learning about what’s happening at the FBI is anything but normal. When your private actions make it impossible for you to perform your public duties, we have a big problem … these reports about your conduct, including reports you’re being so drunk and hungover that your staff had to force entry into your home are extremely alarming, if true, they demonstrate a gross dereliction of your duty and a betrayal of public trust.”
“It’s a total farce. I don’t even know where you get this stuff,” Patel told Chris Van Hollen, ranking member of the Senate appropriations subcommittee, after he asked about the claims reported by the Atlantic. “I will not be tarnished by baseless allegations.”
When Van Hollen asked if Patel would be willing to take a test to determine whether he has a drinking problem, the FBI director snapped that he would – provided the senator would take it alongside him.
Patel attempted to turn the tables on Van Hollen, alleging that the Maryland senator had been caught on camera drinking “margaritas in El Salvador on the taxpayer dollar”, a reference to photographs Van Hollen has credibly described as a hoax staged by an aide to El Salvador’s far-right president, Nayib Bukele.
Patel then claimed that documents filed by the senator’s office showed that Van Hollen “ran up a $7,000 bar tab in Washington DC at the Lobby Bar”.
“The only individual in this room that has been drinking on taxpayer dime during the day is you,” Patel shouted.
A Van Hollen spokesperson told the Guardian that the FBI director’s claim was a distortion of publicly available information, in the form of the senator’s most recent Federal Election Commission campaign spending report, which showed that he spent that money on event catering at the bar, which also offers a full dinner menu, on 12 December 2025.
The $7,128 payment to the Lobby Bar, the senator’s office explained, “was a catering charge at a local restaurant where the Senator hosted an after-hours holiday reception as a thank you to the 50+ members of our team, paid for by campaign funds – not taxpayer dollars”.
The Atlantic had reported that Patel’s alcohol consumption had become “a recurring source of concern across the government”, citing interviews with more than two dozen people, including current and former FBI officials. The most serious allegations include that his security detail on at least one occasion struggled to rouse him because he appeared intoxicated, and that agents had sought “Swat-level breaching equipment” to gain access to a room where he was unresponsive.
Patel has forcefully denied the allegations. “Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court – bring your checkbook,” he told the magazine. The Atlantic has said it stands by its allegations.
On Tuesday, Patel also denied personally ordering polygraph tests to determine leaks to the press. This comes after the FBI said last year that it begun the process of using polygraph tests to aid investigations aimed at identifying the source of leaks emanating from within the law enforcement agency.
He also said that no FBI resources have been used to investigate the negative press about him or his handling of the agency, while answering questions from Patty Murray, the Democratic vice-chair of the Senate appropriations committee.
“I am deeply concerned about the reports that your leadership has not been serious,” Murray said, while repeating allegations of Patel’s behavior while on the job. “Your job is to be reachable … if you want to pass out liquor or pop bottles in a locker room, stick to podcasting. Leave law and order to people who really do care about justice and appearances.”
Earlier this year, Patel faced criticism after a ProPublica reporter shared a video the FBI director chugging a bottle and spraying beer in a locker room with the men’s USA hockey team in Milan, following their gold medal victory against Canada at the Winter Olympics.
Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are all potential candidates for the top job.
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Trump is the ultimate showman. He’s a master of it, a billionaire Barnum, but with a greed so insatiable it moves him ever further from entertainment into malevolence. If the Democrats had realised this earlier and recognised the strength the man was playing to and the particular voting public weaknesses he was preying upon, instead of sneering with distaste, then maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess.
In fact, if they had done what comedian and satirist Munya Chawawa does in his punchy, passionate and weirdly uplifting documentary Wrestling With Trump, it might be a slightly better world today. Chawawa takes the not-new but certainly underused idea that Trump and his team’s campaigns and style of government use the same playbook as that created by the US pro-wrestling industry’s most famous promoters, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). WWE was founded by Vince McMahon and his since-estranged wife, Linda. Vince resigned from various business roles in 2024 in the wake of allegations of sex trafficking and sexual assault (he has vigorously denied these allegations). Linda is now the US secretary of education.
Chawawa has been a fan of wrestling since childhood (we see his box of action figures and the delight on his face as he meets some of his heroes and reminisces with other devotees about the annual WrestleMania competitions held by WWE and other pivotal moments in its history). It makes him a genuinely useful guide to the phenomenon for the likely uninitiated viewer, a convincing explicator of the Trump-wrestlemaniac thesis, and an excellent interviewer of people on both sides of it.
The pages of the playbook most heavily annotated by Trump and his people – if not ripped from it entirely – concern hyperbole, smack talk and kayfabe. The first two are largely self-explanatory and are evident in just about every Trumpian utterance. Everything – including and especially the president himself – is the biggest and the best. Except, of course, if it’s the worst. The world is divided into clear heroes (white Americans) and villains (non-American, non-white Americans), as they are divided into “Babyfaces” (good guys who play by the rules) and “Heels” (who aren’t and don’t) in fights. The rhetoric, whether at a political rally or a wrestling match, is designed to inflame the crowd, rouse the bloodlust, make them commit. Trash talk is catharsis for any number of unspoken frustrations. Perhaps it’s a useful safety valve under the original circumstances. When it leads to the election of a world leader who promises to rid the world of all the people perceived to be the cause of those frustrations – less so.
But it’s kayfabe that is the key to Trump’s success. Kayfabe, in wrestling, is the pretence that everything is real – that the invective is unscripted, that the Heels’ and heroes’ backstories are authentic, that the moves are unchoreographed, and that the bodyslams, hip checks and chokeholds are as dangerous and painful as they look. For as long as the fight lasts, you live the illusion. Nothing is true except what you are told you see.
Even within the world of wrestling, this can have its drawbacks. Chawawa meets one professional wrestler who has for many years fought under the character name “Progressive Liberal” and who has been so relentlessly hated for it that he now looks dead behind the eyes. It is genuinely unsettling.
Take kayfabe and its blurring of the lines between truth and lies out of the wrestling bubble and put it on the political stage, however, and the size and depth of the problems it creates become – have become – terrifying. Chawawa speaks to Maga folk who can call Trump a “blue collar billionaire” without batting an eyelid – a sign of the astonishing power he has to warp the senses, collapse contradictions and reconstruct a reality that suits him better.
Chawawa interviews former Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg, who says that they were indeed informed by Trump’s love of the world of wrestling – especially its “combative storylines” – as they prepared his approach. Should politics be entertaining, wonders Chawawa. Yes, says Nunberg with certainty. Is it the best version of politics we’re witnessing now? Nunberg keeps his counsel, though he calls himself “No special pleader for January 6. That was a bad day for America.” Chawawa pushes. Is Trump a Heel now, or a Babyface – who abides by a code of honour. “Trump abides by his own code,” says Nunberg. Expect more slamming of the body politic in the years to come, then. And it’s really, really going to hurt.
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