Kash Patel keeps suing the press

In 2019, Kash Patel, then a White House aide, objected to how news outlets portrayed his role in President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. “It’s time that I began fighting back,” Patel said at the time. He sued Politico, the New York Times, and CNN.

In 2023, Patel, then a roving pro-Trump commentator, took offense at the work of a blogger who had bashed his record and called him a “chud,” a derogatory term progressives use to describe MAGA followers. He sued the blogger, Jim Stewartson, for $10 million in damages.

And in April, Patel, now the director of the FBI, seethed over an article in the Atlantic that reported alarm among some colleagues over his “erratic” behavior and alleged heavy drinking. He soon sued the publication, demanding $250 million in damages.

Patel has yet to reach a settlement or a favorable jury verdict in the cases. Each of the news organizations he has sued has defended its journalism and said it was protected by the First Amendment.

But the strategy is a familiar one. Trump, the man who appointed Patel to lead the FBI, has long turned to the courts when faced with unfavorable press coverage. And perhaps no one in his two administrations has followed his lead as closely as Patel, who has filed at least six defamation lawsuits against news media companies and commentators in nearly seven years.

In some of the cases, Patel filed strongly worded complaints only to allow them to languish in the ups and downs of civil litigation — a trajectory that some legal experts said raised questions about his objectives.

“The goals here,” said Sonja R. West, a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, “appear to be to muddy the narrative, run up opponents’ legal bills, and send a message to journalists that if you cover us critically, it’s going to cost you a lot of time and money.”

Jesse R. Binnall, a lawyer in Virginia who represents Patel, said in an email, “Director Patel pursues these cases to win them — and anyone who thinks he would tolerate anything less than aggressive, expeditious accountability simply doesn’t know the man.” He added that the number of defamation lawsuits filed by Patel is a “direct reflection of the volume of lies published” about him.

The suits constitute another front on which news organizations have been forced to spend time and money to defend their work in the Trump era. Others include steady public criticism from top officials, including Trump; limitations on access to the White House and the Pentagon; leak investigations that ensnare national security reporters; and investigations by the Federal Communications Commission.

Exact numbers on public officials who file defamation claims are hard to come by, said Michael Norwick, a lawyer at the Media Law Resource Center, a group that assists news organizations. Even so, Norwick, who has worked at the center for 15 years, said, “I don’t remember this being a thing, and now it’s a thing.”

RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, said via email that there were examples of defamation suits from officials who had completed their time in public service, but that she was unaware of cases predating Trump in which officials had wielded “law enforcement or other executive-leverage power that they can couple with the pressure of the suit.”

Andersen Jones said the suits against news media companies had forced her to remove a line she had used in lectures for her entire career, which had said top government officials, including the president, do not sue for libel.

An FBI spokesperson said that even government officials should have recourse to address what they deemed to be malicious lies in the news media.

Patel and Binnall face an uphill battle in court. To recover damages in a defamation suit against a news organization, a public official like Patel would have to prove not only that the journalists had published a damaging falsehood, but also that they had done so knowingly or with reckless disregard of the truth — a legal standard known as actual malice.

When Patel sued the Times in 2019 over its coverage of Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, his complaint contained about 750 words of biography. He called himself a “brilliant attorney, trusted adviser, staunch proponent and defender of the rule of law”; and he demanded nearly $45 million in damages, along with “prejudgment interest” and “postjudgment interest” at 6% per year.

After all that buildup, Patel failed to serve court papers to the Times and later dropped the case.

A similar situation unfolded after Patel sued Politico for what he argued were “malicious efforts” to destroy his career through its coverage of Trump’s interactions with Ukraine. Politico moved to dismiss the case after Patel did not serve the company with court documents for more than a year, leading to a “reasonable presumption that he had abandoned his claims,” according to a court filing.

Patel dropped that suit but filed a new one, which is still active. (His suits against the Times, Politico, and CNN were filed by his previous counsel, not by Binnall’s firm.)

And Patel drew a rebuke from a federal judge in Nevada for failing to pursue his case against Stewartson, the blogger, for more than a year, a gap that Binnall, in an email to the Times, attributed to a careful and deliberate legal strategy. The litigation is ongoing.

In his public statements, Patel is prone to sweeping condemnations of news organizations. Traces of that language surface in his lawsuits. His complaint against CNN, for instance, included claims of a “brutal attack on Kash’s reputation” and a “continuation of past smear campaigns to discredit Kash.”

It also said CNN had defamed Patel by reporting that he “worked to discredit” special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — an odd claim from a man who would go on to characterize that investigation in a book as a “taxpayer-funded hit job from a group of government gangsters.” He abandoned his claims related to the matter during an appeals court hearing.

In affirming the dismissal of Patel’s 2020 suit against CNN, a Virginia appeals court found that his claims were “conclusory and not binding” and fell short of actual malice. It also awarded CNN $150 in damages. The network declined to comment on whether Patel had paid.

The Supreme Court declared in 1964 that public debate may feature “vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks” on government officials, as Patel is now learning.

In April, a federal judge in Texas dismissed a lawsuit filed by Patel against Frank Figliuzzi, a retired FBI official and TV commentator who had knocked Patel’s work habits last year on the MS NOW program Morning Joe, saying the FBI director was “far more” visible at nightclubs than at the agency’s headquarters. The judge dismissed the suit on the grounds that Figliuzzi’s remark amounted to “rhetorical hyperbole that cannot constitute defamation.”

In an email, Binnall said, “Although we agree that Mr. Figliuzzi is not a serious person, the notion that the more you exaggerate a lie, the more legally protected you become, is not a coherent reading of the law.” Patel is appealing the ruling.

Stewartson, the blogger, also stood by the insults that he had slung at Patel on social media. “I thought it was hysterical that he put that in there,” Stewartson said in an interview, referring to Patel’s references to being called a “chud.” “Because how do you prove he’s not a chud?”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.