FBI Director Kash Patel on April 20 filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic and staff writer Sarah Fitzpatrick, alleging that the claims in an article were false.
In a lawsuit filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Patel stated the magazine and Fitzpatrick “published the Article with actual malice, despite being expressly warned, hours before publication, that the central allegations were categorically false,” “despite having abundant publicly available information contradicting those allegations,” and “despite obvious and fatal defects in their own sourcing.”
