FBI Director Kash Patel just lost one defamation case right after he filed another one.
The case he lost was against ex-MSNBC analyst and columnist Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI. While appearing last year on MSNBC’s (now MS NOW’s) “Morning Joe,” Figliuzzi said Patel had “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.”
Patel argued Figliuzzi’s statement was defamatory, while Figliuzzi argued a reasonable viewer would have seen it as a “sarcastic, hyperbolic quip about the media narrative surrounding” Patel at the time. The FBI director countered that a reasonable viewer would have understood the remarks to be factual.
Rejecting Patel on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge George Hanks called Figliuzzi’s statement “rhetorical hyperbole that cannot constitute defamation.” In his opinion dismissing the FBI director’s suit, the Obama-appointed judge in Texas wrote that a person of reasonable intelligence and learning “would not have taken his statement literally: that Dir. Patel has actually spent more hours physically in a nightclub than he has spent physically in his office building.”
Patel had cited Figliuzzi’s remarks in the new defamation suit he filed Monday against The Atlantic and its reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick, in response to a report published last week that Patel called a “sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece.” Citing unnamed current and former officials as sources, Fitzpatrick wrote, among other things, that Patel “is deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy” and that he “has good reasons to think so — including some having to do with what witnesses described to me as bouts of excessive drinking.”
In his new complaint filed in Washington, Patel’s lawyers pointed to Figliuzzi’s comments on “Morning Joe,” writing that the FBI had warned The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick that the article’s allegations “echoed a similar fabrication previously aired by MSNBC’s Frank Figliuzzi on Morning Joe — anonymously sourced reporting that was later retracted by MSNBC and that is the subject of pending defamation litigation — yet Defendants published it anyway.”
Patel’s suit against The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick may meet the same fate as the just-failed claim against Figliuzzi, but that remains to be seen. In the meantime, The Atlantic issued a statement saying it stands by the reporting and calling Patel’s suit “meritless.”
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