Patel loses defamation case against ex-MSNBC analyst that he cited in his new Atlantic suit

FBI Director Kash Patel just lost one defamation case right after he filed another one.

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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 Tex as 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.”