Hirono Accuses Kash Patel of Being 'So Drunk' FBI Briefings Were Rescheduled So He Could 'Sleep It Off'

A Democratic senator has accused the FBI director of being so drunk that bureau briefings had to be rescheduled so he could sleep it off, an allegation he did not answer in the room.

Mazie Hirono of Hawaii made the claim during a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on Tuesday, 15 September 2026, in a closing statement running through what she called a long and growing list of failings. The hearing was an oversight hearing on the Federal Bureau of Investigation featuring FBI Director Kash Patel.

She did not present supporting evidence for the specific drinking allegation during the hearing, and Patel has repeatedly denied allegations of workplace intoxication, calling earlier reports a farce and suing the magazine that published them.

Hirono ended by telling the chairman she was done with the witness, and Patel did not respond to that passage.

What Hirono Said in the Hearing

The line appears in the transcript her office published the same day. 'You have been so drunk that briefings have been rescheduled so you could sleep it off,' Hirono said, according to the statement released by her office. The accusation is hers, and no independent finding supports or refutes it.

It came near the end of a sustained attack on his conduct. Hirono opened by pressing him on a VIP snorkelling tour he took around the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor in August 2025, an excursion documented in emails obtained by the Associated Press and taken after official visits to Australia and New Zealand. She told the hearing that since 2020 such tours have gone only to senior defence officials, members of the military and one congressman who served in special forces.

She said a letter had gone unanswered. Hirono, with Senators Schumer and Durbin, wrote to Patel in May asking what personal travel he had taken, what non-official activities he had attended during official travel and what they had cost taxpayers. Three months on, she said, no response had arrived. Patel disputed that, saying he had responded.

Her broader charge was that the pattern is the point. 'If this snorkel tour were a one-off incident, that would be one thing. But it's part of a broader pattern of using your office to benefit yourself,' she said, accusing him of wasting taxpayer money on foreign luxury cars, partying in Italy and flying a private jet to play golf and watch ice hockey. Those characterisations are hers.

The Drinking Allegations and the Van Hollen Challenge

The claim has a documented history in Congress. At a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on 12 May 2026, Senator Chris Van Hollen told Patel that reports of him being so drunk and hungover that staff had to force entry into his home were extremely alarming and, if true, amounted to a gross dereliction of duty. Patel rejected the claim outright, saying it was a total farce and that he would not be tarnished by baseless allegations and fraudulent statements from the media.

That exchange ended in a challenge to undergo a drinking audit. Hirono told Tuesday's hearing that Van Hollen had since posted his results while Patel had not, an account that comes from her statement rather than from any published record of the test itself. Patel has said separately that he has never been intoxicated on the job.

He has also gone to court over the reporting behind the allegations. Patel filed a £184 million ($250 million) defamation suit against The Atlantic and a reporter in April 2026 over an article detailing claims about his drinking and unexplained absences. The magazine has stood by its reporting, the case remains outstanding, and none of the claims has been tested.

The Wider Charge Sheet

Hirono tied the allegation to a list of management complaints. She said Patel had decimated the workforce, leaving the bureau thousands of professionals short, and asked what he had been thinking in dismissing a dozen Iran experts shortly before the war began. That characterisation of the staffing losses is hers; Patel acknowledged the Iran dismissals.

The hiring standards drew questions from both parties. Under Patel the FBI changed its rules so that theft from an employer, solicitation of sex and bestiality are no longer automatic disqualifications, a change Democrats questioned in a letter sent the day before the hearing and which Patel defended when pressed.

'I think all of us would love to know why an organization charged with investigating theft should bring thieves into its midst,' Hirono said, noting that Republican Senator John Kennedy had also raised it that morning. A policy change of this kind does not establish that any applicant with such a history has been hired.

Her final charge concerned what the bureau is not investigating. Hirono pointed to the £295 million ($400 million) jet accepted from Qatar, an allegation that tech donors received White House access in exchange for funding the president's ballroom project, and reporting that a Russian businessman helped pay for events around Donald Trump Jr's wedding.

Each of those remains an allegation or a matter of reporting rather than an established finding of wrongdoing, and Patel said he was unaware of the wedding reporting.

Patel's Defence

He did not engage with the drinking claim, but he pushed back hard elsewhere. In his opening statement Patel described the bureau's work under him as the most prolific run of crime reduction in United States history, citing a 20-year low murder rate, arrests of violent offenders, fentanyl seizures and the capture of 10 people from the most-wanted list.

He was combative with other members. Patel told Senator Peter Welch he would not participate in what he called a charade of lies, and rejected Dick Durbin's suggestion that his statements about a shooting involving a US citizen had been false.

Hirono finished by saying it was no wonder former attorney general Bill Barr had once said Patel would lead the FBI over his dead body.