FBI Director Kash Patel has been leaving behind an unusual calling card: personalized bottles of Woodford Reserve bourbon engraved with “Kash Patel FBI Director.” The bottles, which also carry a rendering of an FBI shield and the stylized spelling “Ka$h,” have turned up in the hands of staff and civilians Patel has met while on duty.
The practice is drawing fresh attention because one of the 750-milliliter bottles later surfaced on an online auction site, where it was bought by The Atlantic after the earlier report appeared. The bottle bore Patel’s signature and “#9,” and the seller said it had been given to him by Patel at an event in Las Vegas. Eight people familiar with the distribution, including current and former FBI and Justice Department employees, said Patel has handed out the bourbon to people in his orbit and at public functions, including at least one FBI event.
The details give a clearer picture of how far the custom has traveled. Patel and his team transported whiskey on a DOJ plane when he traveled to Milan during the Olympics in February, and one bottle was left behind in a locker room during that trip. In Milan, Patel was also filmed drinking beer with the gold-medal-winning U.S. men’s hockey team. Officials said that did not sit well with the teetotaling president, though Patel later said he was celebrating with his “friends” on the team.
The bourbon story lands on top of an earlier Atlantic report that said FBI personnel were alarmed by Patel’s erratic behavior and excessive drinking, allegations he denied and challenged in a defamation suit. The FBI has not disputed that Patel hands out bottles of whiskey inscribed with his name. That silence matters because the bureau has long projected sobriety and restraint from its leaders; during the 1930s, visitors to FBI offices in Washington received souvenir fingerprint cards tied to J. Edgar Hoover, not branded liquor. Patel’s bottles fit a very different image.
What is left now is not whether the bottles exist. They do. The question is whether a federal law-enforcement chief can keep normalizing a personal brand that travels with him into official business, even after the auction listing, the Milan trip and the earlier reporting have made the practice public.
