FBI Director Kash Patel had his first public issue with alcohol during his undergrad years at the University of Richmond, with an arrest and conviction in 2001 on a misdemeanor public intoxication charge.
This is coming to our attention today from reporting in The Intercept, which tracked down a letter that Patel submitted in 2005 for his application to the Florida Bar.
No, not that kind of bar.
The legal bar.
Gotta BYOB to that one.
Per the letter, Patel wrote that he drew the attention of a campus police officer during a UR home basketball game in 2001 about his “excessive” cheering.
Interjecting a tidbit here: Patel was one of the founders of a group that came to be known as the Richmond Rowdies, basically, sawed-off short dudes with terrible hand-eye coordination, so they made asses of themselves at games to try to compensate.
Back to our story: the officer subsequently escorted Patel out of the arena, according to the reporting from Patel himself, and “(u)pon exiting the arena, the officer placed me under arrest for public intoxication, as I was not yet of 21 years of age.”
“I had consumed two drinks prior to the game,” Patel revealed in the letter.
According to an NBC News report on the matter, three days after the arrest, Patel was found guilty of the misdemeanor offense, which he conceded in his 2005 letter.
“The outcome of this charge is as follows, fine levied and paid.”
So, Patel, future FBI director, poses as a tough guy, was, in college, a tiny, annoying dork, and he couldn’t hold his beer – intoxicated after two drinks, seriously?
The Collegian, the student paper at UR, recently uncovered another incident dating to 2002 involving Patel, a few months at this point from graduation, this one not having to do with alcohol – not outwardly, anyway.
Per that report, which was based on a contemporary account in The Collegian, a fight broke out between Xavier University basketball players and members of the Rowdies during a game.
“They were throwing up ‘X’ for Xavier,” Patel said in the 2002 story on why the fight started. “They were cursing and yelling at us. I think some of them even gave us the finger.”
So, of course, throw down with players who aren’t down with being cursed and verbally abused by liquored up college kids.
Checks out.
The Intercept report notes another incident involving Patel, from his days in law school at Pace University, which ranks 142nd in the U.S. News and World Report ranking of the 194 Best Law Schools in the country.
Referring back to Patel’s 2005 letter to the Florida Bar:
“Some friends and I were out celebrating. We went to a few of the local bars and consumed some alcoholic beverages. At the end of the night, we decided to walk home. In a gross deviation from appropriate conduct, we attempted to relieve our bladders while walking home. Before we could even do so, a police cruiser stopped the group. We were then arrested for public urination.”
“The outcome of this charge is as follows, fine levied and paid.”
I’m not casting aspersions here.
I mean, who among us hasn’t been thrown out of a college basketball game for public intoxication, gotten in a fight with a basketball team at a second game, gotten busted by the 50 on a bar crawl for dropping trou in public to drain the main vein?
Ninety-nine-point-eight percent of us, but anyway, who are we to judge?
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Chris Graham
