A federal judge in Las Vegas threw out the Kash Patel lawsuit against a blogger who spent years calling the FBI director a Kremlin asset and a googly eyed chud, and in doing so erased the $250,000 Patel had already been awarded in the case. Chief U.S. District Judge Andrew Gordon signed the order on July 25. The blogger, Jim Stewartson, made it public four days later and has been running a victory lap ever since.
Patel filed the suit in June 2023, well before he was sworn in to run the FBI. He brought it alongside his nonprofit, the Kash Foundation, and the target was a batch of posts Stewartson had published on X and Substack between June 2021 and May 2023. According to the complaint, Stewartson called Patel a “Kremlin asset,” said he was “guilty of sedition,” claimed he had “attempted to overthrow the government” and personally planned the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and alleged that Patel and his foundation paid people to lie to Congress. He also called him a “blatantly incompetent chud,” which is internet slang for an obnoxious reactionary and comes from a 1984 horror movie about sewer monsters. Patel asked for $10 million.
Then the Kash Patel lawsuit took a strange turn, because Stewartson simply did not respond to it. When a defendant never shows up, the court can rule against them automatically without ever weighing whether the accusations were true. That is called a default judgment, and Gordon entered one in August 2025, awarding Patel $200,000 and his foundation another $50,000.
Stewartson says he only found out he had lost by reading an article about it on CNBC, not through anything the court or Patel’s lawyers sent him. He hired attorneys Margaret McLetchie and Leo Wolpert, who have also represented the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and went back at the case from a completely different direction. Rather than argue about whether his posts were true, they argued that the Nevada court never had the authority to hear the case at all.
That argument turns on something called personal jurisdiction, which is a court’s power to drag a specific person into its courtroom. Under the Constitution, a court generally cannot do that unless the person has meaningful ties to that state, a standard judges call minimum contacts. Patel lives in Nevada. Stewartson lives in California, does not do business in Nevada, and had nothing connecting him to the state except the fact that the man he was posting about happened to live there. His lawyers said letting Patel sue him in Nevada on those facts would violate his right to due process.
Gordon agreed. He wrote that he was granting the motions because Stewartson did not have minimum contacts with Nevada sufficient to establish personal jurisdiction. That finding did two things at once. It dismissed the case, and it retroactively voided the default judgment, because a ruling from a court that never had the power to rule is legally worth nothing.
The judge was clear that he was not blessing Stewartson’s behavior. In the same order he wrote that Stewartson appeared to have known about the lawsuit all along, may have deliberately tried to avoid being served with it, mocked Patel and the foundation online while the case was pending, and leaned on his own incorrect understanding of what counts as legal notice. Gordon said Stewartson wasted both the plaintiffs’ time and the court’s, and indicated he would have considered ordering him to pay Patel’s attorney’s fees if the law gave him room to do it. Because the judgment was void, he concluded he did not have that discretion.
There is also a line from the earlier stage of this case that reads differently now. When Gordon granted the default judgment and technically found that Stewartson had defamed him, he still questioned how much damage had actually been done, pointing out that Patel was confirmed by the Senate as FBI Director after the statements were made and that his reputation clearly had not been significantly hurt. Patel won that round from a judge who openly doubted the premise, and has now lost the whole thing.
Stewartson announced the ruling on X on July 29 and made a point of thanking Gordon for quoting one of his own posts in a footnote, preserving the phrase “googly-eyed Kremlin b**ch” in the permanent federal record. He followed it with a public service announcement telling his followers they were now free to call the FBI director a chud, a googly eyed Kremlin something, and a traitor without worrying about being sued. He also told Patel directly that the two of them were not done.
The dismissal fits a pattern. Patel has filed roughly six defamation suits against journalists and commentators in about seven years, and this is the second to collapse in a matter of months. In April, a Texas judge tossed his case against Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI official who said on MSNBC that Patel was spending more time in Las Vegas nightclubs than on the seventh floor of the Hoover Building. The judge ruled that the remark was protected hyperbole, meaning it read as obvious exaggeration rather than a factual claim, and exaggeration is not defamation. Patel is currently seeking $250 million from The Atlantic over its reporting about his drinking on the job.
One thing this ruling did not decide is whether Stewartson’s posts were defamatory. Gordon never got there, because he found he had no authority to answer the question. Patel could still refile in California, where Stewartson actually lives, and the clock on that would be a matter for a different court.
