Kash Patel Under Fire After Reddit Post Finds Brown Shooting Suspect

FBI Director Kash Patel continues to come under fire as it appears that a Reddit user did a better job of getting leads on the Brown University shooter than the entire FBI. 

After being unable to find the shooter who killed two students and injured nine at Brown University, as well as the suspect in the killing of an MIT professor in his home on Monday, local police were directed to a post in the r/Providence subreddit, an embarrassing indictment of their own investigative skills. 

The poster, known just as “John,” used his encounter with the suspect—48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente—to “blow the case wide open,” according to Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F. Neronha. 

“I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental. That was the car he was driving. It was parked in front of the little shack behind the Rhode Island Historical Society on the Cooke St side. I know because he used his key fob to open the car, approached it and then something prompted him to back away,” John posted on Reddit Wednesday night. “When he backed away he relocked the car. I found that odd so when he circled the block I approached the car and that is when I saw the Florida plates. He was parked in the section between the gate of the RIHS and the corner of Cooke and George St.”

John later told police that he ran into Neves-Valente in the bathroom about two hours before the first shots were heard. He said that he and Neves-Valente made eye contact, and that the suspect wasn’t wearing the right clothing for the Rhode Island cold. He asked him why he had been circling the block, to which Neves-Valente replied, “Why are you harassing me?” John then left him alone. Neves-Valente was later found dead in a New Hampshire storage unit with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. 

So Kash Patel’s mighty FBI couldn’t find someone who walked onto one of the country’s most prestigious universities in the middle of the day, and the primary reason local police were even able to find him was because of a witness who happened to post about it on Reddit. And they found him dead, leaving no room for further questioning or new information. This is pretty pitiful for an FBI director who talked such a big game all year. 

“It’s hilarious that a Reddit user cracked the Brown/MIT case before Kash Patel’s FBI and shows how incompetent they are,” one large X account posted. 

“While Kash Patel is making podcast appearances with his girlfriend, a campus custodian and Reddit users are doing his job,” said another, referring to one of the other witnesses. 

Patel celebrated apprehending a person of interest too soon, only to let them free, and then have the FBI wander around until local police found the suspect days later because the internet helped him—which is reminiscent of the failed manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s alleged shooter. That suspect was only apprehended because his own father turned him in. 

To continuously fail at your job while going on podcasts with your girlfriend, being generally angry and antagonistic with Congress and the media, and presenting as some warrior strongman is just par for the course for Patel and the FBI. Lots of bark, no bite. Just a few lucky breaks.  

A Trump-appointed judge was so upset with the living conditions in which ICE detained an immigrant in Long Island, New York, that he threatened to hold the government in contempt.

U.S. District Judge Gary Brown, who was appointed by Trump in 2019, issued a 24-page ruling Thursday vehemently castigating the Department of Homeland Security for refusing to provide photos of a holding room that illegally held a noncitizen for multiple nights, calling it “putrid and cramped.”

“ICE held them, day after day, without access to bunks, bedding, soap, showers, toothbrushes or clean clothes,” Brown stated in his ruling. “The space is unheated or poorly heated at night, while the outside temperature dropped to as low as 21 degrees.... To the extent they could sleep, they did so, crammed on the filthy floor, while the lights blared 24 hours a day.

“After nearly 35 years of experience with federal law enforcement in this judicial district, encompassing service as a prosecutor and a judge, I have never encountered anything like this,” Brown wrote.

Erron Anthony Clarke, the noncitizen in question, filed a habeas corpus petition with the court after being detained by ICE on December 5. Clarke had entered the U.S. legally on an H-2B work visa in 2018, but ended up overstaying the visa before marrying a U.S. citizen in 2023. He applied for permanent residency this year, but was detained earlier this month and thrown into a small cell with eight other men.

The cell, located in the federal courthouse in Central Islip, New York, had an open toilet and was only “designed to briefly detain a single individual,” Brown wrote, noting that Clarke was held in the crowded cell long beyond ICE’s own internal standards allow. Brown ruled on December 11 that Clarke’s detention violated due process and ordered him released.

Clarke’s ordeal exposed something bigger in Brown’s eyes, particularly “ICE’s horrendous detention practices.”

“This case implicates something more,” Brown said. “There is evidence that the conditions of the detention are substandard, abhorrent and likely unlawful.”

But when Brown asked ICE and DHS for a timeline of Clarke’s location during his detention, and for photos of his holding cell, the government gave “evasive and demonstrably false” information on Clarke’s whereabouts and refused to hand over photographs. The timeline Brown received, for example, claimed that the government moved Clarke between facilities in eight minutes, despite them being separated by about a 35-minute drive.

“These misstatements of fact serve to undermine the information presented and the reliability of the records maintained by ICE,” Brown wrote in his ruling, giving the government until December 30 to argue against being held in contempt.

It’s telling that the White House is going so far in its extreme, and probably unlawful, immigration enforcement that even a judge Trump chose is ruling against the administration. The story of DHS, ICE, Border Patrol, and other federal agencies in Trump’s second term is that of moral bankruptcy, violating laws and basic human rights to enact a racist immigration policy.

The political party that has historically pitched itself as a proponent of “states’ rights” is now advocating for a mass federal seizure of state land.

Speaking with Newsmax on Friday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggested that the next course of action to curb immigration across the southern U.S. border should involve transferring “strips” of California to the federal government.

“We have an opportunity to take a strip of land right along the border, transfer it to the military for a three-year period. Which then, if someone crosses into our country and steps on that, they’re stepping on a military installation,” Burgum said. “That gives our troops that are down there working to secure that border more authorities about detaining people. If they step on that land, it helps to improve the security.”

It’s an escalation of a plan that the White House enacted earlier this year, when it took a  60-foot-wide strip of federal land across three states and turned the entire region into a “military installation.” Doing so effectively allowed Donald Trump to sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act, circumventing Congress to wield the military for border control.

The military base designation was supposed to expand the troops’ authority, granting them the ability to “temporarily detain trespassers” and to “conduct cursory searches of trespassers … to ensure the safety of U.S. service members and Department of Defense (DoD) property.”

But even that effort was unsuccessful. In May, a federal judge dismissed charges against nearly 100 immigrants that the administration claimed had entered the “national defense” zone, determining that the government had failed to prove the immigrants were aware they were entering a restricted military area.

Seizing land in California could prove to be an even bigger catastrophe. In the same interview, Burgum—the former governor of North Dakota—suggested that the best location to usurp state land would be “near the Pacific,” on the basis that the region is “an area of high traffic.”

Not even Fox Business can pretend like President Donald Trump isn’t wrecking the economy.

Fox Business anchors Lauren Simonetti and Stuart Varney reported Friday that a University of Michigan survey found that an index of consumer sentiment had sunk even further since mid-December.

There had been a “surprise drop” in consumer sentiment to 52.9 percent confidence in the economy, Simonetti said. That’s down from 53.3 percent just slightly earlier this month, CNBC reported separately.

“Consumers are just worried about the price of things and long-run inflation expectations as well,” Simonetti added.

“But with rather these dull numbers, the market seems to like it. Perhaps implying that we’ll get more Fed rate cuts,” Varney noted.

“The weakness, I think, is attractive. Bad news is actually good news for the market, maybe.”

While it may be good for the market in the short term, consumer confidence is an accurate means of understanding the current economic situation and consumers’ willingness to spend, borrow, or invest. It can take several months before low consumer confidence is fully realized.

In December 2024, before Trump ever imposed his slate of disastrous economic policies, such as tariff wars and mass deportations, Michigan’s consumer sentiment index had been 74 percent, indicating a nearly 30 percent plummet year over year.

And it gets worse.

The survey’s rating of the “current economic conditions” was only 50.4 percent, down from 51.1 in November. CNBC reported that this was “a new all-time low” for the study going all the way back to the 1970s. In December, the rating had been 75.1, showing a nearly 33 percent drop year over year.

A livestream of a bearded man who goes by “Real Matt Money” inexplicably took over the White House home page on Thursday night, leading the public to ask if the page had been hacked or if the Trump administration was getting financial advice from a self-described “shepherd for individual investors.”

As Bloomberg reported, the livestream appeared and disappeared on the White House website in about an hour.

Real Money Matt seemed to be just as surprised as the rest of us.

“If I had known I would be live for the WORLD to see, I likely would have had a different message than personal finance,” he wrote Friday on X. “Let me meet the @POTUS.”

While Matt took it in stride, the randomness of his live appearance on the White House website does lend itself to questions regarding just how serious the Trump administration is about security, especially since it brought us the Signalgate scandal just one month in.

The White House has yet to publicly comment.