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........

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