The Director of the FBI Cannot Stop Tweeting About Its Investigations

Welcome back to Barf Bag.

By this point I think you’re all sadly familiar with Kash Patel, the former host of a MAGA podcast and current director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He’s the guy accused of abusing the FBI’s $60 million jet to go on dates with his 27-year-old country singer girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, and has a bad habit of running to Twitter to clout-post while federal investigations are still underway.

This week, The Wall Street Journal uncovered a new example of his itchy Twitter fingers. The FBI recently helped arrest an alleged cocaine trafficker in Mexico so he could be charged in a California federal court. (The suspect is a former Canadian Olympic snowboarder named Ryan Wedding, what a world.) But the agency’s involvement in the January 22 operation was supposed to be a secret because Mexican law bans foreign agents from making arrests on its soil. Then, around 2 p.m. on January 23, Patel tweeted out that the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team helped arrest the guy:

This was a zero-margin, high-risk operation.

Our FBI HRT teams executed with precision, discipline, and total professionalism alongside our Mexican partners to bring Ryan James Wedding back to face justice.

One of the most dangerous criminals in the world is now off the… pic.twitter.com/nP5ElScfNF

— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) January 23, 2026

 

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said at a press conference that U.S. authorities told her Wedding turned himself in at the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Ronald Johnson, also said he surrendered. But Wedding’s attorney says that’s not what happened. “He was arrested, he didn’t surrender,” Anthony Colombo told the WSJ. Sheinbaum has been accused of making concessions to the U.S. to try to prevent punishing tariffs, so she is possibly just trying to play nice here by repeating the Trump regime’s line.

Patel’s posts have gotten him into trouble for months. He has now bragged online about detaining a person of interest before anything was certain in at least two investigations. The first was in the aftermath of the September assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the second was after a mass shooter killed multiple people on the Brown University campus in December. To make matters worse, he allegedly posted his incorrect tweets about the Kirk shooting from Rao’s, a 10-table Italian restaurant in New York City’s East Harlem neighborhood that is notoriously difficult to get into. The New York Times reported that Patel apparently spoke to some agents who were working on the case before hitting send, but he didn’t talk to his own leadership team. He tried to clean things up by saying he was posting as a way “to release information in interest of transparency.”

Then there was the time Patel “publicly disclosed an investigation into what he called a ‘potential’ Halloween weekend terrorist plot near Detroit—before investigators had a chance to flesh out key details, including whether the attack actually was imminent.”

Perhaps someone in the administration needs to take his social media accounts away, like they reportedly did to now-former Border Patrol “Commander at Large” Greg Bovino.

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More barf:

• We’re arresting journalists now. [NPR]
• Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are terrorizing people in Maine so badly that local leaders are worried about evictions due to breadwinners being detained, or people being afraid to leave their homes to go to work. [Maine Morning Star]
• ICE denied a man’s request to attend the funeral of his disabled son, for whom he was the primary caregiver until agents detained him in October. [CNN]
• MAGA snowflakes want anti-ICE whistles to be “considered a violent weapon.” [The Independent]
• House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries demands a ban on deporting U.S. citizens, which is already illegal. [The Hill]
• Now why the hell is Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard looking into the 2020 election?  [WSJ]
• The White House hung up a framed photo of President Donald Trump and murderous dictator Vladimir Putin. [The Guardian]
• When talking about how his own brain is fine, Trump forgot the word “Alzheimer’s.” [New York Magazine/Bluesky]
• The Anti-Defamation League tried to hide that Elon Musk’s Grok was the most antisemitic chatbot of the six it tested. [The Verge]
• Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, is planning more layoffs at the publication as he attended the Paris couture shows. [NPR/CNN]
• CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil interviewed his own mother after Bari Weiss said the network was going to focus on scoops. [Entertainment Weekly]

This has been your Friday Barf Bag, thanks for reading!