Last August, the FBI reinstated agent Stephen Friend, who left the bureau in 2023, and awarded him a lump sum settlement of $61,430, plus “hundreds of thousands of dollars in back pay.” In December, FBI Director Kash Patel personally fired him for “unprofessional conduct and poor judgment.” And on Thursday, Friend sued Patel in federal court in Orlando to vindicate his God-given right to “speak[] publicly in his capacity as a citizen about an important, publicly known, and widely debated federal investigation.”
It’s the circle of grifter life!
Friend is either a whistleblower victimized by the weaponized Biden DOJ or an attention whore with very bad judgment, depending on whose account you believe. Friend says he declined to participate in the arrest of a January 6 defendant in August of 2022, telling his boss it was “inappropriate to use an FBI SWAT team to arrest a subject for misdemeanor offenses” who would face “biased jury pools in Washington, DC.” In September, he was suspended, after which he lost his clearance and then resigned in February of 2023.
In a May 2023 letter to Congress, the bureau said Friend had downloaded FBI documents onto a flash drive, “participated in multiple, unapproved media interviews, including an interview with a Russian government news agency,” and made a “surreptitious recording of a meeting with FBI management” that “may have violated Florida state law.”
Friend insists that he’s a righteous whistleblower, pushed out for refusing to participate in persecution of the poor, beleaguered J6-ers and for reporting on the “irregular” procedures used to prosecute them. He quickly became a regular fixture of the right-wing podcast circuit, championed by both Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan.
During that heady time, he got chummy with a lot of people in the MAGA media ecosystem, including then-podcaster Kash Patel, who served as a sort of patron saint of a clique of disciplined FBI agents who call themselves “the Suspendables.” Check out their clothing line — it “exists to forge elite-level resilience in the warriors who defend, serve, and sacrifice, and in those who stand with them, by building strength in body, mind, and spirit.” Founder Kyle Seraphin hosts a daily show, and, until 2025, Friend co-hosted the American Radicals Podcast with fellow Suspendable Garret O’Boyle.
Patel’s support for these rejects wasn’t just moral. When Friend and O’Boyle testified before Rep. Jordan’s weaponization subcommittee in May of 2023, they acknowledged taking a “donation” from Patel. And when Patel got tapped to run the bureau after the election, he texted the group: “Thank you guys, you made this happen.”
But almost immediately, things started to go south. In August of 2025, Patel’s girlfriend Alexis Wilkins sued Seraphin for defamation after he called her a “honeypot” for Israel:
[FBI Director Kash Patel] has had his own little ‘honeypot’ issue that’s been going on of late, so we’re just going to acknowledge it real publicly. He’s got a girlfriend that is half his age, who is apparently is both a country music singer, a political commentator on Rumble, a friend of John Rich through Bongino, who also now owns a big chunk of Rumble, and she’s also a former Mossad agent in what is like the equivalent of their NSA. But I’m sure that’s totally because, like, she’s really looking for like a cross-eyed, you know, kind of thickish built, super cool bro who’s almost 50 years old who’s Indian in America. Like it has nothing to do with the fact that uh we’re really close to the Trump administration. Anyway, I’m sure that’s totally just like love. That’s what real love looks like.
In May, Judge David Ezra refused to toss that suit, finding that a reasonable viewer would take Seraphin’s claims as fact, in part because his show opens with a voiceover promising that “this program has no time for comforting lies.”
The day before Wilkins sued Seraphin, Friend signed his reinstatement deal with the government. But he didn’t set foot in an FBI office until December 8, when he spent two days at the Jacksonville Division under escort, with no gun, no computer, and no email, performing, by his own account, “no actual work or duties.” On December 13, supervisors summoned him to the Daytona Beach office to sign security-clearance paperwork, then handed him a letter signed by Patel firing him for “unprofessional conduct and poor judgment.”
This time his offense was running his mouth about the January 6 pipe bomb investigation. According to the termination letter, Friend “disseminated media sources and photographs identifying an alleged subject and discussed the alleged subject on your podcast, despite the lack of credible, verifiable evidence necessary to publicly identify the subject.” That subject was a Capitol Police officer, wrongly identified by Glenn Beck’s The Blaze as the DNC Pipe Bomber based on the “science” of gait-analysis. She’s currently suing The Blaze for defamation.
On December 4, the FBI arrested Brian Cole Jr. for planting the pipe bombs. The next day, Friend joined The Kyle Seraphin Show, for his regular “Friend Fridays” spot. This time the friends floated the possibility that Cole was “a Chester the molester pedophile,” pressured into pleading to the bombing instead. He suggested that someone “in a position of executive leadership” was “just so damn thirsty to get a win for dad so that the president will be proud of you finally.”
To wit:
If you were doing another put-up job on this guy, I think we spelled out a pretty compelling case that this probably ain’t the guy. Then may God have mercy on your soul. And I’m going to end with this. I’m going to bring out my inner Commodus. You better pray to Gaia or Vishnu or whatever your maker is that RealSteveFriend is never in a position to be an instrument of God’s wrath. Because I will be merciful. I won’t give you a trial and a hanging. I’ll allow you to breathe every breath that your body will have for the rest of its natural life inside of a box. And then when it ultimately fades to black, that’s when real wrath begins.
This is undoubtedly inappropriate conduct by an FBI employee. It’s also exactly how Patel got his job. So it’s more than a little ironic that now he’s calling it a firing offense — although he softened the blow with a payout of $163,674.40, for reasons unclear to Friend himself.
Friend is represented by former Florida state Rep. Anthony Sabatini, a MAGA firebrand who is no stranger to controversy himself. The complaint, which was flagged by Law & Crime, says that Friend was acting in a personal capacity when he speculated that the head of a federal agency had framed an innocent man for a bomb plot, and that he has a First Amendment right to speak on matters of public concern. This would be entirely counter to a long line of decisions granting law enforcement agencies substantial deference when they want to discipline an employee for intemperate public comments. Nevertheless, Friend wants Judge Paul Byron, an Obama-appointee to the Middle District of Florida, to reinstate him and award him backpay.
In the meantime, the rupture is causing major heartburn in MAGA media land.
“Steve has been pushed past breaking point, after waiting out the Biden administration to receive justice, only to be slapped in the face, anonymously smeared, and betrayed by Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who promised him the world until they were in a position to deliver,” NYPost columnist Miranda Devine wailed, even as she conceded that “it has been unwise and self-destructive for Steve to blow off steam in public.”
But of course blowing off steam in public is the entire reason Friend got hired back at the FBI. Patel spent years cutting checks to guys whose whole brand was trashing the government, then handed them badges and acted shocked when they kept doing it. Now one of them is suing him. The circle of grifter life continues.
Friend v. Patel [Trial Docket via Court Listener]
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The post Kash Patel Fires ‘Whistleblower’ For MAGA Pod Hits, Gets Sued appeared first on Above the Law.
Last August, the FBI reinstated agent Stephen Friend, who left the bureau in 2023, and awarded him a lump sum settlement of $61,430, plus “hundreds of thousands of dollars in back pay.” In December, FBI Director Kash Patel personally fired him for “unprofessional conduct and poor judgment.” And on Thursday, Friend sued Patel in federal court in Orlando to vindicate his God-given right to “speak[] publicly in his capacity as a citizen about an important, publicly known, and widely debated federal investigation.”
It’s the circle of grifter life!
Friend is either a whistleblower victimized by the weaponized Biden DOJ or an attention whore with very bad judgment, depending on whose account you believe. Friend says he declined to participate in the arrest of a January 6 defendant in August of 2022, telling his boss it was “inappropriate to use an FBI SWAT team to arrest a subject for misdemeanor offenses” who would face “biased jury pools in Washington, DC.” In September, he was suspended, after which he lost his clearance and then resigned in February of 2023.
In a May 2023 letter to Congress, the bureau said Friend had downloaded FBI documents onto a flash drive, “participated in multiple, unapproved media interviews, including an interview with a Russian government news agency,” and made a “surreptitious recording of a meeting with FBI management” that “may have violated Florida state law.”
Friend insists that he’s a righteous whistleblower, pushed out for refusing to participate in persecution of the poor, beleaguered J6-ers and for reporting on the “irregular” procedures used to prosecute them. He quickly became a regular fixture of the rightwing podcast circuit, championed by both Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan.
During that heady time, he got chummy with a lot of people in the MAGA media ecosystem, including then-podcaster Kash Patel, who served as a sort of patron saint of a clique of disciplined FBI agents who call themselves “the Suspendables.” Check out their clothing line — it “exists to forge elite-level resilience in the warriors who defend, serve, and sacrifice, and in those who stand with them, by building strength in body, mind, and spirit.” Founder Kyle Seraphin hosts a daily show, and, until 2025, Friend co-hosted the American Radicals Podcast with fellow Suspendable Garret O’Boyle.
Patel’s support for these rejects wasn’t just moral. When Friend and O’Boyle testified before Rep. Jordan’s weaponization subcommittee in May of 2023, they acknowledged taking a “donation” from Patel. And when Patel got tapped to run the bureau after the election, he texted the group: “Thank you guys, you made this happen.”
But almost immediately, things started to go south. In August of 2025, Patel’s girlfriend Alexis Wilkins sued Seraphin for defamation after he called her a “honeypot” for Israel:
[FBI Director Kash Patel] has had his own little ‘honeypot’ issue that’s been going on of late, so we’re just going to acknowledge it real publicly. He’s got a girlfriend that is half his age, who is apparently is both a country music singer, a political commentator on Rumble, a friend of John Rich through Bongino, who also now owns a big chunk of Rumble, and she’s also a former Mossad agent in what is like the equivalent of their NSA. But I’m sure that’s totally because, like, she’s really looking for like a cross-eyed, you know, kind of thickish built, super cool bro who’s almost 50 years old who’s Indian in America. Like it has nothing to do with the fact that uh we’re really close to the Trump administration. Anyway, I’m sure that’s totally just like love. That’s what real love looks like.
In May, Judge David Ezra refused to toss that suit, finding that a reasonable viewer would take Seraphin’s claims as fact, in part because his show opens with a voiceover promising that “this program has no time for comforting lies.”
The day before Wilkins sued Seraphin, Friend signed his reinstatement deal with the government. But he didn’t set foot in an FBI office until December 8, when he spent two days at the Jacksonville Division under escort, with no gun, no computer, and no email, performing, by his own account, “no actual work or duties.” On December 13, supervisors summoned him to the Daytona Beach office to sign security-clearance paperwork, then handed him a letter signed by Patel firing him for “unprofessional conduct and poor judgment.”
This time his offense was running his mouth about the January 6 pipe bomb investigation. According to the termination letter, Friend “disseminated media sources and photographs identifying an alleged subject and discussed the alleged subject on your podcast, despite the lack of credible, verifiable evidence necessary to publicly identify the subject.” That subject was a Capitol Police officer, wrongly identified by Glenn Beck’s The Blaze as the DNC Pipe Bomber based on the “science” of gait-analysis. She’s currently suing The Blaze for defamation.
On December 4, the FBI arrested Brian Cole Jr. for planting the pipe bombs. The next day, Friend joined The Kyle Seraphin Show, for his regular “Friend Fridays” spot. This time the friends floated the possibility that Cole was “a Chester the molester pedophile,” pressured into pleading to the bombing instead. He suggested that someone “in a position of executive leadership” was “just so damn thirsty to get a win for dad so that the president will be proud of you finally.”
To wit:
If you were doing another put-up job on this guy, I think we spelled out a pretty compelling case that this probably ain’t the guy. Then may God have mercy on your soul. And I’m going to end with this. I’m going to bring out my inner Commodus. You better pray to Gaia or Vishnu or whatever your maker is that RealSteveFriend is never in a position to be an instrument of God’s wrath. Because I will be merciful. I won’t give you a trial and a hanging. I’ll allow you to breathe every breath that your body will have for the rest of its natural life inside of a box. And then when it ultimately fades to black, that’s when real wrath begins.
This is undoubtedly inappropriate conduct by an FBI employee. It’s also exactly how Patel got his job. So it’s more than a little ironic that now he’s calling it a firing offense — although he softened the blow with a payout of $163,674.40, for reasons unclear to Friend himself.
Friend is represented by former Florida state Rep. Anthony Sabatini, a MAGA firebrand who is no stranger to controversy himself. The complaint, which was flagged by Law & Crime, says that Friend was acting in a personal capacity when he speculated that the head of a federal agency had framed an innocent man for a bomb plot, and that he has a First Amendment right to speak on matters of public concern. This would be entirely counter to a long line of decisions granting law enforcement agencies substantial deference when they want to discipline an employee for intemperate public comments. Nevertheless, Friend wants Judge Paul Byron, an Obama-appointee to the Middle District of Florida, to reinstate him and award him backpay.
In the meantime, the rupture is causing major heartburn in MAGA media land.
Miranda Devine@mirandadevine
Hero FBI whistleblower @stevefriend has been fired by @FBIDirectorKash.
I can vouch for Steve’s integrity, having known him since he blew the whistle on J6 excesses and other FBI malfeasance under Biden and Wray.
Steve has been pushed past breaking point, after waiting out …
9:19 PM · Dec 13, 2025 · 630K Views
673 Replies · 1.5K Reposts · 3.36K Likes
“Steve has been pushed past breaking point, after waiting out the Biden administration to receive justice, only to be slapped in the face, anonymously smeared, and betrayed by Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who promised him the world until they were in a position to deliver,” NYPost columnist Miranda Devine wailed, even as she conceded that “it has been unwise and self-destructive for Steve to blow off steam in public.”
But of course blowing off steam in public is the entire reason Friend got hired back at the FBI. Patel spent years cutting checks to guys whose whole brand was trashing the government, then handed them badges and acted shocked when they kept doing it. Now one of them is suing him. The circle of grifter life continues.
