FBI Director Kash Patel and country singer Alexis Wilkins are engaged.

Wilkins, 27, announced the relationship milestone on social media Sunday night, posting a photo in which she displayed a sizable diamond ring while standing beside her future husband.

“Went and got the law involved,” the singer quipped in the caption.

Patel reposted the announcement, adding heart and diamond-ring emojis.

Alina Habba, a former attorney for President Donald Trump, joined the congratulations. “This makes my heart smile. Big congratulations to my friends [Alexis Wilkins] and [Kash Patel],” she wrote.

Laura Loomer and other figures associated with Trump’s political circle also celebrated the couple’s engagement.

Patel and Wilkins reportedly met at a conservative ReAwaken America event in October 2022, according to an insider who previously spoke with the Daily Mail. Their romance began several months later, in January 2023.

Their relationship has also drawn public attention over Patel’s alleged use of government resources while visiting and protecting the country performer.

Last year, Patel took an FBI aircraft to Pennsylvania to watch Wilkins perform the national anthem at a wrestling event. The decision sparked criticism online, with some accusing the FBI director of misusing agency resources during a government shutdown.

Kyle Seraphin, a former FBI agent, mocked Patel in a social media post, referring to him satirically as “KA$H.”

“Dear FBI Employees: I’m sorry the government ISN’T funded, so you won’t be getting a paycheck,” Seraphin wrote. “Luckily, that doesn’t stop Real American Freestyle WRESTLING! So I flew the FBI jet to State College PA, hung out with my chick, and then flew to Nashville where she lives.”

Patel defended the trip, dismissing his detractors as “uninformed internet anarchists.”

“The disgustingly baseless attacks against Alexis — a true patriot and the woman I’m proud to call my partner in life — are beyond pathetic,” he said at the time.

“She is a rock-solid conservative and a country music sensation who has done more for this nation than most will in ten lifetimes. I’m so blessed she’s in my life.”

He continued: “Attacking her isn’t just wrong — it’s cowardly and jeopardizes our safety. My love of family will always be my cornerstone, and you will never tear that down or keep me from them.”

Patel’s spokesperson, Ben Williamson, also defended him, saying his trips pale in comparison to the money spent by former FBI chiefs James Comey and Christopher Wray. He also claimed Patel pays a reimbursement in advance. 

Williamson said Patel is permitted to take personal time to visit family, friends or his longtime girlfriend. “He doesn’t do it often,” Williamson added.

Yet Patel faced renewed scrutiny just a few months later when it was revealed he used a SWAT team to protect Wilkins.

MS NOW reported that Wilkins received the protection of ‘elite FBI agents’ who typically work with the Nashville office’s SWAT team. 

Some veterans of the agency complained that typically, girlfriends and spouses of officials do not get that level of protection.

Helen Wray, the wife of ex-FBI Director Christopher Wray, had said she only received a security detail when she was traveling with her husband. 

Others argued that Wilkins does not face the threats necessary for that amount of attention, and that the agents assigned to protecting the singer could be kept from responding to more serious potential crimes.  

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‘There is no legitimate justification for this. This is a clear abuse of position and misuse of government resources,’ former senior FBI agent Christopher O’Leary told MS Now. 

‘She is not his spouse, does not live in the same house or even the same city.’

O’Leary also complained that Wilkins was gaining security when people who were being threatened by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, like recently indicted former White House advisor John Bolton, were losing their details. 

But the FBI once again defended the move, claiming Wilkins had faced a slew of death threats since their relationship was made public. 

‘Ms. Wilkins is receiving a protective detail because she has faced hundreds of credible death threats related to her relationship with Director Patel, whom she has been dating for three years,’ a spokesperson told the Daily Mail. 

‘Out of respect for her safety, we will not be providing additional details.’ 

Wilkins, though, decided to go public with some of the abuse she’s taken from certain corners of the internet. 

‘A morning in my DMs.’ she posted on social media as she shared comments including that ‘you should pray to christ and end your life! You’re better off in his hands than on this earth’ and ‘you need to touch a bullet.’

‘Someone needs to kidnap her,’ a third Instagram user added.

The hate-filled messages came after Wilkins sued two right-wing commentators for allegedly claiming she is a Mossad agent.

Wilkins launched the legal action against failed Utah candidate for the US Senate, Samuel Parker, and MAGA social media provocateur Elijah Schaffer.

She accuses the pair of the ‘insidious assertion’ that she has connections to Israel‘s government and is acting as a ‘honeypot’ – an agent who uses a romantic or sexual relationship to compromise a target.

The Nashville-based Wilkins ‘is a Christian, American-born, United States citizen, and is unaffiliated with any intelligence agency, much less the government of Israel,’ the singer’s lawyers wrote in her federal complaint. 

Wilkins has never been to Israel, her lawyers attested. 

Parker, who had a failed bid in 2018, has since grown a social media following by stoking controversy on the right, including his attacks on Wilkins. 

The country music singer has also previously sued podcaster and former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin for allegedly lying about her being ‘an agent of a foreign government, assigned to manipulate and compromise the Director of the FBI.’ 

The former agent later alleged the lawsuit was an effort to silence his criticism of the FBI director and his girlfriend. 

Wilkins has been regularly accused of being a ‘honeypot,’ a spy who uses romantic tactics or sexual relationships to influence actions or compromise targets with access to intelligence.

Their 19-year age gap fueled the tin foil hat conspiracy which she fiercely denied.

She told the Daily Mail in August it would have been a ‘huge long-game’ since she was dating Patel for years before he became FBI director.

Wilkins said that the redirection of attacks has been so harmful she’s had to censor out the word ‘honeypot’ from her social media comments.

‘I’ve blocked the word “honeypot” from my Instagram comments, if that tells you anything,’ Wilkins told the Daily Mail.

WASHINGTON — Sen. John Kennedy, known for his sharp one-liners, is leaving open the possibility of a 2028 presidential bid while defending Sen. Tom Cotton against President Trump’s anger over his opposition to the Sunshine Protection Act.

“My plans right now are to run for re-election, but as I’ve said before, if I don’t think I can be effective in the Senate anymore, I would consider it,” the 74-year-old Louisiana Republican told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

“I haven’t made a decision. If a bunch of, on my side of the aisle, if a bunch of goobers run, and I think they’re goobers, and one of the goobers might win, and I think I could do a better job, I would consider running.”

Kennedy, a Louisiana senator whose viral soundbites and distinctive Southern drawl have made him a political standout, is up for re-election in 2028.

His fellow Louisiana Republican, Sen. Bill Cassidy, lost a primary earlier this year after Trump backed Rep. Julia Letlow’s effort to defeat him.

Still, Kennedy has not shied away from questioning Trump or his administration. His pointed questioning of then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem about publicly funded advertisements came shortly before she was fired.

On Sunday, Kennedy criticized Trump for publicly targeting Cotton. The president released the Arkansas senator’s personal cellphone number during a fierce attack over Cotton’s opposition to legislation that would make daylight saving time permanent.

“Every now and then, there are disputes in Congress that have existential significance for the future of Western civilization. Daylight Savings Time is not one of them,” Kennedy said. “Tom Cotton feels strongly about it. Tom is a rock star senator.”

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“The president, as we know, can be sometimes — he, he exists loudly,” Kennedy added. “He can be tempestuous. He can go from zero to a-hole in about three seconds.”

“I don’t think he should have given out Tom’s cellphone number.”

Cotton, who chairs the Senate Republican Conference, is scheduled to face re-election on Nov. 3.

Kennedy is also working to help Republicans in competitive Senate contests. He said he plans to campaign in Texas, Michigan and Ohio.

He characterized the Texas race as an “unpopularity contest” between Attorney General Ken Paxton and state Rep. James Talarico.

“I think ultimately Mr. Paxton will win because I think Texas is a Republican state, but I think it’s gonna be very, very close,” Kennedy said.

More broadly, Kennedy suggested that the political environment could be less difficult for Republicans than many pundits predict.

“I will bet you a soda and a nice hat that the experts are wrong. I will think — I do think it will be close. I think the biggest issue is cost of living,” he said.

Kennedy acknowledged that Republicans bear some responsibility for voters’ affordability concerns. “Some of that is our fault,” he said. “We should have done more, but we’ve done a lot, and I’ve been out on the campaign trail talking about it.”

NEW YORK — One woman came forward, then another, then a third. Before long, a steady stream had become a flood.

Across social media, countless women — along with some men — declared themselves Jane Doe in solidarity with a young woman who used that name while suing Cornell University and seven fraternity members she alleges raped her.

For many participants, adopting the pseudonym also meant recounting their own experiences of sexual abuse or assault. Their posts became part of a broad show of support that intensified after journalists at Cornell’s independent student newspaper reported on the lawsuit late last month.

Some people joined the campaign to help shield the plaintiff in an era when online searches can quickly expose a person’s identity. By flooding the internet with “I am Jane Doe” messages, they hoped to confuse search tools and artificial intelligence systems.

Another moment of reckoning

The declarations have appeared in nearly every format, including videos, photographs and written posts shared across social media.

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The wave of testimony has evoked the peak of the #MeToo movement, which surged roughly a decade ago as women shared accounts of harassment and assault following a prominent Hollywood case. The hashtag itself had been introduced in that setting years earlier.

“These moments … are encouraging more women to speak up and tell their stories,” said Emma Davidson Tribbs, founding director of the National Women’s Defense League. “They are giving people a level of bravery and comfort to come forward and speak their truth. And they can be incredibly catalyzing for change.”

Wendy Lea Brewer hopes the campaign leads to that kind of change. The 48-year-old singer posted Instagram reels carrying messages such as “I am Jane Doe” and “It’s time to speak.”

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Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, won the first round of Brazil’s presidential election tonight with a surprisingly strong performance, extending a broader run of victories for Latin American right-wing candidates backed by Donald Trump.

The contest had tightened significantly in the weeks before voting, but most polls still showed incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva holding a single-digit lead.

Flávio Bolsonaro will now meet Lula in a second-round runoff on October 25. With 99% of the vote counted, Bolsonaro held a 47.2% to 44.9% advantage over Lula in an election the incumbent had been widely expected to win.

The immediate question dominating the aftermath is how pollsters could have missed the result by such a wide margin.

The dramatic polling miss is likely to strengthen the Brazilian right and the Bolsonaro camp, which have long accused the country’s leading pollsters of producing surveys that favor Lula and his Workers’ Party.

Polling also underestimated Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 and 2018 elections, although those discrepancies were relatively small compared with the gap between the surveys and tonight’s results.

Bolsonaro delivered an especially powerful performance in his southern strongholds, winning Brazil’s three largest states by substantial margins:

In São Paulo, the country’s most populous state, Bolsonaro led Lula 52% to 38%.

In Minas Gerais, Brazil’s historic bellwether state, Bolsonaro held a 48% to 43% advantage. In his home stronghold of Rio de Janeiro, he defeated the incumbent 53% to 39%.

Lula built commanding leads in his traditional northeastern bases, including the vote-rich states of Bahia, Pernambuco and Ceará. Those margins, however, were not enough to offset Bolsonaro’s unprecedented strength across southern Brazil.

Flávio Bolsonaro maintained a close relationship with Donald Trump during the campaign. Trump made clear that he wanted to remove Lula, a longtime geopolitical adversary, from office.

The unexpected result is the latest in a series of right-wing victories across Latin America, where conservative candidates have recently gained power in Chile, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.

The outcome is certain to trigger a period of reflection within Brazil’s left, including questions over whether Lula should have sought another term.

At 80, after three presidential terms and an attempt to win a fourth, Lula had been widely regarded as the only candidate capable of uniting Brazil’s divided and often-fractured left.

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Lula’s political career has included one of the country’s most remarkable comebacks. After being imprisoned on corruption charges, he was freed by Brazil’s Supreme Court and went on to defeat incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in a closely fought 2022 election.

Lula had famously promised in 2022 to serve only one term before reversing course. That decision now appears likely to work against him as he approaches what will almost certainly be his final electoral campaign.

Flávio Bolsonaro will face Lula in the October 25 runoff, entering the second round with several structural advantages.

In addition to vastly outperforming across the country, and proving the pollsters wrong, he is likely to win the majority of the votes of the major third-party candidates: Augusto Cury, Renan Santos, Ronaldo Caiado, and Romeu Zema.

Together, these four candidates received nearly 8% of the vote.

Caiado, Zema, and Santos are generally seen as candidates leaning to the political right, while Cury is a centrist. Caiado, Santos, and Cury have allegedly said they do not plan to make an endorsement in the second round.

If elected, Flavio Bolsonaro is all but certain to free his father, and senior Brazilian military officers, who are currently jailed on charges of planning a coup to remain in power following the 2022 election.

The election also saw other members of the Bolsonaro family ushered into higher office: Jair Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelly, was elected senator, as was his son Carlos, while another son, Renan, was elected federal deputy.

Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party also turned in strong results in races for both chambers of Brazil’s Congress, particularly in the Senate, where they are expected to hold 29 seats, compared to just 9 for Lula’s Workers Party.

In Brazil’s lower chamber, the Liberal Party is also expected to hold the greatest number of seats, with 121, while Brazil Fe, a left-wing coalition, is on track to secure 78 seats.

Political analyst Flavio Morgenstern argued, “This election was not about Flavio Bolsonaro vs. Lula. It’s about all of freedom-loving Brazil against the Brazilian Supreme Court. People have no voice in the institutions, and all the power in Brazil is concentrated in the Supreme Court.”

The Brazilian right and the Bolsonaro family have long butted heads with the nation’s Supreme Federal Court, which is dominated by justices appointed by the Workers Party.

While Bolsonaro appears to have the wind in his sails, it is too early to count out Lula in the second round election in three weeks. Lula is renowned as a smart and effective campaigner, and still commands a powerful electoral machinery.

Yet, is winning election to an unprecedented fourth term a feat too daunting for even Lula, the great giant of the Latin American left?