Wedding is wanted for allegedly shipping hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia, through Mexico and southern California, to Canada and US locations, and for orchestrating multiple murders and an attempted murder to further these drug crimes.

The US is offering a reward of up to $10m (£7.7m) for information leading to Wedding’s arrest or conviction.

Investigators believe he is living in Mexico, but have not ruled out his presence in the US, Canada, other Latin American countries or elsewhere.

It was not clear if he has a lawyer.

Wedding competed in Giant Slalom snowboarding for Canada during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

His aliases include “El Jefe,” “Giant,” “Public Enemy,” “James Conrad King,” and “Jesse King,” the FBI said.

In June 2024, Wedding and his accomplice Andrew Clark, 34, also Canadian, were charged in California with running a continuing criminal enterprise, committing murder in connection with the enterprise and assorted drug crimes, and conspiring to possess, distribute, and export cocaine.

Clark was arrested last October by Mexican authorities and was among 29 fugitives extradited to the US from Mexico last week.

The US indictment alleges that Wedding and Clark directed the 20 November 2023 murders of two family members in Ontario, Canada, in retaliation for a stolen drug shipment that passed through southern California. Another family member survived the shooting but was left with serious physical injuries, the FBI said.

Wedding and Clark allegedly also ordered the murder of another victim on 18 May 2024 over a drug debt, according to the FBI.

“The alleged murders of his competitors make Wedding a very dangerous man, and his addition to the list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, coupled with a major reward offer by the State Department, will make the public our partner so that we can catch up with him before he puts anyone else in danger,” Akil Davis, the assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, said in a press release on Thursday.

Trump posted on social media that Bongino was “a man of incredible love and passion for our Country” and would serve under newly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel.

Bongino, 50, has worked for the New York police department and the Secret Service – as well as having been part of the protection detail for two presidents, George W Bush and Barack Obama.

His appointment, which does not require Senate confirmation, means neither of the top two people running the agency has FBI experience.

The deputy director, who is responsible for supervising all domestic and international operations, is usually a career agent with years of experience.

He hosts daily podcast The Dan Bongino Show whose Facebook posts often attract more attention than those of Fox News and CNN combined.

In Friday’s episode, there was a segment about the FBI, in which he praised Patel and tried to allay Democratic fears the agency will be used to target Trump’s enemies.

“Kash Patel is there for one reason, he is there to make the FBI great again,” he said.

He’s committed to fighting crime and that only, he added, calling his new boss the “change agent” the FBI needs.

“How amazing would it be in four years to look back with a good, high-quality, reformed FBI free of woke culture and DEI that goes out making headline, big arrests of real bad guys destroying your community. How good would that be?

Trump said in his social media announcement on Sunday that Bongino would give up the podcast, adding he would help restore fairness, justice, law and order.

Bongino, who has run for Congress three times, hosted Trump on his podcast ahead of last year’s election.

Episodes of his programme from the last week include titles such as “Trump Keeps Delivering And The Libs Are Seething” and “The Only People Who Love Crime Are Criminals!!!”

Talking about his career as a prolific conservative political commentator, Bongino said in 2018: “My life is all about owning the libs now.”

With a combative persona, he can often be found firing back at Trump’s detractors on X, including a long-running spat with horror author Stephen King.

Patel was last week narrowly confirmed by the Senate to the lead the law-enforcement agency that he has long attacked.

He denied any plans to pursue political vendettas and has promised to “rebuild” the bureau.

The FBI has 38,000 employees and a budget of more than $11bn.

The upper chamber of Congress narrowly approved President Donald Trump’s nominee by 51-49. Two Republicans voted no.

Democrats had warned he would seek retribution against Trump’s enemies, although the nominee has denied any plans to pursue political vendettas.

In his confirmation hearings, Patel, 44, also denied keeping a list of “deep state” enemies, while playing down controversial past remarks he had made such as referring to law enforcement officials who investigated Trump as “criminal gangsters”.

Patel was voted against by all Democratic senators and two Republicans who have often dissented, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

He was the 18th cabinet official approved by lawmakers since Trump was inaugurated a month ago.

“I am honored to be confirmed as the ninth Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Patel said on X, shortly after he was confirmed by the Senate.

“My mission as Director is clear: let good cops be cops – and rebuild trust in the FBI.”

“We will rebuild an FBI the American people can be proud of,” he added.

Patel takes the helm of an FBI in flux after the justice department forced out some of its top officials and demanded the names of agents who investigated the 2021 riot by Trump supporters at the US Capitol.

News of Patel’s confirmation was greeted by an ovation on the other side of Washington DC where Republicans were gathering for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Florida Senator Rick Scott stood on CPAC’s stage and asked the crowd: “What do you think about Kash Patel?” Loud applause was the response.

To most Republicans, Patel is a disruptor who will lead an overdue shake up the nation’s top law enforcement agency, which they and Trump claim has been weaponised against conservatives.

But Democrats say Patel is a far-right conspiracy theorist with little experience in law enforcement, and someone who would put fealty to Trump above his oath to lead a department that is meant to operate independently.

“[Patel’s] poor judgment and lack of experience make him wholly unqualified to keep Americans safe as our FBI Director. I voted no,” Senator Martin Heinrich said on X.

Patel replaces Christopher Wray who Trump picked in 2017. Wray resigned before inauguration day last month, after the incoming Republican president indicated he would fire him.

More than 5,000 names were on the list, sources told CBS, the BBC’s US news partner.

Meanwhile, two lawsuits were filed on Tuesday on behalf of agents seeking to keep the names under wraps.

The developments are the latest struggles over the future of the main US federal law enforcement agency. President Donald Trump believes the FBI and DoJ under Joe Biden unfairly targeted him for prosecution.

Last week, new officials appointed by the White House at the justice department – which oversees the FBI – fired dozens of prosecutors who pursued riot-related cases. Those prosecutors also had worked for special prosecutor Jack Smith, who brought charges against Trump for his alleged role in sparking the riot.

And over the weekend, thousands of FBI employees were asked to fill out a questionnaire about their participation in the Capitol riot investigation – the largest in FBI history.

According to Tuesday’s legal filings, the form included questions such as, “What was your role in the investigation(s) or prosecution(s) relating to events that occurred at or near the US Capitol on January 6, 2021?”

On 6 January 2021, after a speech by Trump, his supporters broke into the US Capitol, delaying the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

Trump effectively ended the investigation into the riot within hours of taking office last month, and pardoned all but a handful of the nearly 1,600 rioters who had been convicted or charged with crimes

One of the lawsuits seeking to stop disclosure of agents’ names alleges that the purpose of the list of FBI employees who worked on the riot and Trump classified documents cases “is to identify agents to be terminated or to suffer other adverse employment action.”

“Donald Trump has made repeated public pronouncements of his intent to exact revenge upon persons he perceives to be disloyal to him,” the filing says.

Lawyers for nine anonymous FBI agents also argue in the filing that revealing details of investigations would harm national security. It says that agents and their families would be “in immediate danger of retribution by the now pardoned and at-large Jan. 6 convicted felons” if their identities are revealed.

A separate lawsuit was filed Tuesday on behalf of another group of seven unnamed agents by the FBI Agents Association (FBIAA) — an organization that represents thousands of current and former bureau employees.

“FBI Special Agents who risk their lives protecting the country from criminals and terrorists are now being placed on lists and having their careers jeopardized simply for doing their jobs,” said FBIAA president Natalie Bara.

Trump’s pick to head the justice department, Pam Bondi, has not been sworn in to her post yet, although that is expected soon after a full Senate vote on her nomination Tuesday.

In the meantime the department is being run by acting chief Emil Bove, a White House appointee who formerly worked as one of Trump’s defence lawyers.

The BBC contacted the justice department for comment on Tuesday’s lawsuits.

The fight over the identities of the FBI agents comes as one of Trump’s top advisors, tech billionaire Elon Musk, sought to stop the disclosure of names of employees in his unofficial Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).

Doge is reportedly attempting to operate in a number of different US government departments. A response to a post on his X network listed several names of Doge employees; Musk replied “You have committed a crime”, and the account posting the original message was suspended.

Other accounts repeated the names, which also were disclosed in news reports.

Alexander Smirnov, 44, also admitted tax evasion after not reporting more than $2m (£1.58m) in income.

His claims became the basis of an impeachment investigation in Congress which centred around the false claims that the Bidens made millions in bribes from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company.

But Smirnov admitted he made the story up, and pleaded guilty in Los Angeles on Monday as part of an agreement with prosecutors.

Smirnov, a dual US-Israeli citizen, had been an FBI informant for more than a decade when he made the allegations about the Bidens in June 2020, saying that Joe and Hunter Biden each received $5m from the energy company.

Prosecutors said Smirnov was motivated by “bias” against President Biden and that he spun his “routine and unextraordinary business contacts” with Burisma into tales about bribery that were “fabrications”.

The FBI investigated his statements but within months recommended the case be closed without any legal action taken against the Bidens.

But the allegations refused to die, and became the basis for a Republican-led drive to investigate President Biden, including an effort to make Smirnov’s initial statement public.Prosecutors say that when he was re-interviewed by FBI agents in September 2023, Smirnov doubled down on his claims.

Smirnov was arrested in Nevada as he returned to the US from an overseas trip in February 2024.

According to court documents, he had ties with Russian intelligence and used his more than $2m in unreported income to buy a Las Vegas condominium, a lease on a Bentley car, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of clothes, jewellery and accessories.

The case was brought by Special Counsel David Weiss – who has overseen an investigation of Hunter Biden.Joe Biden issued a pardon for his son, who faced potential prison time for tax evasion and lying on a form about his drug addiction when he bought a gun.

Smirnov will be sentenced in January. The plea agreement is subject to approval by a federal judge.

He faces a maximum sentence of 35 years in prison and a $1m fine, however prosecutors and defence lawyers have agreed to a sentence of between four and six years and a restitution payment of $675,502, according to the plea deal.

Thursday’s 88-page report, issued by the office of Inspector General Michael Horowitz, zoomed in on the work of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), one of the US’s foremost domestic intelligence agencies.

It concluded that the FBI had behaved “effectively” ahead of the attack on January 6, 2021, which sought to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election.

“Despite playing only a supporting role in preparing for and responding to the events of January 6, the FBI recognized the potential for violence and took significant and appropriate steps to prepare for this supporting role,” the inspector general’s office explained.

But, it added, the FBI could have gone further to identify intelligence about potential threats, including by canvassing its field offices for materials, as it does before major events like the Super Bowl.

The FBI, however, has long come under scrutiny for its actions in the lead-up to the January 6 attack.

And the agency’s future is now in question, as its longtime director, Christopher Wray, prepares to step down after more than seven years at the helm.

Incoming President Donald Trump has long taken an adversarial approach to the bureau, which he has described as part of a “deep state” system designed to undercut his authority.

His nominee to lead the FBI, former prosecutor Kash Patel, has floated shuttering the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC, and significantly reducing its operations.

The report centres on the events of January 6, when Trump, the outgoing president at the time, held a rally near the White House calling on supporters to “stop the steal” of the 2020 election.

He claimed — falsely — that his defeat in the 2020 race was the result of widespread voter fraud.

In the hours afterwards, pro-Trump protesters moved from the Ellipse, a round park south of the White House, to the US Capitol, where members of Congress inside were certifying the election results.

Rioters assaulted law enforcement officers and broke into the Capitol building, some chanting slogans like “Hang Mike Pence”, Trump’s then-vice president. Congress members were evacuated, and one protester was shot and killed as she tried to enter a room through a broken window.

Other deaths have also been linked to the attack. Some protesters suffered medical emergencies during the riot, while several law enforcement officers reportedly killed themselves in the aftermath.

 role the FBI played in the lead-up to those events has been the subject of bipartisan scrutiny in the years since.

A June 2023 report from the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee took the stance that the January 6 attack was “planned in plain sight”.

It blamed both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for “intelligence failures” that allowed the attack to unfurl.

“The intelligence failures in the lead-up to January 6th were not failures to obtain intelligence indicating the potential for violence,” that 2023 report argued.

Rather, it accused the FBI and DHS of failing “to fully and accurately assess the severity of the threat” based on the tips they received.

The report added that both agencies had a duty to issue guidance “with sufficient urgency and alarm to enable” law enforcement “to prepare for the violence that ultimately occurred on January 6th”.

Meanwhile, far-right conspiracy theorists have claimed FBI agents helped spur the violence on January 6, to unfairly smear Trump supporters.

Thursday’s report refutes that. No undercover FBI agents were at the protest, the report says.

While there were 26 confidential informants in Washington, DC, for the events of January 6, only three were at the Capitol, according to the report. It specifies they were tasked with observing “specific domestic terrorism case subjects”, nothing more.

“None of these FBI CHSs [confidential human sources] was authorized by the FBI to enter the Capitol or a restricted area or to otherwise break the law on January 6,” the report explained.

“Nor was any CHS directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts on January 6.”

This week’s report also emphasises that the FBI was charged with only a “supporting role” in preparing for the events of January 6.

Rather, it said, law enforcement agencies like the US Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police Department “were generally responsible for security operations, crowd control, and visitor protection in advance of protests and other demonstrations in and around the Capitol”.

President-elect Donald Trump has publicly signalled his desire to replace Mr Wray with Kash Patel, a long-time loyalist who has called for “dramatically” limiting the FBI’s authority.

Mr Wray, who was nominated by Trump in 2017 to serve a 10-year term, has faced criticism during his tenure from Republicans due to the FBI’s investigations into Trump after he left office.

Speaking at the FBI meeting on Wednesday, Mr Wray said: “After weeks of careful thought, I’ve decided the right thing for the bureau is for me to serve until the end of the current Administration in January and then step down.”

“My goal is to keep the focus on our mission – the indispensable work you’re doing on behalf of the American people everyday,” he told his colleagues.

“In my view, this is the best way to avoid dragging the bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work,” Mr Wray said.

He also addressed the FBI’s mission in his remarks, saying that the bureau’s goal to “keep Americans safe and uphold the constitution” will not change.

Trump appointed Mr Wray to lead the FBI after firing his predecessor James Comey following the FBI’s investigations into alleged contacts between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

But in recent years, Mr Wray has fallen out of favour with the president-elect after the FBI assisted with a federal probe into Trump’s handling of classified documents, a case that has since been dropped.

Trump indicated in a recent interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that he wasn’t “thrilled” with Wray, saying that Wray “invaded Mar-a-Lago” — a reference to the 2022 FBI search for classified documents that led to Trump’s 2023 indictment on seven criminal charges — and that he wanted someone in place to “straighten” out the bureau.

“I mean, it would sort of seem pretty obvious that if Kash gets in, he’s going to be taking somebody’s place, right?” Trump said, responding to a question about whether he would fire Wray if he didn’t resign on his own.

Wray, a Republican, was appointed by Trump in 2017 after the then-president fired James Comey as FBI director. Comey’s departure sparked the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate the Trump campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 election. Under normal protocol, Wray’s term would expire in 2027, although Mueller is the only person to have served a full term as FBI director since the 10-year post-Watergate norm was put in place. Only two FBI directors (including Comey) have been pushed out.

Following his election to a second term, Trump said his pick for FBI director would be Patel – a former aide who has been a steadfast supporter of the incoming Republican president.

Trump announced the decision in a post on his Truth Social network on Saturday, saying Patel, who wants to downsize the top intelligence body and pursue “conspirators” in the government and media, would restore “fidelity, bravery and integrity” to the agency.

“Kash is a brilliant lawyer, investigator, and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People,” Trump wrote.

The announcement means current FBI Director Christopher Wray must either resign or be fired after Trump takes office on January 20.

Although Wray is serving a 10-year term, his removal is not surprising given Trump’s longstanding public criticism of him and the FBI. Wray, who replaced Jim Comey, led the FBI as it investigated Trump for alleged obstruction of justice and raided his Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents, leading to indictments.

The decision sets up what is likely to be an explosive confirmation battle in the Senate, which must approve the appointment, not long after Trump’s plan to have another trusted ally, Matt Gaetz, lead the Department of Justice fell through.Patel is a lesser-known figure, but his nomination is still expected to cause shockwaves. He has embraced Trump’s rhetoric about a “deep state”, called for a “comprehensive housecleaning” of government workers who are disloyal to Trump and has referred to journalists as traitors, promising to try to prosecute some.

He has also pledged he would shut down the FBI’s Washington headquarters and “reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state’”.

A son of Indian immigrants, Patel served in several high-level posts during Trump’s first term, including as a national security adviser and as chief of staff to the acting defence secretary.

“Kash did an incredible job during my First Term,” Trump said, adding that the nominee would work to “end the growing crime epidemic in America, dismantle the migrant criminal gangs, and stop the evil scourge of human and drug trafficking across the Border”.

During the final months of Trump’s first term, he unsuccessfully pushed the idea of installing Patel as the deputy director of either the FBI or CIA. William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, wrote in his memoir that he told then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that an appointment to Patel as deputy FBI director would happen “over my dead body”.

“Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s pre-eminent law enforcement agency,” Barr wrote.

Trump also announced on Saturday that he would nominate Sheriff Chad Chronister, the top law enforcement officer in Hillsborough County, Florida, to serve as the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). He has worked closely with Trump’s choice for attorney general, Pam Bondi.

“Chad will work with our great Attorney General, Pam Bondi, to secure the Border, stop the flow of Fentanyl, and other Illegal Drugs, across the Southern Border, and SAVE LIVES,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The FBI is the investigative arm of the Justice Department, while the DEA also falls under its purview.

The appointments of Bondi and Patel indicate that Trump is interested in lining up closely aligned appointees willing to carry out his vision and policy inclinations.