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ODNI sends criminal referrals to DOJ for ex-IG, whistleblower tied to Trump impeachment

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence sent criminal referrals to the Justice Department for the whistleblower whose complaint helped trigger President Donald Trump’s 2019 impeachment and for the former intelligence community inspector general who notified Congress of the allegations, Fox News Digital has learned.

“I want to refer information that may constitute possible criminal activity in violation of federal criminal law committed by one or more former employees of the intelligence community,” ODNI’s general counsel wrote in the referral to the Justice Department.

Fox News Digital on Wednesday reviewed the referrals ODNI sent to the Justice Department. 

“The possible criminal activity concerns the circumstances described in the following congressional briefings:Discussion with Intelligence Community Inspector General, House Permanent Select Comm. on Intel., 116th Cong. (2019); Briefing by the Intelligence Community Inspector General, House Permanent Select Comm. on Intel., 116th Cong. (2019),” it continued.  

The referrals come after DNI Tulsi Gabbard released documents earlier this week exposing what was described as a “coordinated effort” by elements within the intelligence community—including then-Inspector General Michael Atkinson, to “manufacture a conspiracy” that was used as the basis to impeach Trump in 2019.

An intelligence official told Fox News Digital that the language in the referral is broad, but that it’s specifically directed at Atkinson and the whistleblower who reported concerns about President Trump’s July 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 

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Data Breach Exposing French Gun Owners a Warning to America

Anytime there’s a list of anything, there are going to be people who want to view that list for whatever reason. As we are firmly in the 21st century, that list is going to be digital more often than not, and that means the number of people who want to get that data increases exponentially. Especially when it’s something like a gun registry.

Luckily, federal law bars the federal government from creating a gun registry, though let’s be real here. If they change their minds, they’ll repeal the law in a heartbeat. It won’t stop them. Hell, it’s not even stopping the ATF from digitizing old records, which is really just a gun registry with a different name.

France, however, didn’t think gun registries were a bad thing.

Now, though, they’re finding out that data breaches into that registry are.

In a development that will shock absolutely nobody acquainted with the realities of gun control, there was another security breach of firearm owner data maintained by a government agency. This one took place in France, and an online cybersecurity resource, NeuraCyb Cybersecurity, reported it involved that country’s firearm registration system. Known as the Système d’Information sur les Armes (SIA), all law-abiding French gun owners are required to register information with it that includes, among other things, the gun owner’s name, address, firearms (including serial numbers), and a complete transaction history of each gun.

Because the SIA can be accessed in a number of ways—the firearms industry can access it to report commercial activity while gun owners can also access it to report any changes to their personal collection of firearms—it may be susceptible to being hacked from multiple points.

According to the NeuraCyb article:

Authorities detected the unauthorized access in late March 2026. The intrusion did not involve a direct hack of the central SIA database. Instead attackers used a compromised account belonging to a legitimate company or professional user authorized to interact with the system. This allowed them to extract commercial files stored within that specific account.

An anonymous hacker who took credit for the breach claimed to have stolen information on roughly 60,000 firearms and has allegedly offered to sell the data on underground online forums.  It is currently unknown how many law-abiding French gun owners might now have their personal information floating around the Internet and offered for sale to the highest (and shadiest) bidder, but some estimate it would be in the tens of thousands.

The absolute best-case scenario here is that the hacker just took the data because he needed proof he’d actually hacked it. In the hacker world, there are bragging rights to hacking certain systems, and having data from it proves you did it. They don’t want to do anything with the data so much as just support their claims and win acclaim in the hacking universe. He’s just saying he was going to sell it to make himself look cooler.

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‘Legitimate targets’: Medvedev on Russian MOD’s Ukraine-linked drone network list

A list of Ukraine-linked manufacturing facilities scattered across Europe, which was published by the Russian military, should be treated as a register of potential targets, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said.

The Russian Defense Ministry rolled out the list earlier on Thursday, claiming that Kiev’s Western backers have been planning to sharply ramp up production of long-range drones to target Russia. The plan is bound to drag European nations involved in the effort closer to direct conflict with Moscow, the military warned.

Medvedev, the deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council, urged European nations to take the warning at face value.

“[The] Russian Defense Ministry’s statement must be taken literally: the list of European facilities which make drones & other equipment is a list of potential targets for the Russian armed forces. When strikes become a reality depends on what comes next. Sleep well, European partners!” the ex-president wrote on X.

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FAFO: American YouTuber Sent to Prison in South Korea for Disrespecting Public Statue

An American YouTuber who goes by the name ‘Johnny Somali’ has been sentenced to prison time in South Korea for disrespecting a public statue and basically gyrating and twerking on it.

This was not only disrespectful but incredibly stupid.

Johnny is going to learn a whole new level of respect for American freedom from this episode. It’s amazing how time spent in a foreign prison can make someone appreciate how great things are in the USA.

The Associated Press reports:

American YouTuber sentenced to 6 months in South Korean prison for offensive stunts

An American YouTuber who sparked national outrage in South Korea for provocative stunts, including dancing on a statue honoring victims of wartime sexual slavery, was sentenced to six months in prison Wednesday.

The Seoul Western District Court found Ramsey Khalid Ismael, a self-proclaimed internet “troll” known online as Johnny Somali, guilty of multiple charges, including obstruction of business and distributing fabricated sexually explicit content.

Prosecutors had sought a three-year term for Ismael, who also faced accusations of harassing staff and visitors at an amusement park, disrupting a convenience store by blasting music and upending noodles onto a table, causing similar scenes on a bus and subway, and distributing non-consensual deepfake videos.

The court said the 25-year-old displayed “severe” disrespect for South Korean law, noting that he offended countless people with livestreamed stunts aimed at generating YouTube revenue. The court ordered his immediate detention following the verdict, citing him as a flight risk.

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House Votes to Advance Bill PROTECTING Haitian Migrants — Six Republicans Vote “Yes”

Congress is now trying to pass legislation that would protect hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants from deportation.

Today, the House of Representatives advanced a bill that would re-instate temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitian migrants for three more years.

The final vote was 219-209, with six Republicans siding with Democrats to advance the bill.

Those six were:

  • Maria Elvira Salazar – Florida
  • Don Bacon – Nebraska
  • Brian Fitzpatrick – Pennsylvania
  • Carlos Gimenez – Florida
  • Mike Lawler – New York
  • Nicole Malliotakis – New York

Here are the full details:

BREAKING: Six House Republicans just joined Democrats to PROTECT HAITIAN MIGRANTS, 219-209

Are you KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW!?

This would give Haitians temporary protected status — a category in which one of them KlLLED that woman in Florida at a gas station

Per Tim Burchett: “A Democrat motion to provide for consideration that legal immigrants status to Haitians.”

“It provides legal immigrants status to Haitians who are already in the United States. So you have illegal Haitians here and we’re going to allow them to stay. And [several] Republicans, look them up, who they were.”

“You can pretty much guess, but go ahead and look them up. Anyway, unbelievable. This is one time I’m glad for an inaction in the Senate.”

“That’s what we’ve become. We gotta, we gotta clean this mess up up here.”

REPUBLICAN “YEAs”:
– Salazar
– Bacon
– Fitzpatrick
– Gimenez
– Lawler
– Malliotakis

It’s not final passage, but this is the motion moving forward.

Under President Trump’s orders, the Department of Homeland Security has been ending TPS for many groups of migrants — including those from Venezuela and Afghanistan.

Back in June, it was announced that TPS would also be canceled for Haitians. However, rogue judges have blocked that order from going into effect.

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Pentagon Accused Of Cover-Up After Missing Deadline On 46 Military UAP Videos

The Pentagon has come under fire for failing to meet a congressional deadline to release dozens of military videos showing unidentified aerial phenomena, sparking fresh claims of a bureaucratic stall on one of the most sensitive national security issues in decades.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., had pressed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to deliver 46 specific clips by April 14. Whistleblowers had told her task force that the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) already possessed the records. Yet as the deadline passed with no delivery, critics pointed to a pattern of delay that has long fueled public distrust.

The requested material includes spherical objects maneuvering erratically over Afghanistan, cigar-shaped craft, Tic Tac-style encounters, transmedium vehicles moving between air and water, and multiple formations captured near U.S. military assets, submarines, and sensitive airspace.

On April 15, with the deadline missed, the War Department moved to address the growing pressure. A U.S. official told Liberation Times that AARO is now actively working with the White House and other agencies to prepare previously unseen UAP records for public release.

“The Department of War’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) is working in close coordination with the White House and across federal agencies to consolidate existing UAP records collections and facilitate the expeditious release of never-before-seen UAP information,” the official stated.

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Trump Reverses Himself, Joins Obama and Biden in Demanding “Clean” Renewal of NSA Domestic Spying Powers

In August 2013 — in the wake of our Snowden reporting, which revealed the NSA’s mass warrantless domestic spying on Americans — an extraordinary bipartisan bill emerged. Jointly sponsored by one of the most liberal House members (Michigan Democrat John Conyers) and one of his most libertarian-conservative counterparts (Michigan Republican Justin Amash), the bill would have reined in the NSA’s domestic spying powers by imposing serious limits on how such powers can be exercised when aimed at American citizens.

When the Conyers-Amash bill was first introduced, “Official Washington” did not take it seriously. But the Snowden revelations were causing serious public anger about NSA spying, and many members of Congress shared that anger because they were not told that the NSA had implemented a system of mass warrantless surveillance aimed, in part, at Americans. As a result, support for the bill quickly picked up bipartisan steam, seemingly heading toward certain passage — until Barack Obama called Nancy Pelosi.

Despite running for President as a constitutional law professor who vowed to end the civil liberties abuses of the War on Terror, Obama had become an enthusiastic supporter — and user — of the NSA’s domestic spying system. He thus instructed then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi to whip enough Democratic House votes to kill the bill. She did as she was told, and the bill — which initially appeared on its way to approval — was defeated 205-217 (94 Republicans and 111 Democrats voted for the reform bill; 134 Republicans and 83 Democrats voted against it). Official Washington heralded Pelosi as the heroine who saved NSA warrantless spying on Americans.

It is hard to overstate how significant the passage of this bill would have been. It would have been the first time in two decades that the U.S. Congress limited rather than increased the domestic powers of the U.S. security state. The era of the Patriot Act would finally have been confronted, or at least diluted. But Obama and Pelosi joined hands with the likes of GOP pro-spying members such as Peter King, Michelle Bachmann, and Kristi Noem to block any limits on the NSA’s power to spy on Americans without warrants.

Now, Donald Trump is on the verge of doing what Obama and Pelosi did back then. Despite running in 2024 by vowing to “KILL FISA,” based on his (quite valid) claim that spying powers had been abused against him for political ends in the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump on Monday demanded that FISA be fully renewed: yet again, with no reforms, safeguards, or limits of any kind.

Congress this week, perhaps as early as Wednesday, will vote on a renewal of Section 702 of FISA, which grants the NSA the power to spy on certain communications of American citizens without a warrant. Although it appeared that there was bipartisan support for finally imposing some limits and safeguards in the wake of years of documented abuses, Trump’s demand on Tuesday — that all House Republicans unite to renew the spying powers with no limits — raises serious doubts about whether any reform is now possible.

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DOJ fires at least 4 prosecutors involved in FACE Act cases during Biden administration

The Justice Department has fired at least four prosecutors who were involved in prosecutions under the FACE Act during the Biden administration, a government official familiar with the firings told CBS News.

Among those fired Monday is Sanjay Patel, a longtime federal prosecutor in the Civil Rights Division’s criminal section who was placed on administrative leave last month, sources told CBS News at the time. The terminations occurred at about the same time a report on the FACE Act and the Biden Justice Department was being finalized. 

Congress passed the FACE Act in 1994 to address rising concerns about threats and intimidation that women were facing at reproductive health clinics. Nonviolent and first-time offenses of the law are misdemeanors, while repeat offenses or violations that result in bodily injury or death can be treated as felonies.

The FACE Act report is being drafted by the Justice Department’s “weaponization working group,” established in the first days of former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s tenure. 

Tuesday’s firings mark the latest in a purge that started last year of Justice Department employees, many of whom worked on criminal or civil cases opposed by the Trump administration or President Trump’s allies.

A Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement that the department “has terminated the employment of personnel responsible for weaponizing the FACE Act who still remained at the department.”

Stacey Young, a former Civil Rights Division lawyer who founded and leads the nonprofit Justice Connection, said in a statement, “Congress passed the FACE Act with bipartisan support more than 30 years ago, and courts have consistently upheld the constitutionality of its provisions that ensure safe access to reproductive health services.”

She added, “Firing DOJ attorneys for zealously enforcing the law is unconscionable — it politicizes the department’s enforcement actions and punishes dedicated civil servants for doing their jobs.”

The Trump administration has repeatedly alleged without citing evidence that the Civil Rights Division under former Attorney General Merrick Garland used the Act to intentionally target conservative Christians who are morally opposed to abortion.

Although the Justice Department also pursued criminal charges against abortion rights activists who were accused of trying to scare volunteers and workers at a crisis pregnancy clinic that counseled on alternatives to abortion, excerpts of a draft the report reviewed by CBS News said the total number of such cases were minimal compared to those targeting conservative anti-abortion Christians.

Early in his second term, Mr. Trump pardoned many of the FACE Act defendants convicted during the Biden administration. The Justice Department also dismissed several other FACE Act cases and ordered prosecutors to put the brakes on future FACE Act investigations.

At the same time, however, the current Justice Department has allowed the remaining FACE Act cases involving abortion rights activists to proceed without interference, with one Florida-based defendant receiving a 120-day prison term in March 2025.

Many of the other former federal prosecutors who handled FACE Act cases have since left the Justice Department.

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New Documents Reveal Democrats’ Plot To Frame Trump With Ukraine Call

After seven long years, key documents surrounding the Ukraine impeachment saga have finally been released by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, following Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s declassification. They include previously unreleased interview transcripts with the Inspector General as well as related materials. They tell a story many of us suspected at the time, but which now appears even more disturbing and more elaborate than originally understood.

The newly released documents show a coordinated effort to frame President Trump over a phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky. A manufactured narrative was elevated and then used by Congress in an attempt to overturn the outcome of an election and, effectively, shape the next one by pursuing impeachment over a routine diplomatic exchange.

Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who should have acted as a neutral gatekeeper, instead enabled the process by allowing a completely unverified, third-hand, and politically motivated complaint to move forward.

Of particular note is the timing. The call took place on July 25, 2019, the morning after the disastrous congressional testimony of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which effectively collapsed the Russia collusion narrative. Many suspected at the time that this timing was not coincidental. It was as if one hoax had collapsed and another was needed to take its place. The new material strengthens that view.

What we previously knew was that a so-called whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella, an Obama-era National Security Council staffer, filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, Michael Atkinson, alleging that President Trump had attempted to interfere in the upcoming 2020 election during the call with Zelensky.

The newly released documents, specifically the interview notes from Congress’s classified interview with Atkinson, together with the so-called whistleblower complaint and its supporting materials, bear little resemblance to what actually happened when set against the official transcript of the call released publicly by Trump in 2019.

Ciaramella alleged that Trump was using the power of his office to “solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. elections” and was pushing Ukraine to investigate his “main political rival,” Joe Biden, who at the time was polling at around 26 percent in the Democratic primary. He further suggested that Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General Bill Barr were involved in the alleged scheme to interfere in the 2020 election.

In fact, the official call transcript contains no evidence of election interference. It shows, at most, that Trump referenced widely reported public information, specifically Joe Biden’s own 2018 Council on Foreign Relations admission in which he described leveraging U.S. taxpayer loan guarantees to secure the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor who was at that time investigating Hunter Biden’s firm, Burisma, and had already moved to seize assets connected to it.

As later emerged from material found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, there were emails from the chairman of Burisma’s board of directors explicitly describing the shutting down of the investigation as a required “deliverable” and demanding that Hunter Biden intervene to bring it to an end, shortly before Joe Biden took steps that did exactly that.

In other words, far from constituting election interference, Trump was raising matters that were already in the public domain and, on any reasonable view, within the scope of legitimate diplomatic discussion, given U.S. financial exposure and foreign policy interests. At minimum, it is entirely plausible that he was also probing the disposition of the newly elected Ukrainian president by testing his response to issues involving his predecessor.

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Man Pleads Guilty to Firebombing Nonprofit with Napalm Device – ALSO Tried to Hand Hezbollah a Hit List of 35,000 Israelis Saying “Start the Hunt”

A man allegedly linked to “white supremacist movements” has now pleaded guilty to a disturbing series of crimes, including firebombing a nonprofit using a napalm-style device and attempting to assist the foreign terrorist organization Hezbollah.

28-year-old Regan Darby Prater of Tullahoma, Tennessee, stood before a federal judge in Knoxville and copped to one count of arson and one count of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.

According to the Department of Justice, Prater admitted he drove from his home to the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee.

According to the press release:

“Regan Darby Prater, 28, currently of Tullahoma, Tennessee, entered a guilty plea to one count of arson and one count of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. Prater pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee at Knoxville. Sentencing has been set before U.S. District Judge Thomas A. Varlan for Sept. 9, in Knoxville.

Prater faces up to 20 years in federal prison, along with related fines, restitution, and a term of supervised release to be served after he is released from custody. As part of his agreement, Prater waived indictment by a Federal Grand Jury and agreed to plead guilty to the aforementioned charges.

Court documents establish that Prater used a so-called “sparkler bomb,” i.e., a napalm-based incendiary device ignited by a common sparkler, to destroy facilities maintained by the Highlander Center, a school for grassroots leaders and social movements in New Market, Tennessee. As part of his guilty plea, Prater admitted that he drove from his home in Tullahoma to the Highlander Center, ignited the sparkler bomb, and destroyed a building, ultimately causing over $1.2 million in damage.

Before he detonated the bomb, Prater spray-painted the symbol of the Iron Guard, a 1930s-era paramilitary arm of the Romanian Nazi Party, in the Highlander Center parking lot. This same symbol was engraved on the rifle used in the terrorist attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, just two weeks prior to the arson. Prater acknowledged that he committed the arson at the Highland Center due to his white-supremacist ideology and as a response to the Highlander Center’s faith-based educational priorities and its association with the Civil Rights Movement.

Separately, Prater also admitted that, in 2019, he attempted to provide material support to Hizballah, also known as “Hezbollah,” which the United States has recognized as a Foreign Terrorist Organization since 1997. Specifically, Prater obtained a document purporting to contain personally identifiable information of over 35,000 individuals purportedly affiliated with the government of Israel. He then provided that document to an individual he believed to be associated with Hizballah, stating, among other things: “Start the hunt.””

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