Tag: cia

In Lawsuit Against Spying On Assange Visitors, CIA Will Invoke ‘State Secrets Privilege’

The CIA plans to invoke the “state secrets privilege” to block a lawsuit against the agency for allegedly spying on Americans, who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange while he was living under political asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy.

In December, United States Judge John Koeltl dismissed multiple claims brought by four American attorneys and journalists against the CIA. But Koeltl also determined that the Americans had grounds to sue the CIA for violating their “reasonable expectation of privacy” under the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

The Americans alleged that the CIA and CIA Director Mike Pompeo directed UC Global, a Spanish security company, to carry out a spying operation against Assange. The security company copied the contents of their electronic devices and provided the data to the CIA.

On February 8, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jean-David Barnea notified the court [PDF] that the CIA would assert the state secrets privilege.

“After the court’s recent decision on the government’s motion to dismiss, the sole remaining claim in this case is the plaintiff’s allegation that, at the CIA’s request, the Spanish defendants illegally downloaded the contents of the plaintiffs’ electronic devices when they visited Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London and transmitted these materials to the CIA.”

The government continued, “Any factual inquiry into these allegations—whether they are true or not—would implicate classified information, as it would require the CIA to reveal what intelligence-gathering activities it did or did not engage in, among other things.”

“Because the CIA cannot publicly reveal the very facts over which it is seeking authorization to assert the state secrets privilege,” the government indicated that it would not respond to the Americans’ discovery requests or any allegations in the complaint. 

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Inside sinister true story of the ‘Octopus Murders’ and the gruesome death of investigative journalist Danny Casolaro who ‘killed himself’ in a bathtub while trying to expose terrifying CIA conspiracy

An upcoming documentary series is set to unravel the gruesome true story of an investigative journalist found dead in a bathtub after pursuing a conspiracy group.

Danny Casolaro’s lifeless body was discovered by a housekeeper at a motel in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in August 1991.

The 44-year-old had died from a loss of blood after suffering multiple slash wounds to his wrists inflicted by ‘a very sharp bladed object’ – and local authorities quickly ruled it a suicide.

But his family and friends have long insisted that he had been murdered for investigating a conspiracy group he had called The Octopus.

Here, FEMAIL has laid bare the sordid details of the case as Netflix gets set to release a four-part series titled American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders.

The chilling case began when Danny started investigating a dispute between the Department of Justice and a technology company called INSLAW.

The clash appeared to be over intellectual property rights but it soon seemed that it had a much more sinister underbelly.

Following months of research, Danny is said to have stumbled into a web of ‘stolen government spy software, a string of unsolved murders, and some of the biggest political scandals of the 20th century,’ according to Netflix. 

The writer believed he had uncovered a hidden organization, which he branded as The Octopus, made up of eight ex-government officials.

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The Plot Thickens: Uncovering the CIA & Rockefeller Foundation’s Role in the 2025 Depopulation Forecast released by Deagel

In a world where reality often seems stranger than fiction, the machinations behind global events can be an enigma wrapped in mystery.

One such intrigue revolves around Deagel.com, an obscure online entity known for its exhaustive data on military capabilities and eyebrow-raising depopulation forecasts for 2025.

We can reveal that recent findings appear to link Deagel directly to significant players on the world stage: The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)/ The Pentagon, and The Rockefeller Foundation.

And current real-world data on excess deaths in the West strongly suggest Deagel’s depopulation forecast is not just an estimation but in fact, a target that is on track to be hit thanks to the deadly effects of Covid-19 vaccination.

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Big Sur UFO Film: Government Whistleblower Reveals He Watched It

According to two former US Air Force officers—Lieutenant Bob Jacobs and Major Florenze Mansmann—a USAF photographic team based at Vandenberg AFB, California, tasked with filming missile test launches, inadvertently captured the image of a domed, disc-shaped UFO as it circled and then disabled—with four flashes of an intense beam of light—a dummy nuclear warhead flying downrange over the Pacific Ocean. Jacobs had been in charge of the telescopic photography site located at Big Sur, California, and Mansmann was Vandenberg’s chief photographic imagery analyst.

The date of the dramatic incident was September 15, 1964. Two days later, a highly-restricted screening of the spectacular footage took place at the base—attended by Jacobs, Mansmann, and two CIA officers who immediately classified the event Top Secret. The film was then confiscated by the pair and flown “back East” for analysis and storage, according to Major Mansmann. The destination was undoubtedly the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) which, it is now known, had already engaged in UFO photo analysis for years.

By the early 1980s, Jacobs felt that enough time had passed following the stunning UFO encounter to allow him to discuss it publicly. He has explained that, at the time of the 1964 film screening at Vandenberg, Major Mansmann had only ordered him “not to talk about” the unexpected filming of the UFO with anyone, pointedly saying that it had “never happened”. No mention was made of its Top Secret classification, for reasons that remain unclear to the former Lieutenant. Furthermore, because the two officers lost touch with each other after leaving the Air Force, 19 years passed before Mansmann was able confirm to Jacobs that the two mysterious men in civilian clothes at the screening were in fact CIA personnel.

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CIA terminates whistleblower who prompted flood of sexual misconduct complaints

The CIA this week terminated a woman whose whistleblower account of being assaulted in a stairwell at the spy agency’s headquarters prompted a flood of colleagues to come forward with their own complaints of sexual misconduct. The woman’s attorney called the action a brazen retaliation.

While the CIA said that accusation was “factually inaccurate,” it wouldn’t comment further on the case and declined to explain why the 36-year-old did not make it through the agency’s clandestine officer training program known as “the Farm” and, unlike many of her classmates, was not hired into another job.

“To be clear, the CIA does not tolerate sexual assault, sexual harassment or whistleblower retaliation,” CIA spokesperson Tammy Thorp told The Associated Press, adding the agency uses “consistent processes to ensure the fair and equal treatment of every officer going through training.”

The woman’s termination came less than six months after she filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging the CIA retaliated against her for reporting what she said was a 2022 stairwell assault in Langley, Virginia, to law enforcement and testifying about it in a closed congressional hearing.

The lawsuit accused the agency of giving her harsher performance reviews and “slut shaming” her by improperly releasing her personal information during the state prosecution last year of Ashkan Bayatpour, a then-fellow CIA trainee convicted of assaulting her with a scarf.

The woman’s attorney, Kevin Carroll, told the AP that the CIA has now “unlawfully ended a young woman’s career only because she had the moral courage, lacking in her managers, to stand up and be a witness about her sexual assault.”

“The agency’s festering workplace sexual violence problem,” Carroll said, “is now harming the retention of young women who won’t put up with it any longer.”

The woman, who is not being identified because the AP does not generally identify victims of alleged sexual abuse, was credited with launching a reckoning, of sorts, at the CIA because hers was the rare allegation of sexual misconduct at the super-secret spy agency to make it into a public courtroom.

An AP investigation found the case helped embolden at least two-dozen women to come forward to authorities and Congress over the past two years with their own accounts at the CIA of sexual assaults, unwanted touching and what they contend is a campaign to keep them from speaking out.

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Putin Claims War In Ukraine Was Started By A CIA Coup

During the interview with Tucker Carlson, Russian leader Vladimir Putin stated that the war in Ukraine “did not start in 2022,” but rather was a result of a 2014 coup in the country, directly backed by the CIA.

Putin recalled the moment he decided he had to invade, noting “initially it was the coup in Ukraine that provoked the conflict.”

Putin claimed that a decade ago the United States proposed a joint effort to for a diplomatic settlement in Ukraine and the then President Yanukovich agreed not to deploy troops or police. However, an armed opposition, which Putin alleges was run by the CIA, orchestrated a coup in Kiev.

Putin further stated that “the representatives of three countries, Germany, Poland, and France, arrived. They were the guarantors of the signed agreement. Despite that, the opposition committed a coup and all of these countries pretended that they didn’t remember they were guarantors of the peaceful settlement.”

He continued, “President Yanukovich agreed to all conditions which included holding an early election he had no chance of winning”, Putin stated, adding “Why the coup? Why the victims? Why threaten Crimea? Why threaten the Donbas? That’s what I don’t understand.”

“The CIA did its job to complete the coup,” he continued, adding “The political mistake was colossal. All this could be done without victims.”

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Former CIA coder sentenced to 40 years in prison for WikiLeaks ‘Vault 7’ breach

A federal judge sentenced former CIA programmer Joshua Schulte to 40 years in prison on Thursday afternoon on espionage charges for the largest leak in agency history, in addition to child pornography convictions.

Comparing the WikiLeaks “Vault 7” leak of top secret Central Intelligence Agency cyber-espionage tools to a “digital Pearl Harbor,” U.S District Judge Jesse Furman said Thursday he was “blown away by Mr. Schulte’s complete lack of remorse and acceptance of responsibility.”

“The impact on our nation’s intelligence operations was enormous and we will likely never know the extent of the damage caused, but no doubt it was massive and real,” Furman said before imposing the 480-month sentence.

“It did have, as substantiated by the deputy director’s unclassified letter and even more substantiated by a confidential letter, an immediate and catastrophic effect on the CIA, and caused untold damage to national security,” the Obama-appointed judge said at the conclusion of the two-hour sentencing hearing.

Furman sentenced Schulte to 400 months imprisonment on the espionage counts and separately to 80 months for child pornography counts.

Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York asked for the judge to impose a sentence of life prison for Schulte’s convictions of what they called “some of the most heinous, brazen violations of the Espionage Act in American history.”

“Schulte’s theft of an arsenal of extremely sensitive intelligence-gathering cyber-tools from the Central Intelligence Agency and subsequent dissemination of that information to WikiLeaks — which in turn publicized it to America’s adversaries — is ‘one of the largest unauthorized disclosures of classified information in the history of the United States’,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing letter.

Schulte, who has been detained at federal jails in Manhattan and Brooklyn for over six and a half years, requested nine years’ imprisonment followed by five years’ supervised release.

Federal prosecutors argued an additional terrorism enhancement on his sentence was warranted because Schulte’s theft of the arsenal of extremely sensitive, intelligence-gathering cyber-tools from the Central Intelligence Agency — and subsequent dissemination of that information to WikiLeaks — was intended to satisfy a personal vendetta and “clearly calculated to retaliate against the United States as a whole.”

The 35-year-old asked for a sentence of time served, citing the “immoral human rights abuses” he says he endured during his pretrial detention at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

In his lengthy 28-minute sentencing statement, Schulte decried the conditions of his “torture cage” at the Bureau of Prison facility, calling it “New York City’s very own Auschwitz,” and “something only the SS could come up with.”

Judge Furman during sentencing called Schulte’s comparison to Nazi concentration camps “offensive”.

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CIA Officials Implicated in Secret Plot to ‘Get Rid’ of President Donald Trump

In January 2017, an “all-hands” National Security Council staff meeting  was convened for the explicit purpose of scheming to “get rid” of then-President Trump.

Donald Trump, the duly elected president, was already in the midst of a Russia collusion hoax accusing him of high treason, which was orchestrated by defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.

Trump’s political opponents weaponized the false accusation of Russian collusion using Russian disinformation in the Steele dossier. This had led to 2016 Trump campaign surveillance and the undermining of his first presidential term with the ensuing Mueller investigation. It was the consummate act of “election interference.”

This 2017 NSC meeting involved a figure that Americans would come to learn more about during the first impeachment imbroglio, based on hearsay that Donald Trump was attempting to procure “dirt” on future president Joe Biden from the Ukrainian president.

His name? The accused “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella.

A 2020 Real Clear Investigations article sets the scene:

Barely two weeks after Donald Trump took office, Eric Ciaramella – the CIA analyst whose name was recently linked in a tweet by the president and mentioned by lawmakers as the anonymous “whistleblower” who touched off Trump’s impeachment – was overheard in the White House discussing with another staffer how to remove the newly elected president from office, according to former colleagues.

Sources told RealClearInvestigations the staffer with whom Ciaramella was speaking was Sean Misko. Both were Obama administration holdovers working in the Trump White House on foreign policy and national security issues. And both expressed anger over Trump’s new “America First” foreign policy, a sea change from President Obama’s approach to international affairs.

“Just days after he was sworn in they were already talking about trying to get rid of him,” said a former White House official who overheard their conversation.

“They weren’t just bent on subverting his agenda,” the former official added. “They were plotting to actually have him removed from office.”

It is important to note here that both Ciaramella and Misko were implicated in the plot to remove Donald Trump in the first impeachment hearing.

Misko left the White House last summer to join House impeachment manager Adam Schiff’s committee, where sources say he offered “guidance” to the whistleblower, who has been officially identified only as an intelligence officer in a complaint against Trump filed under whistleblower laws. Misko then helped run the impeachment inquiry based on that complaint as a top investigator for congressional Democrats. […]

The coordination between the official believed to be the whistleblower and a key Democratic staffer, details of which are disclosed here for the first time, undercuts the narrative that impeachment developed spontaneously out of what Trump’s Democratic antagonists call the “patriotism” of an “apolitical civil servant.”

Two former co-workers said they overheard Ciaramella and Misko, close friends and Democrats, discussing how to “take out,” or remove, the new president from office within days of Trump’s inauguration. These co-workers said the president’s controversial Ukraine phone call in July 2019 provided the pretext they and their Democratic allies had been looking for.

“They didn’t like his policies,” another former White House official said. “They had a political vendetta against him from Day One.”

Furthermore, the documentation that shows how Rep. Adam Schiff’s office was contacted by the “whistleblower” was reported as being “Secret.”

The investigators say that details about how the whistleblower consulted with Schiff’s staff and perhaps misled Atkinson about those interactions are contained in the transcript of a closed-door briefing Atkinson gave to the House Intelligence Committee last October. However, Schiff has sealed the transcript from public view. It is the only impeachment witness transcript out of 18 that he has not released.

Schiff has classified the document “Secret,” preventing Republicans who attended the Atkinson briefing from quoting from it. Even impeachment investigators cannot view it outside a highly secured room, known as a “SCIF,” in the basement of the Capitol. Members must first get permission from Schiff, and they are forbidden from bringing phones into the SCIF or from taking notes from the document.

But a new Judicial Watch lawsuit seeks to uncover the documentation of the NSC meeting

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C.I.A. Homes In on Hamas Leadership, U.S. Officials Say

The C.I.A. is collecting information on senior Hamas leaders and the location of hostages in Gaza, and is providing that intelligence to Israel as it carries out its war in the enclave, according to U.S. officials.

A new task force assembled in the days after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 terror attacks on Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and some 240 taken hostage back in Gaza, has uncovered information on Hamas’s top leaders, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence assessments.

Immediately after the Oct. 7 attack, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, sent a memo to the intelligence agencies and Defense Department ordering the task force’s creation and directing increased intelligence collection on Hamas’ leadership, officials said.

The establishment of the task force has not created any new legal authorities, but the White House raised the priority of collecting intelligence on Hamas.

It is not clear how valuable the information has been to Israel, though none of the most senior leaders of Hamas has been captured or killed. The United States is not providing Israel with intelligence on low or midlevel Hamas operatives.

Israel had estimated before Oct. 7 that Hamas had 20,000 to 25,000 fighters. By the end of 2023, Israel had told American officials they believed they had killed roughly a third of that force.

Some American officials believe targeting low-level Hamas members is misguided because they can be easily replaced and because of the unwarranted risk to civilians. They have also said the Israeli military bombing campaign in Gaza — which according to Gaza’s Health Ministry has killed some 23,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians — could end up replenishing Hamas’s bench of fighters.

But eliminating Hamas’s strategic military leadership is another matter. Israel would score a major victory if it kills or captures Yahya Sinwar, believed to be an architect of the Oct. 7 attack, or Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing. Such an operational success would likely give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more latitude with the Israeli public to wind down the military campaign in Gaza.

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UFO whistleblower held secret talk with ‘Wall St bigwigs’ and CIA officials in Manhattan – where he claimed US was in possession of 40ft Tardis-like craft that was ‘the size of a football field when you stepped inside’

A UFO whistleblower shared new details of a Tardis-like craft in government possession during a secret meeting in New York City.

Decorated former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch claims his sources worked on a 40-foot UAP that ‘was the size of a football field’ when they stepped inside, according to an attendee at the event.

The object could manipulate both space and time and use and could harness enough energy to power 70,000 homes a year, the source said.

DailyMail.com understands that guests included officials from the FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, tech entrepreneurs and Wall Street ‘bigwigs.’

All in, Grusch gave the talk to 60 people at a penthouse in Manhattan, and photos were banned from the event.

The only information about the meeting was leaked by an anonymous attendee who took pictures of Grusch.

DailyMail.com has since verified that the meeting took place and was told by sources that Coinbase advisor John D’Agostino and high-powered attorney John J. Altorelli hosted the event.

Coinbase is a publicly traded company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform.

The two men are said to host monthly events at the penthouse apartment, focusing on different topics. 

The leaker said: ‘It was hosted by a Wall Street bigwig and his lawyer friend.

‘It was sort of a small saloon-style talk. David also did it for free. Even went as far as to fly into NYC just for this. 

‘He had arrived only a few hours beforehand and then left 1st thing the next day. 

‘The idea was to get a group of both skeptics and believers from all these different walks of life for a talk regarding David and the things he has said. 

‘Most of the people who left had left as believers.’

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