Tag: fbi

NSA Reveals in FOIA Response that the FBI Involved in “Improper Surveillance” of 16,000 Americans

Then on January 6, after one million Trump supporters rallied with President Trump at the Ellipse outside the White House, some 900 individuals went inside the US Capitol. Over 400 have since been arrested, including those who were waved into the US Capitol by the police standing at the exits.

Since January, the Deep State and Democrats will not release videotapes to Republican lawmakers from January 6th inside or outside the US Capitol.

Earlier this week Revolver News published an important piece on the “unindicted co-conspirators” in the Jan. 6 attack who were never charged by the DOJ or FBI for their part in the violence on Jan. 6.

The “unindicted co-conspirators” were frequently the most violent and leaders of the assault on the US Capitol. They are also likely FBI informants.

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How Long Has the FBI Been in the Terror Biz?

In light of the revelations by Revolver about the likely infiltration by the FBI of the groups involved in the events of Jan. 6 as well as the FBI’s confirmed infiltration in the ludicrous plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, it might pay to revisit the 2016 plot to bomb a Kansan mosque and apartment complex.

In the way of background, in February 2015 CNN reported on an intelligence assessment, circulated by the Department of Homeland Security.

The report argued that the domestic terror threat from “sovereign citizen groups” was “equal to – and in some cases greater than – the threat from foreign Islamic terror groups, such as ISIS.”

Later that same year, without FBI assistance, a pair of Islamic terrorists killed or seriously injured 36 people in an attack on a San Bernardino Christmas party.

Six months after that attack, in June 2016, another Islamic terrorist shot more than 100 people, killing 49 of them, at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

As the 2016 election approached, one suspects that certain elements within DHS hoped to shift media attention back to the real threat, what CNN called “right-wing sovereign citizen extremists.” The media had not yet rediscovered the “white supremacist” label. That would come in time.

Over the spring and summer of 2016, a splinter group from the Three Percenters – one of the groups involved in the events of Jan. 6 – began to contemplate a “plan” to deal with the Somalis imported to western Kansas to work in the packing plants.

A surprisingly fair December 2017 article in New York Magazine by Jessica Pressler details how the plan progressed from something that was mostly barroom BS to a bomb plot for which three men were sentenced in a federal court to prison terms of up to 30 years.

“These defendants planned to ruthlessly bomb an apartment complex and kill innocent people, simply because of who they are and how they worship,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray upon their sentencing in January 2019.

“Today, together with our law enforcement partners, we reaffirm our commitment to protecting all people in our communities from those who seek to terrorize and do harm.”

In her conversations with one of the men convicted, a predictably troubled soul named Patrick Stein, Pressler sheds some useful light on how the events played out in Kansas and how they may well have played out on Jan. 6.

In the conventional retelling of the story, the hero was one of the plotters, a fellow named Dan Day.

In an Associated Press story, tellingly headlined, “Trial begins for alleged bomb plotters who wanted more Trump voters on jury,” the reader is told, “Dan Day knew the plan would go forward and innocent people would die.”

Here the AP paraphrases prosecutor Risa Berkower who claimed that Day “struggled with what to do, prayed about what to do. And then he contacted the FBI, and later agreed to wear a wire.”

Reportedly, it was not until a hearing at the federal courthouse in Wichita that the conspirators realized it was Dan Day who set them up.

“He’s the one who fed us all the information, showed us how bad they were, doing this and that and the other,” Stein told Pressler. “He was working for the feds the entire time. It was all a setup.”

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Parler Warned FBI More Than 50 Times Before Capitol Riot, Rep. Carolyn Maloney Says

Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York revealed to the House Oversight Committee and the Reform Committee Tuesday that the conservative social media site Parler sent warnings about its users’ violence to the FBI more than 50 times leading up to the January 6 attacks on the Capitol.

Maloney, the Democratic chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee, presented research into why the response was so slow to requests for aid from the Capitol Police on January 6. “The threats, I would say, were everywhere,” Maloney said. “The system was blinking red.”

Maloney questioned FBI Director Christopher A. Wray about the bureau’s lack of a response to several intelligence alerts pre-riots, particularly dozens of warnings from Parler.

The “Committee has obtained docs showing that…Parler sent the FBI evidence of planned violence in DC on January 6. Parler referred this content to the FBI for investigation over 50 times,” Maloney said. The content allegedly included “specific threats of violence being planned at the Capitol.”

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FBI warns lawmakers that QAnon ‘digital soldiers’ may become more violent

The FBI has warned lawmakers that online QAnon conspiracy theorists may carry out more acts of violence as they move from serving as “digital soldiers” to taking action in the real world following the January 6 US Capitol attack. The shift is fueled by a belief among some of the conspiracy’s more militant followers that they “can no longer ‘trust the plan” set forth by its mysterious standard-bearer, known simply as “Q,” according to an unclassified FBI threat assessment on QAnon sent to lawmakers last week, which was obtained by CNN. But the report suggests the failure of QAnon predictions to materialize has not led to followers abandoning the conspiracy. Instead, there’s a belief that individuals need to take greater control of the direction of the movement than before.

This might lead followers to seek to harm “perceived members of the ‘cabal’ such as Democrats and other political opposition — instead of continually awaiting Q’s promised actions which have not occurred,” according to the assessment.

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FBI sold phones to organized crime and read 27 million “encrypted” messages

The Federal Bureau of Investigation created a company that sold encrypted devices to hundreds of organized crime syndicates, resulting in 800 arrests in 16 countries, law-enforcement authorities announced today. The FBI and agencies in other countries intercepted 27 million messages over 18 months before making the arrests in recent days, and more arrests are planned.

The FBI teamed up with Australian Federal Police to target drug trafficking and money laundering. They “strategically developed and covertly operated an encrypted device company, called ANOM, which grew to service more than 12,000 encrypted devices to over 300 criminal syndicates operating in more than 100 countries, including Italian organized crime, outlaw motorcycle gangs, and international drug trafficking organizations,” Europol said today.

Distribution of the devices began in October 2018. The cellphones sold by the FBI-run company were “procured on the black market” and “performed a single function hidden behind a calculator app: sending encrypted messages and photos,” The New York Times wrote today. The cellphones were “stripped of all normal functions,” with the faux calculator being the only working app. Once users entered a code, they could use the app to send messages that they thought were protected by end-to-end encryption.

“For years, organized crime figures around the globe relied on the devices to orchestrate international drug shipments, coordinate the trafficking of arms and explosives, and discuss contract killings, law enforcement officials said,” the Times wrote. “Users trusted the devices’ security so much that they often laid out their plans not in code, but in plain language.”

Unbeknownst to users, messages were routed to an FBI-owned server and decrypted with a master key controlled by the FBI.

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Ex-FBI Agent Indicted For Accepting Bribes Paid by Lawyer Linked to Armenian Organized Crime Figure

A former FBI agent who retired after 20 years as a special agent has been arrested and indicted on a federal criminal charge alleging he conspired to accept more than $200,000 in cash bribes and gifts.

The Department of Justice said Babak Broumand accepted the bribes and gifts in exchange for providing sensitive law enforcement information to a lawyer with ties to Armenian organized crime.

Broumand was charged with filing false financial disclosure forms to cover up bribes he allegedly received from an attorney with ties to organized crime.

The indictment alleges that Sargsyan was a criminal and “associated with a criminal organization” when he bribed Broumand, who was still working at the FBI at the time. He allegedly bought Broumand a $36,000 motorcycle and paid him $30,000 for a down payment on a second home in Lake Tahoe.

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FBI demands info on readers of USA Today story about agents killed in child porn raid

The FBI is demanding that newspaper giant Gannett hand over identifying information on readers of a USA Today story about a suspect in a child porn case who killed two agents in February.

Federal investigators served the company with a subpoena in April seeking the IP addresses and phone numbers of the people who accessed a news article, between 8:03 a.m. and 8:38 a.m. on Feb. 2, about the Florida shooting that left two FBI agents dead and three others wounded.

The information sought by the feds, “relates to a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI,” according to the subpoena.

Gannett, the publisher of the paper, fought back against the order in federal court on May 27, claiming the demand is unconstitutional and in violation of the Department of Justice’s policy for subpoenaing information from the press.

“A government demand for records that would identify specific individuals who read specific expressive materials, like the Subpoena at issue here, invades the First Amendment rights of both publisher and reader, and must be quashed accordingly,” Garnett lawyers wrote in the motion, made public Wednesday.

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The FBI’s Strange Anthrax Investigation Sheds Light on COVID Lab-Leak Theory and Fauci’s Emails

One of the most significant events of the last two decades has been largely memory-holed: the October, 2001 anthrax attacks in the U.S. Beginning just one week after 9/11 and extending for another three weeks, a highly weaponized and sophisticated strain of anthrax had been sent around the country through the U.S. Postal Service addressed to some of the country’s most prominent political and media figures. As Americans were still reeling from the devastation of 9/11, the anthrax killed five Americans and sickened another seventeen.

As part of the extensive reporting I did on the subsequent FBI investigation to find the perpetrator(s), I documented how significant these attacks were in the public consciousness. ABC News, led by investigative reporter Brian Ross, spent a full week claiming that unnamed government sources told them that government tests demonstrated a high likelihood that the anthrax came from Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program. The Washington Post, in November, 2001, also raised “the possibility that [this weaponized strain of anthrax] may have slipped through an informal network of scientists to Iraq.” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) appeared on The David Letterman Show on October 18, 2001, and said: “There is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq.” Three days later, McCain appeared on Meet the Press with Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and said of the anthrax perpetrators: “perhaps this is an international organization and not one within the United States of America,” while Lieberman said the anthrax was so finely weaponized that “there’s either a significant amount of money behind this, or this is state-sponsored, or this is stuff that was stolen from the former Soviet program” (Lieberman added: “Dr. Fauci can tell you more detail on that”).

In many ways, the prospect of a lethal, engineered biological agent randomly showing up in one’s mailbox or contaminating local communities was more terrifying than the extraordinary 9/11 attack itself. All sorts of oddities shrouded the anthrax mailings, including this bizarre admission in 2008 by long-time Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen: “I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.” At the very least, those anthrax attacks played a vital role in heightening fear levels and a foundational sense of uncertainty that shaped U.S. discourse and politics for years to come. It meant that not just Americans living near key power centers such as Manhattan and Washington were endangered, but all Americans everywhere were: even from their own mailboxes.

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