Tag: fbi

FBI Nominee Kash Patel Vows to End Censorship Collusion, Slams Wiretaps, and Pledges Section 230 Work

FBI Director nominee Kash Patel’s Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday was a chance to learn about the direction the agency would take after a number of years filled with controversies linked to online censorship.

Patel addressed several of these issues, including the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop stories and the FBI’s role in the scandal – which he said would not repeat going forward.

Patel also spoke against the FBI attempting to pressure Big Tech to get these companies to censor content, as well as against wiretapping political candidates and their staff – but also pledged to work with Senator Richard Blumenthal in order to bring potentially controversial changes to Section 230 that could jeopardize end-to-end encryption.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, was on the confirmation hearing panel and recalled that in October 2020 – a month before the election – the FBI was among those who worked to falsely present Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation.”

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Senior FBI leaders ordered to retire, resign or be fired by Monday

At least six senior FBI leaders have been ordered to retire, resign or be fired by Monday, according to sources briefed on the matter, extending a purge that began last week at the Justice Department across the street from the FBI headquarters.

The senior officials are at the executive assistant director level or special agent in charge level and include those who oversee cyber, national security and criminal investigations, the sources told CNN. Some were notified while Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the agency, sat answering questions from senators for his confirmation hearing Thursday.

Trump transition officials in recent months have signaled plans to push aside leaders promoted by former FBI Director Christopher Wray.

The leadership changes have drawn internal consternation, in part because these officials didn’t have anything to do with prosecutions of Donald Trump, which have been the focus of the president’s ire.

The personnel moves come as hundreds of FBI agents who were assigned to investigate the January 6 US Capitol attack and Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents are bracing for the possibility that they could be forced out or punished, similar to what has happened to dozens of career Justice Department lawyers.

The changes highlight how the new administration has moved quickly to deliver on Trump’s vow to strike back at so-called weaponization at the FBI. Trump has falsely accused agents of abuse in their court-ordered search of his Mar-a-Lago home and of their treatment of Capitol rioters.

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Lindsey Graham’s Exchange With Kash Patel Reminds Us How Corrupt the FBI Has Become

While Democrats are using Kash Patel’s confirmation hearing for FBI Director to rant and rave about Jan. 6, at least one Republican used his time to illustrate why so many people no longer trust the Bureau.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) brought up Patel’s work investigating FBI operation Crossfire Hurricane, an effort aimed at promoting the hoax that President Donald Trump collaborated with the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

Patel was instrumental in exposing the hoax and the weaponization of the FBI against Trump. Graham brought up a text message exchange between former agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in which they showed anti-Trump bias.

Okay. It was opened up on July 31st, 2016, and here’s what Strzok said, And damn, this feels momentous because this matters…‘Super glad to be on this voyage with you.’ That’s to Page. Page responds a couple of months later, ‘he’s not ever going to be president, right?’

Graham recounted Strzok replied, “No, he won’t. We’ll stop it.”

“Is it fair to say that the people in charge of investigating Crossfire Hurricane hated Trump’s guts?” Graham asked.

Patel answered in the affirmative.

The conversation turned to former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who was the subject of surveillance during the 2016 race. “Do you know that the FBI secured warrants against him on four different occasions?” Graham asked.

Patel answered yes. Graham continued, asking if Patel knew that the Bureau relied on false information from the Steele Dossier to obtain the FISA warrant used to justify their spying on a member of the Trump campaign.

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Senators release whistleblower docs showing anti-Trump FBI agent helped launch lawfare case

Two senior Republican lawmakers released protected whistleblower disclosures Thursday revealing how an anti-Trump FBI agent went outside established agency protocols for opening probes to help launch the federal election interference case against the president.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Chairman Ron Johnson of Wisconsin released internal FBI emails and documents that exposed an alleged political scheme by Timothy Thibault, a former FBI assistant Special Agent in Charge.

Mr. Thibault, whom The Washington Times first reported in August 2022 was forced to retire from the FBI after exposing his anti-Trump bias, authored the initial language for what ultimately became special prosecutor Jack Smith’s federal case against Mr. Trump regarding the 2020 presidential election, according to the new whistleblower documents provided by the GOP senators.

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BOOM: Kash Patel Vows to Dismantle Child Sex Trafficking Rings and Expose Jeffrey Epstein’s Client List

Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI director, vowed to take down child trafficking networks during his confirmation hearing Thursday.

“I know that breaking up these trafficking rings is important to President Trump,” said Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). “So will you work with me on this issue? So we know who worked with Jeffrey Epstein in building these sex trafficking rings?”

“Absolutely, senator,” Patel replied. “Child sex trafficking has no place in the United States of America, and I will do everything if confirmed as FBI director to make sure the American public knows the full weight of what happened in the past, and how we are going to [counteract] missing children and exploited children going forward.”

During his opening statement, the former chief of staff to Trump’s Acting Defense Secretary said he’d faithfully execute his duties to the Constitution and the American people.

“Protecting the rights of the Constitution is of the utmost importance to me, and has been every single time I’ve taken that oath of office,” Patel said. “The recent terrorist attacks in New Orleans tragically claimed the lives of 14 Americans, and serve as a stark reminder that our national security is at threat, both internally and externally. The FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice, where I served, play a pivotal role in securing our freedoms and our safeties for American citizens.”

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Whistleblower: Multiple FBI Agents Called In Sick With ‘Blue Flu’ To Avoid Helping ICE Round-Up Criminal Illegals In Chicago

Multiple FBI agents assigned to assist ICE with illegal alien deportations in Chicago last weekend, called in sick with the “Blue Flu,” according to an FBI whistleblower.

On January 22, Acting Attorney General James McHenry ordered the FBI; U.S. Marshal’s Service; Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF);  and Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to assist ICE with deportations.

Former FBI Special Agent Steve Friend said Tuesday that multiple agents assigned to assist in the deportation effort in Chicago called in sick to “protest” the mission.

“I’ve been told that agents are calling in sick—”blue flu” style—to protest the directive,”  Friend posted on X.

ICE ramped up it’s deportation effort over the weekend, making nearly 1,200 arrests Sunday and nearly 1,000 on Saturday, according to the Wall Street Journal.

President Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan was in Chicago on Sunday, along with US Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, to oversee Immigration enforcements in the city, Fox News’ Matt Finn reported.

A video posted by Finn on X shows Bove saying that the the Department of Homeland Security is running the operation in lockstep with the Department of Justice and urging agents to safely implement Trump policies.

Friend,  who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America and an “American Radicals” podcaster, told American Greatness that other field offices have been asking for volunteers to help with the deportation effort, but many agents are afraid of retaliation from their superiors. 

“People know if they step forward, then leadership will identify them as MAGA,” he explained.

“The executive management at some field offices aren’t sending out any guidance for the ICE directive. Just ignoring,” he added.

The former G-man said it was important for the Senate to confirm former federal prosecutor Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, “to root this subterfuge out.”

“Everyone is scared of retaliation. Always. But people are coming forward with more for me recently because they think Kash [Patel] is getting in,” Friend told American Greatness.

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Phone Metadata Suddenly Not So ‘Harmless’ When It’s The FBI’s Data Being Harvested

The government’s next-best argument (after “Third Party Doctrine yo!”) in support of its bulk collection of US persons’ phone metadata via the (now partly-dead) Section 215 surveillance program was this: hey, it’s just metadata. How harmful could it be? (And if it’s of so little use to the NSA/FBI/others, how is it possible we’re using it to literally kill people?)

While trying to fend off attacks on Section 215 collections (most of which are governed [in the loosest sense of the word] by the Third Party Doctrine), the NSA and its domestic-facing remora, the FBI, insisted collecting and storing massive amounts of phone metadata was no more a constitutional violation than it was a privacy violation.

Suddenly — thanks to the ongoing, massive compromising of major US telecom firms by Chinese state-sanctioned hackers — the FBI is getting hot and bothered about the bulk collection of its own phone metadata by (gasp!) a government agency. (h/t Kevin Collier on Bluesky)

FBI leaders have warned that they believe hackers who broke into AT&T Inc.’s system last year stole months of their agents’ call and text logs, setting off a race within the bureau to protect the identities of confidential informants, a document reviewed by Bloomberg News shows.

[…]

The data was believed to include agents’ mobile phone numbers and the numbers with which they called and texted, the document shows. Records for calls and texts that weren’t on the AT&T network, such as through encrypted messaging apps, weren’t part of the stolen data.

The agency (quite correctly!) believes the metadata could be used to identify agents, as well as their contacts and confidential sources. Of course it can. That’s why the NSA liked gathering it. And that’s why the FBI liked collections it didn’t need a warrant to access. (But let’s not pretend this data was “stolen.” It was duplicated and exfiltrated, but AT&T isn’t suddenly missing thousands of records generated by FBI agents and their contacts.)

The issue, of course, is that the Intelligence Community consistently downplayed this exact aspect of the bulk collection, claiming it was no more intrusive than scanning every piece of domestic mail (!) or harvesting millions of credit card records just because the Fourth Amendment (as interpreted by the Supreme Court) doesn’t say the government can’t.

There are real risks to real people who are affected by hacks like these. The same thing applies when the US government does it. It’s not just a bunch of data that’s mostly useless. Harvesting metadata in bulk allows the US government to do the same thing Chinese hackers are doing with it: identifying individuals, sussing out their personal networks, and building from that to turn numbers into adversarial actions — whether it’s the arrest of suspected terrorists or the further compromising of US government agents by hostile foreign forces.

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The FBI Wrongly Raided This Family’s Home. Now the Supreme Court Will Hear Their Case.

When asked about the evening the FBI mistakenly broke into her home, detonating a flash grenade in the house and ripping her door from its hinges, Curtrina Martin struggles to find a way to describe what that does to a person. “I don’t know if there is a proper word that I can use,” she told me last year.

The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will evaluate whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled correctly when it barred Martin from suing over that nightmare scenario—a case that has attracted bipartisan attention from Congress.

In October 2017, the FBI arrived at Martin’s house, which she shared with her then-fiancé, Hilliard Toi Cliatt, and her 7-year-old son, Gabe. The agents were searching for a man named Joseph Riley, who lived approximately one block over. After law enforcement found Martin and Cliatt hiding in the closet, police dragged Cliatt out and handcuffed him, while another officer screamed and pointed his gun at Martin, who says she fell on a rack in the chaos.

A panel for the 11th Circuit wrote that the two structures “share several conspicuous features.” For example, they are “beige in color” and have “a large tree in the front.” Since it was dark outside, the judges said, it would have been “difficult to ascertain the house numbers on the mailboxes.” Lawrence Guerra, who led the raid, thus received immunity.

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FBI’s Warrantless Search Ruled Unconstitutional in a Blow to Government Spying

A case that started a decade ago with a New York City man’s arrest at John F. Kennedy Airport for allegedly trying to join a Pakistani terrorist group has now dealt a setback to government spying powers.

In a decision that could feed into a looming fight over government surveillance, a federal court ruled last month that FBI agents violated the man’s constitutional rights when they searched National Security Agency databases for information on him dozens of times without a warrant.

The decision gives a boost to the surveillance critics who have long asked Congress to impose a warrant requirement on “backdoor” searches of NSA data collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA.

Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, has called for “major reform” of Section 702. He faces a Thursday confirmation hearing where surveillance hawks on the Senate Intelligence Committee could grill him about that position. Trump’s other nominees, however, have lined up to back the law.

The parties to the New York City case have not signaled whether they intend to appeal the ruling in the case against Agron Hasbajrami, who remains imprisoned. But if it stands, the decision could play a role in thecongressional debate over the spying law when it expires in April 2026.

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Whistleblower: FBI’s New Orleans Boss Stayed On Vacation after New Year’s Terrorist Attack

Apparently the second-deadliest foreign-inspired terrorist attack in the U.S. since 9/11 wasn’t enough for the boss of the New Orleans FBI field office to end his vacation early.

Early on New Year’s Day, 42-year-old Army veteran Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar rammed a pickup truck into a crowd in New Orleans’s famed French Quarter—killing 14 people who were celebrating the New Year. Police fatally shot Jabbar in a following firefight, and authorities later determined that the incident was inspired by the foreign terrorist organization ISIS.

Despite that, New Orleans FBI Special Agent in Charge Lyonel Myrthil took several more days to return to the office, according to a whistleblower working with the office of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

“Myrthil vacationed in Europe from late December to early January, which included New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, and the Sugar Bowl and took multiple days to return to New Orleans after the terrorist attack on January 1,” Grassley said in a Tuesday letter to FBI Acting Director Brian Driscol and Acting Attorney General James McHenry.

“The FBI failed to note this in any of the joint briefings it provided to Congress and must provide more information.”

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