FBI’s “Stand Down” Directive to NYPD on Jeffrey Epstein Investigations, and More

Just five days after Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest in the summer of 2019, federal authorities “directed” the New York Police Department to “stand down” its investigations related to Epstein, new documents released by the Department of Justice show. The directive applied to NYPD’s Special Victims Unit — the group specially trained and equipped to handle sex crimes and child abuse cases. At the time, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office (DANY) had an ongoing investigation involving Epstein’s victims, the documents reveal, but the FBI assumed that would come to a halt as well following the Bureau’s directive.

These revelations are just part of the chronology below, which spans 1996-2025. The timeline amounts to the most comprehensive record to date of the publicly available information on New York law enforcement authorities’ action and inaction with regard to Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and other potential co-conspirators. It is a long record of institutional failures though with some successes (including DANY’s more recent pursuits with at least one of the alleged co-conspirators). The timeline is provided for public education, especially given that New York was an epicenter of Epstein’s vast criminal conspiracy.

Notably, last week, the Office of New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez also revealed that his state’s “investigation was closed in 2019 at the request of the U.S Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.” The revelation came alongside Attorney General Raúl Torrez ordering the criminal investigation to now be “reopened.”

Readers’ may be interested in Ryan Goodman, Siven Watt and Joshua Kolb, Timeline of Jeffrey Epstein-Ghislaine Maxwell Law Enforcement Failures (1996-2025) published on August 18, 2025.

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FBI Wins Court Ruling to Keep Twitter Payments Secret

A federal judge has handed the FBI a win in its attempts to keep secrets. On February 4th, Chief Judge James Boasberg ruled that the bureau can keep secret the precise amounts it paid Twitter between 2016 and 2023 for complying with legal process requests.

Judicial Watch, which had sued under the Freedom of Information Act, walked away empty-handed.

We obtained a copy of the opinion for you here.

You may remember our earlier reporting on how the FBI was paying Twitter. The payments totaled at least $3.4 million between October 2019 and February 2021 alone. That figure emerged from the Twitter Files released in December 2022. The FBI has never confirmed it. Neither has Twitter. And now, thanks to Boasberg’s ruling, the quarterly breakdown that would show exactly when the money flowed, and how much, stays buried.

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IT WAS ALL A SETUP: FBI Internal Emails Reveal Biden White House Coordinated with DOJ on Mar-a-Lago Raid

Fox News on Friday obtained internal FBI emails proving that the Biden White House coordinated with the Justice Department to raid Mar-a-Lago.

Biden’s FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in 2022 and seized boxes of records from Trump’s Florida estate.

More than 3 dozen machine-gun-toting agents descended on Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, and by November, Biden’s DOJ appointed a special counsel to investigate the documents stored at the Florida residence.

The raid came after the National Archives (NARA) visited Mar-a-Lago in early 2022 and demanded documents from Trump.

Court documents revealed that Biden’s FBI authorized the use of deadly force during their raid on Mar-a-Lago, which was authorized by US Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Corrupt FBI agents released staged photos of the ‘classified’ documents laid out on the floor of Mar-a-Lago.

Newly obtained FBI emails reveal Joe Biden was indeed coordinating with the DOJ in the months leading up to the Mar-a-Lago raid.

The Biden White House repeatedly denied having any foreknowledge of the raid. In fact, Joe Biden said he found out about the raid in media reports.

“New emails obtained by Fox News from May 2022, 3 months before Mar-a-Lago was raided by the FBI, illustrated coordination between the White House Counsel’s office and the DOJ regarding an interview of Walt Nauta,” Fox News reporter Davis Spunt said.

Walt Nauta, a former White House employee and Navy veteran who worked as a valet for Trump and served as a personal staffer at Mar-a-Lago, was indicted along with Trump in 2023.

According to the federal indictment reviewed by The Gateway Pundit, Nauta was charged along with Trump in counts 32, 33, 43, 35, and 36.

The charges include conspiracy, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation and scheme to conceal.

Walt Nauta was also charged alone in count 38: False statements and misrepresentations.

The charges against Walt Nauta were dismissed last year.

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Boasberg Rubber-Stamps DOJ Request To Keep FBI-Twitter Payments Secret

When the Twitter files hit in December of 2022, they revealed that the Biden administration had paid Twitter at least $3.4 million between October 2019 and February 2021 to reimburse the pre-Musk, left-leaning social media giant for a flood of requests. 

During this period, the Biden DOJ was going after vaccine skeptics, lab-leak proponents, 2020 election ‘deniers,’ Catholic parents, Hunter Biden laptop / Burisma content, and conservative news outlets. We also learned that the FBI’s Elvis Chan and crew were holding weekly meeting with Twitter on “misinformation,” and flagged thousands of accounts for the above. 

Days after the Twitter files were released, watchdog group Judicial Watch sued the Biden DOJ, which oversees the FBI, over a FOIA request demanding to know how much the FBI paid Twitter from 2016 onward. The FBI initially refused, but eventually released 44-pages of documents with the key payment details redacted – claiming the data was protected under FOIA’s “Exemption 7(E),” which lets agencies hide info about law enforcement methods if releasing it could help criminals or enemies dodge detection.

Judicial Watch then narrowed their claims to just those redacted payment amounts (JW dropped other issues such as vendor names), however in December of 2025, the Trump DOJ asked Judge James Boasberg for a Motion for Summary Judgement to deny Judicial Watch’s request – effectively concealing the extent to which the FBI, under Trump and Biden, was going after Americans. 

In its request for summary judgement, US Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office (say it ain’t so!) argued that revealing payments that are tied to real investigations could reveal super secret investigative methods – such as how much the FBI is “engaging” with Twitter vs. other platforms, which could lead to ‘bad guys’ (criminals, hackers, foreign spies) to switch to platforms with less FBI activity, and that it might reveal shifts in FBI priorities over time.

Revealing the quarterly totals could also betray “mosaic theory,” where seemingly harmless info (like one quarter’s payment) can be pieced together with public data (e.g., Twitter’s transparency reports) to form a big picture of FBI strategies.

Earlier this month, Boasberg agreed – ruling that revealing the payments could expose FBI “techniques and procedures” (how they monitor online threats) and help bad actors figure out what the FBI is focused on, allowing them to adapt and change strategies. 

Boasberg wrote in his opinion that the 7(E) exemption is valid because it could “risk circumvention of the law.” 

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Fulton County Files Lawsuit to Claw Back Election Evidence – Some Major Issues with Filing Revealed by Board Member

Last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice executed a search warrant on the Fulton County Elections and Operations Hub, seizing over 650 boxes of election records from the 2020 election.

The Gateway Pundit reported on the claims that led to the search, including missing ballot images (as admitted by Fulton County in the federal case Curling v. Raffensperger), missing tabulator opening tapes and unsigned closing tapes for all advance in-person voting locations, and numerous other issues.

Now, The Gateway Pundit has learned that the Fulton County Board of Commissioners [BOC] Chairman, Robert Pitts, the Fulton County Board of Registrations and Elections [BRE], as well as Fulton County itself, have sued the federal government in hopes of retaining those election records seized by the FBI.

The basis of the lawsuit (below) is Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure Rule 41(g), which regulates “unlawful search and seizure of property” and provides a means for returning said property.

However, according to a letter sent to Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr by BRE member Julie Adams, several problems exist within the filing.

This article will deal with those issues rather than the substance of the lawsuit itself.  The substance will be covered in a following article.

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The only Epstein property the FBI refuses to discuss as desert burial claims surface after girls were ‘strangled during sex’

Jeffrey Epstein‘s notorious properties from around the world were searched by the FBI after the financier’s 2019 death.

All except one, perhaps. 

The FBI has refused to comment on whether or not its agents searched Epstein’s New Mexico mansion, dubbed Zorro Ranch. 

The site was the venue for serious crimes including rape and murder, according to the Epstein files.

The pedophile ordered the burial of two ‘foreign girls’ near his ranch after they were strangled to death during ‘rough, fetish sex’, according to an email from the latest tranche of documents released by the Department of Justice.

The email was sent from an encrypted address of a person claiming to have worked for Epstein at Zorro to a man named Eddy Aragon on November 21, 2019, before it was forwarded to the FBI.

When the Daily Mail asked the FBI on Monday whether it ever searched the notorious ranch residence, a bureau spokesperson responded: ‘The FBI declines to comment.’

The FBI’s field office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, did not immediately respond to the Daily Mail’s request for comment. 

The FBI has also declined to answer the pressing question when asked by other outlets, raising questions about whether the New Mexico residence was ever investigated. 

‘Edward, This is sensitive, so it will be the first and last email depending on your discretion. You can choose to take it or trash it but this comes from a person that has been there and seen it all, as a former staff at the Zorro,’ the email states. 

‘What is damning about Jeffrey Epstein is yet to be written. Did you know somewhere in the hills outside the Zorro, two foreign girls were buried on orders of Jeffrey and Madam G? Both died by strangulation during rough, fetish sex.’ 

The sender also included links to videos which claimed to show Epstein having sex with minors, threesomes and sex with underage girls.

They then demanded a payment of one Bitcoin in return for the video and information.

The email was forwarded onto the FBI just three months after Epstein died while being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City.

Nearly half a dozen Epstein victims have alleged they were abused at the ranch.  

Months after Epstein’s death in federal custody in August 2019, the ranch had not been scoured by the FBI, according to a recently released email.

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Newly Declassified FBI Memos Reveal Bureau Ran SECRET ‘J6 Tabletop Exercise’ in Summer 2020 — Planned ‘Mass Prosecutions’ and ‘Embedded Informants’ MONTHS Before Capitol Event

The deep state’s fingerprints are all over the events of January 6, and a newly declassified memo has just blown the lid off the entire operation.

Documents obtained by Just the News and recently turned over to Congress by FBI Director Kash Patel at the request of Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), show the FBI’s Boston Field Office led an internal intelligence assessment warning that “domestic violent extremists (DVEs)” could escalate violence if the 2020 election results were contested.

This wasn’t just a routine drill. It was a blueprint for the very tactics used to hunt down and persecute Trump supporters: undercover informants and “heavy-handed” mass prosecutions for minor offenses, according to the news outlet.

The documents show that while the American public was focused on the 2020 campaign, the FBI’s Boston office was busy conducting a “tabletop exercise” imagining election-related violence.

According to the FBI’s own internal Executive Analytical Report dated August 21, 2020, the Bureau assessed that:

“…Domestic violent extremist (DVE) threats related to the 2020 elections likely will increase as the election approaches… ‘Election-related threats’ include but are not limited to those against candidates, campaign events, presidential conventions… and threats or plots related to electoral outcomes.”

While the bureau looked at “anarchists” on the left, their primary focus, and their eventual implementation, was laser-targeted at the American right.

Perhaps the most stunning revelation is the Bureau’s recommendation to build what it called a “robust source base” embedded within groups deemed capable of post-election violence.

The assessment explicitly recommended embedding Confidential Human Sources (CHS) within potentially violent groups to provide “early detection and disruption of planning for future events.”

This is exactly what played out. We now know, thanks to whistleblower reports and congressional oversight, that there were informants embedded in the crowd on January 6.

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FBI strategy memo on election violence raises questions about double standard between J6, BLM riots

When the FBI prepared on the eve of the 2020 presidential election for possible violence in case of a disputed election, it made no distinction between left and right-wing groups when it recommended prosecutions to deter illegal activity. 

Yet, months later, there was a disparity in how the FBI, the Justice Department, and local prosecutors were treating illegal activity during the breach of the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021, compared to the summer of 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.  

An FBI memo reported on by Just the News earlier this week shows the bureau’s Boston office led a tabletop exercise and culled open-source intelligence on the potential for violence from both left-leaning anarchists to right-leaning extremists. It recommended relying on undercover informants and aggressive prosecutions for minor crimes to keep tabs on potentially violent groups and deter them. 

90% of 2020 BLM protesters were not jailed, but 84.6% of J6 rioters convicted

The document raises new questions for congressional investigators about why the bureau failed to heed its own warnings ahead of the Capitol riot and whether it provides further evidence there was a double standard in federal prosecutions. 

News outlets have reported for years on the fact that a vast majority of cases against protesters who broke the law during the fiery and violent summer of 2020 were dropped, especially by localities. A 2021 analysis from The Guardian found that this happened in about 90% of cases across a dozen U.S. jurisdictions that experienced protests. 

In Houston, one of the epicenters of protests in Texas, about 93% of all charges brought were dropped, The Guardian reported. This is despite the fact that the demonstrators blocked a federal highway, threw objects at police officers, and damaged buildings. Eight officers were also injured. In Philadelphia, where protesters smashed windows, looted stores, and set fire to police cars, at least 95% of the arrests resulted in no prosecutions or dropped charges.

Many of these cases were handled by local prosecutors. In the more than 300 federal cases brought against those involved in the protests, fewer than half pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial, the Associated Press found.  

Conversely, more than 1,500 individuals were arrested in connection with the Capitol riot, resulting in 1,270 total convictions–making that outcome about 80% of the cases–on the eve of President Donald Trump’s sweeping pardon last year. That comes out to about 86%.

Federal prosecutors also used a controversial statute that allowed them to prosecute some of those who were charged with obstructing an official proceeding for interrupting the Jan. 6 congressional certification of the electoral college vote. The statute was also used in some of the charges levied against President Trump by Special Counsel Jack Smith in his case arguing Trump was directly responsible for the violence that day. 

That interpretation of the statute, which Republicans often pointed to as evidence of the double standard of aggressive prosecutions, was eventually struck down by the Supreme Court in June 2024. The high court ruled that the law only applied when a defendant prevented the use of “records, documents, objects, or other things used in an official proceeding.”

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FBI has ‘substantiated’ irregularities in Georgia 2020 vote counts, probing if they were intentional

The FBI has “substantiated” some major irregularities in how votes were counted in Georgia’s largest urban area in the aftermath of the 2020 election and is probing whether those failures were intentional efforts to violate federal election law, according to a bombshell affidavit unsealed by a federal court on Tuesday.

FBI Special Agent Hugh Raymond Evans first filed the affidavit last month to establish probable cause for a raid that seized about 700 boxes of Georgia 2020 elections ballots from a storage warehouse in the Atlanta area, after getting a referral from Trump White House election integrity czar Kurt Olsen.

The affidavit included information gleaned from FBI interviews with about a dozen unnamed witnesses recounting various allegations that dated back to the disputed 2020 election in Georgia in which Joe Biden was narrowly declared the winner over Donald Trump.

“Some of those allegations have been disproven while some of those allegations have been substantiated, including through admissions by Fulton County,” Evans wrote. “This warrant application is part of an FBI criminal investigation into whether any of the improprieties were intentional acts that violated federal criminal laws.”

Many of the substantiated allegations were previously reported by Just the News over the last five years based on its review of ballot records.

Evans’ affidavit, dated Jan. 28, cited five major areas of irregularities under investigation, including that:

  • Fulton County has admitted that it does not have scanned images of all the 528,777 ballots counted during the Original Count or the 527,925 ballots counted during the state’s first recount, a major loss of evidence.
  • Fulton County has confirmed that during the Recount of votes, some ballots were scanned multiple times. “Ballot images made available in response to public record requests show ballots with unique markings duplicated within the ballot images,” the affidavit said.
  • During the Risk Limiting Audit, auditors counting the votes by hand reported vote tallies for batches inconsistent with the actual votes within the batch. “The State’s Performance Review Board reported that Secretary of State investigators confirmed inaccurate batch tallies from the Risk Limiting Audit,” the affidavit said.
  • Auditors assisting in the Risk Limiting Audit reported counting purported absentee ballots that had “never been creased or folded, as would be required for the ballot to be mailed to the voter and for the ballot to be returned in the sealed envelope
    requiring the voter’s signature for authentication.”
  • On the day of the deadline to report the Recount results, Fulton County reported a recount totaling 511,343 ballots, 17,434 ballots fewer than the original count. “The following day, Fulton County then reported a total of 527,925 ballots counted,” the affidavit noted.

You can read the unsealed affidavit below: 

gov.uscourts.gand_.355087.22.1.pdf

Just the News reported in 2021 that a contractor sent to Fulton County to observe voting on behalf of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had chronicled widespread confusion, mistakes and irregularities in the vote count, a fact the affidavit cited. Gov. Brian Kemp also referred Fulton County for investigation for miscounting ballots based on information from Just the News.

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Massie Exposes Les Wexner As Epstein Co-Conspirator, Opening Door To Criminal Charges Against Kash Patel

Although President Donald J. Trump has amplified his attacks against Kentucky representative Thomas Massie on the basis of deluded claims that he is a radical, un-American liberal who is hellbent on sabotaging his administration, it is the congressman’s continued crusade to expose the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein that shows the actual threat he poses to Trump. The latest development in the Epstein Files fallout has clearly proven that the Trump administration’s best attempts to continue to cover up the crimes of Epstein and his accomplices are no match for Massie’s vigilance. After granting members of Congress access to view unredacted versions of the Epstein Files in response to the pressure mounted by Massie, the revelations therein have shown the lengths that the Trump Department of Justice (”DOJ”) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (”FBI”) have taken to continue the Epstein cover-up, going as far as to break federal law in an increasingly futile attempt to keep the truth from the American public.

The enhanced political pressure from Massie and California representative Ro Khanna following their success in passing The Epstein Files Transparency Act resulted in the Trump DOJ deciding to allow members of Congress to view unredacted files beginning on Monday morning. Members of Congress have been given limited access to view unredacted versions of the Epstein Files on computers at DOJ offices, provided they give 24 hours’ notice, though they will not be given access to the physical documents themselves. The DOJ has limited access to members of Congress alone, excluding any members of their staff. Although members of Congress will be able to take notes on any files they view, the DOJ has prohibited them from bringing any electronic devices into their review sessions. Unredacted documents made accessible to members of Congress are also limited to the trove of over 3 million files that have been released to the public, far short of the full scope of the more than 6 million files the DOJ has said it has in its possession.

Despite being given such limited access, the revelations included in what has been made available have led to a monumental shift that disproves the Trump administration’s narrative that the action it has been taken on the Epstein Files has been made with the aim of providing full transparency. According to representatives Massie and Khanna, they have identified at least six individuals incriminated in Epstein’s crimes, two of whom the FBI has officially labeled as co-conspirators, in the limited time allocated to them on the first day of being able to review the unredacted files whose identities have been obfuscated by the Trump administration despite their apparent complicity. Of those officially acknowledged as a co-conspirator is high-profile Epstein associate and billionaire Les Wexner, whose confirmation as such opens the door to criminal charges being brough against against high-ranking members of the Trump administration.

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