Tag: fbi

Former Trump Advisor Says FBI Raided His Home This Week Because He Criticized Biden’s Ukraine Policy

The FBI earlier this week raided the home of Dimitri Simes, a Russian-born policy analyst who advised Trump in 2016.

Dimitri Simes, who has been living and working in Russia since October 2022, said his Virginia home was raided because he spoke out against the Deep State and criticized Biden’s Ukraine policy.

The raid “clearly is an attempt to intimidate, not only somebody from Russia, but just anyone who goes against official policies and particularly against the deep state,” Simes told Sputnik News.

“My suspicion is that instead of trying to get me to come to the United States and to interrogate me — or even to arrest me — their real purpose is to make sure that I would not come back,” said Simes.

The bank account Simes uses to pay the mortgage on the home was also frozen.

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Higgins Report, Part 3: Trump Assassination Attempt: FBI Cleaned Up Biological Evidence from the Crime Scene – Something Unheard Of

Rep. Clay Higgins released a preliminary report on the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump on Thursday. The report reveals disturbing lapses by federal authorities that raise serious questions about the integrity of the investigation.

Congressman Clay Higgins (R-LA), a member of the House Task Force on the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, authored the report after spending 20 hours on the ground in Butler County, Pennsylvania, meticulously examining the crime scene.

The report, dated August 12, 2024, and addressed to Task Force Chairman Mike Kelly, exposes a series of alarming FBI actions—or inactions—that appear to undermine the investigation’s credibility.

As reported earlier, Higgins’ report highlighted several critical observations from his investigation, shedding light on the events leading up to and during the assassination attempt.

One part of the report focused on the clean-up operation. The FBI moved quickly to eliminate all traces of biological evidence from the crime scene.

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FBI Will “Neither Confirm Nor Deny” The Existence Of Bitcoin-Creator Satoshi’s Records

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has reportedly responded to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from a journalist implying that Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto was a “third party individual” for whom it could neither confirm nor deny it had records.

According to an Aug. 13 X post by investigative journalist Dave Troy, the FBI issued a “Glomar response” to his request for information on Satoshi —- neither confirming nor denying the law enforcement agency had records identifying the pseudonymous Bitcoin creator.

Troy said he intended to appeal the FOIA response but claimed the FBI had made an “interesting assertion” by implying Satoshi was a “third party individual.”

“I submitted as a broad general subject request, with full context, so it is the bureau and not me that is asserting that this is an individual,” said Troy. “[M]y intent is not to establish the identity behind the pseudonym, but rather to get what info the bureau may have on the subject. If that helps establish identity somehow, fine, but that’s not my primary question.”

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The FBI Raided This Innocent Woman’s House. Will She Ever Get Justice?

On an early morning in 2017, Curtrina Martin inadvertently attended a pyrotechnic exhibit she compares to the Fourth of July. Except it was October, and it was inside her home in Georgia.

The source was considerably less joyful. The FBI detonated a flash grenade in the house and ripped the door from its hinges in a raid to arrest a man, Joseph Riley, accused of gang activity, who lived in a different house approximately one block over.

The agents would not realize their mistake until after they made their way into Martin’s bedroom, where they found her and her then-fiancé, Hilliard Toi Cliatt, hiding in the closet, which the couple had retreated to when they were jolted awake by the commotion. An officer on the SWAT team dragged Cliatt out and handcuffed him, while another officer screamed and pointed his gun at Martin, who had reportedly fallen on a rack amid the chaos.

“I don’t know if there is a proper word that I can use” to describe her fear that night, Martin tells me. She says she initially had no idea it was law enforcement that had broken into her home. Her 7-year-old son was in a different room she couldn’t get to.

The leader of the SWAT raid, Lawrence Guerra, who was then a special agent with the FBI, noticed that Cliatt did not match the physical description of Riley, while Michael Lemoine, another FBI special agent, saw a piece of mail with a different address than the target. Guerra ultimately ended the raid. 

Almost seven years have gone by, and Martin and Cliatt are still trying to find recourse for what happened that night. A federal lawsuit they filed continues to wind its way through the judiciary, although the courts have thus far immunized the government from having to pay any damages.

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FBI Raids Home of Former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter

On Wednesday, the FBI raided the home of Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector and outspoken critic of the NATO proxy war in Ukraine and Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza.

Ritter told reporters outside of his New York home that the raid was related to a suspected violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a law that requires individuals or entities engaging in lobbying or other activity on behalf of a foreign country to register as foreign agents with the US Department of Justice.

“The search warrant is related to concerns apparently the US government has about violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. I will tell you right now I am not in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act … and hopefully, by executing the search warrant and taking the information that they did, they will rapidly reach that conclusion,” Ritter said.

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Pakistani National with Iranian Ties Charged with Murder-for-Hire in Foiled Assassination Plot Against President Trump

A federal complaint unsealed on Tuesday in Brooklyn has charged Asif Merchant, also known as “Asif Raza Merchant,” a 46-year-old Pakistani national, with murder-for-hire in connection with a foiled assassination plot targeting a politician or U.S. government officials on American soil.

The plot was thwarted by law enforcement before any attack could be executed. Merchant is currently in federal custody in New York, according to the press release.

FBI investigators believe that the intended targets of the plot included Trump and other current and former U.S. government officials, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter, per CNN.

According to court documents, Merchant orchestrated a plot to assassinate a politician or U.S. government officials on U.S. soil. In approximately April 2024, after spending time in Iran, Merchant arrived in the United States from Pakistan and contacted a person he believed could assist him with the scheme. This individual reported Merchant’s intentions to law enforcement and became a confidential source (CS).

In early June, during a meeting with the CS, Merchant outlined his assassination plot and indicated that this opportunity would not be a one-time event. He made a gesture resembling a gun with his hand while discussing the killing and specified that the targets would be “here,” referring to the United States.

Merchant’s plan included various criminal activities: stealing documents from a target’s residence, organizing protests, and ultimately assassinating a political figure or government official. He expressed concerns about security measures surrounding potential targets and discussed multiple scenarios for carrying out the assassination.

In mid-June, Merchant met with individuals he believed were hitmen but were actually undercover FBI agents (UCs). During these meetings, he sought their services for theft and assassination and indicated that he would provide instructions on whom to kill after leaving the U.S.

Merchant arranged to pay $5,000 in cash as an advance for the assassination services and successfully delivered this payment on June 21. Following this transaction, he made plans to leave the country on July 12, 2024, one day before Trump’s assassination attempt. However, law enforcement intervened and arrested him before he could depart.

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FBI To Resume Meetings With Social Media Companies, Ignoring Censorship Concerns

Here we go again – another US election is coming up, and there’s another push to find ways to censor “disfavored” voices, and one of those ways is the focus on the foreign malign influence (FMI) boogeyman.

Americans (and the world) have seen this play out already before and after the contested 2020 vote.

The infamous case of the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop news story came after the FBI issued a warning to social media companies about an incoming FMI “disinformation dump” – from Russia.

We know how that went and was eventually debunked, the laptop being authentic, rather than a figment of some “disinformation” peddling operation’s imagination. But here is the FBI again, more than just emboldened by the recent Supreme Court’s ruling in the Murthy v. Missouri case.

That decision lifted an injunction that banned the US government from colluding with Big Tech in order to promote censorship. Now the case is back in the lower courts, and in the meanwhile, mere months before the election, the legal hurdle to resume suspected collusion has been cleared.

And so the FBI will now “resume regular meetings” with social media companies, the pretext being finding ways to combat “potential” FMI threats. The Hunter Biden laptop scandal illustrates very well how the supposed hunt for FMI can go astray, straight into the political censorship territory.

But none of that seems to matter now, as the current White House presses on with the old practices. On July 12 this year, just after the Supreme Court’s decision, Department of Justice (DOJ) Associate Deputy Attorney General George D. Turner penned a memo that shows the collusion never really stopped – even after last October’s court injunction restricting this type of “collaboration.”

We obtained a copy of the memo for you here.

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Unreleased FBI Documents Shed Light on Lt. Col. Philip Corso’s Controversial Claims

The FBI has released a collection of documents pertaining to Lt. Col. Philip J. Corso, a prominent figure in the UFO community known for his claims about recovered alien technology. These documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by The Black Vault in 2019, reveal Corso’s interactions with the FBI and other government entities, many of which appear to be previously unreleased.

Corso, who served in the U.S. Army for over twenty years primarily in intelligence roles, gained notoriety with the publication of his book, The Day After Roswell. In it, Corso claimed he had direct knowledge about the recovery and analysis of extraterrestrial technology from the Roswell incident, which he alleged was reverse-engineered to advance American technology. Despite his fame in the UFO community, the newly released FBI files focus on his broader interactions with the government but make no mention of his UFO stories.

What a portion of these documents do deal with is a 1964-1965 request to perform a name check on Corso. A name check is a thorough search conducted by the FBI to investigate an individual’s background, ensuring there are no red flags or derogatory information that might affect their suitability for certain roles or positions. This process is particularly crucial for individuals being considered for sensitive government positions or committee memberships.

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Senator Johnson on FBI Claims of Would-Be Assassin Thomas Crooks: “They’re Trying to Paint This as a MAGA Terrorist Trying to Take Out MAGA President. This Doesn’t Make Sense – You Can’t Trust the FBI”

On Tuesday night Senator Ron Johnson joined Laura Ingraham to discuss the Secret Service and FBI’s tawdry testimony before the Senate committees earlier today.

U.S. Secret Service Acting Director Ronald Rowe and FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate provided updates on the ongoing investigation into the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump and the murder of one Trump supporter in Butler, Pennsylvania.

During the testimony, the FBI shamelessly attempted to link deceased killer Thomas Matthew Crooks, the would-be assassin of former President Donald Trump, to a social media account purportedly filled with anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Despite initial reports that investigators had found no threatening posts on Crooks’ social media accounts, Deputy Director Abbate claimed new evidence had surfaced.

“Something just very recently uncovered that I want to share is a social media account which is believed to be associated with this shooter,” Abbate said.

“Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect anti Semitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature,” he added.

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FBI Director Wray Uses Trump Assassination Attempt To Criticize Private Messaging

FBI Director Christopher Wray has used a congressional hearing organized after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump to launch another attack against encryption and use that as justification for the state of the investigation.

Appearing before the House Judiciary Committee this week, Wray was supposed to speak about the FBI’s investigation into this extremely serious incident, as well as about what the committee said is “the ongoing politicization” of the agency under his and Attorney-General Merrick Garland’s direction.

But Wray turned it into blaming encrypted apps and services for the pace of the investigation. Quite extraordinarily for a person who is supposed to be highly knowledgeable about security, the FBI chief came across as oblivious to how essential encryption is for people’s online security – from their bank transactions to their communications.

Instead, he complained that it is difficult to break into accounts on encrypted platforms, that is, to break encryption – a situation that the FBI head said has “unfortunately become very commonplace.”

He went on to claim that law enforcement at all levels, federal, state, and local finds it “a real challenge.”

Reports say that the FBI had “early success” in breaking into the phone of the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, using tools provided by Cellebrite. This is an Israeli company that oddly advertises its wares as “accelerating justice.”

Wray did not reveal which platforms host the accounts belonging to Crooks that the FBI says it has trouble accessing but noted that “legal process returns” are awaited to accomplish that goal.

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