Tag: fbi

Facebook Censors Media Who Criticize FBI’s ‘Deadly Force’ Raid Against Trump

Facebook is deploying so-called “fact-checkers” to run interference for the FBI after it was revealed the agency authorized the use of “deadly force” against former President Trump during its 2022 raid on his Mar-a-Lago estate.

On Thursday, the Big Tech platform slapped an “independent fact-check” on The Federalist’s May 21 report detailing the contents of unsealed court documents that revealed the FBI gave agents raiding Trump’s Florida residence the green-light to use “deadly force” against the former president “when necessary.” The raid — which took place on Aug. 8, 2022 — was approved by Attorney General Merrick Garland and reportedly aimed at retrieving “any document Trump ever saw, read, or created for the entirety of his four years as commander-in-chief.”

According to the filing by Trump’s legal team, the FBI’s operations order “contained a ‘Policy Statement’ regarding ‘Use Of Deadly Force,’ which stated, for example, ‘Law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary …’” The document further revealed that these agents “planned to bring ‘Standard Issue Weapon[s],’ ‘Ammo,’ ‘Handcuffs,’ and ‘medium and large sized bolt cutters,’ but they were instructed to wear ‘unmarked polo or collared shirts’ and to keep ‘law enforcement equipment concealed.’”

The FBI also appeared to provide guidance to agents on how to engage Trump and Secret Service personnel if they were encountered during the raid.

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Dirty FBI Defends Authorized Use of Deadly Force at Mar-a-Lago Raid, Including: Triage Plans, 30 Armed Agents, and Map to a Trauma Center

The FBI on Tuesday evening issued a rare statement after court documents revealed the Bureau was authorized to use deadly force when it raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022.

Judge Aileen Cannon on Tuesday unsealed numerous motions related to Jack Smith’s classified documents case against Trump.

One filing revealed Biden’s FBI authorized the use of deadly force during their raid on Mar-a-Lago authorized by US Attorney General Merrick Garland in August 2022.

Armed FBI agents were prepared to kill President Trump and his family, attack the Secret Service if necessary, and raid the guest rooms at the hotel!

In an appalling statement released Tuesday evening, the FBI claimed the authorization of deadly force on former President Trump is just “standard protocol.”

As Cristina Laila reported, the FBI also claimed Joe Biden had nothing to do with the use of deadly force on Trump, his family or Secret Service Agents assigned to his detail.

“The FBI, like other law enforcement agencies, requires the team leader of any search warrant or arrest warrant to complete a standardized form known as an “Operations Plan.” This form, which also must be read by the team leader to all assisting agents, is a reminder of the FBI’s deadly force policy. This is a legal requirement to be included on all Ops Plans and read to agents immediately preceding the enforcement action. The President (Biden) has nothing to do with, and has zero input on, an Ops Plan. This is an internal law enforcement document and a standardized form that FBI lawyers require before engaging in any enforcement operations,” the FBI said.

Of course, this was all a lie.

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FBI Authorized ‘Deadly Force’ in Mar-a-Lago Raid

Documents reported on by American journalist Julie Kelly have revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation authorized using “deadly force when necessary” during its raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

“Tons of new unsealed filings on classified docs case,” Kelly posted to X on Tuesday, “I will try to post as much as I can (there goes the workout) but this is mind-blowing.”

In a subsequent post, Kelly wrote:

“Oh my God. Armed FBI agents were preparing to confront Trump and even engage Secret Service if necessary. They were going to go door to door to terrorize MAL guests and even pick the locks. Gestapo.”

Kelly further noted that the FBI apparently had a medic on standby and even pinpointed a local traume center in case anybody got “injured” during the raid.

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After Expanding Warrantless Surveillance The FBI Is Playing Politics With Your Privacy

A bombshell report from WIRED reveals that two days after the U.S. Congress renewed and expanded the mass-surveillance authority Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Paul Abbate, sent an email imploring agents to “use” Section 702 to search the communications of Americans collected under this authority “to demonstrate why tools like this are essential” to the FBI’s mission.

In other words, an agency that has repeatedly abused this exact authority—with 3.4 million warrantless searches of Americans’ communications in 2021 alone, thinks that the answer to its misuse of mass surveillance of Americans is to do more of it, not less. And it signals that the FBI believes it should do more surveillance–not because of any pressing national security threat—but because the FBI has an image problem.

The American people should feel a fiery volcano of white hot rage over this revelation. During the recent fight over Section 702’s reauthorization, we all had to listen to the FBI and the rest of the Intelligence Community downplay their huge number of Section 702 abuses (but, never fear, they were fixed by drop-down menus!). The government also trotted out every monster of the week in incorrect arguments seeking to undermine the bipartisan push for crucial reforms. Ultimately, after fighting to a draw in the House, Congress bent to the government’s will: it not only failed to reform Section 702, but gave the government authority to use Section 702 in more cases.

Now, immediately after extracting this expanded power and fighting off sensible reforms, the FBI’s leadership is urging the agency to “continue to look for ways” to make more use of this controversial authority to surveil Americans, albeit with the fig leaf that it must be “legal.” And not because of an identifiable, pressing threat to national security, but to “demonstrate” the importance of domestic law enforcement accessing the pool of data collected via mass surveillance. This is an insult to everyone who cares about accountability, civil liberties, and our ability to have a private conversation online. It also raises the question of whether the FBI is interested in keeping us safe or in merely justifying its own increased powers.

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Newly Published Records Show FBI Officials Were Instructed To ‘Stand Down’ The Day Before Jan. 6 After Targeted Individuals From a Group They Had Infiltrated Decided Not to Come to DC

The Federal Bureau of Investigation continues to cover-up how the government entrapped Americans who demonstrated at the January 6 Save America rally.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI released a trove of internal documents on May 7 on “The Vault” section of its website titled “United States Capitol Violence and related Events of January 6, 2021 Part 35.”

Email correspondence among FBI officials in the days leading up to Jan. 6, real-time reactions to violence at the fedsurrection, and guidance of the bureau’s response to the Capitol riot are among the 107 pages of newly released documents.

But the most interesting aspect of the FOIA drop is the information the bureau concealed. The increasingly lawless agency, that continues to surveil and terrorize Americans who protested that day, heavily redacted nearly every page of the records, hiding all evidence potentially indicating malfeasance.

Despite a frustrating number of the pages being redacted,  some interesting tidbits remain among the scraps.

An email thread with the subject line, “Stand down. See Below” was sent at 5:46 pm the day before the massive crowd of demonstrators was bombed, gassed and shot by police at the Capitol.

“We are standing down in [REDACTED]. The predicated subjects have been [REDACTED]. [REDACTED] is being informed. The only people from the group who are continuing to DC are non-subjects, who are not carrying weapons, and appear to be solely involved in legal First Amendment protesting,” states one of the emails from the thread.

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FBI Documents Allege Japan Used Germ Warfare in Attack on US and Canada

Two FBI reports, one of them newly declassified, suggest the use of biological agents, in particular bubonic plague and anthrax, as part of a large-scale balloon barrage – code name “Fu-Go” – carried out by Japan over the United States and Canada in late 1944 and the first four months of 1945.

One report, dated two months after the end of World War II, stated that anthrax was discovered in Japanese balloons that came down in the U.S. Midwest. The other report was dated five years after the war. Written by J. Edgar Hoover, or sourced to his office, it discussed outbreaks of bubonic plague that experts felt were linked to the Japanese balloon attacks.

During World War 2, Japan launched some 9,300 high-altitude balloons against the U.S. and Canada. Approximately 300 balloons, many carrying antipersonnel and incendiary bombs, were known to have touched land in North America.

According to Japanese testimony, all records inside Japan relating to their secret balloon program were destroyed at the end of World War II, along with the biological warfare research undertaken by Japan’s infamous Unit 731.

The new evidence presented in this article significantly changes our understanding of this important episode in World War II, and points to an intelligence cover-up more than seven decades old.

Balloons Downed in Midwest Carried Anthrax

Last year, stimulated by the controversy over the discovery of a Chinese balloon drifting over the United States, a number of news articles recalled the WW2 Japanese balloon episode. In a May 5, 2023 Time Magazine interview with historian Ross Coen, who has written a book on the Fu-Go attacks, Coen noted, “From the perspective of the War Department and Army intelligence, the thing that they feared most was biological warfare…. Ultimately there never was any biological component to the balloons.”

But a July 6, 1945 FBI memorandum addressed to the Chief of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division, Daniel M. Ladd, stated, “recently several Japanese balloons were found in [North and South Dakota, and Nebraska] which were determined to have been carrying bacteria.”

The bacteria were identified as anthrax. The pathogen was discovered in the hydrogen gas that inflated the massive paper-laminated balloons. The FBI report was written by the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Norfolk Field Division.

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Here’s How the CIA Plans To Use Your Ad Tracking Data

For years, the U.S. government has bought information on private citizens from commercial data brokers. Now, for the first time ever, American spymasters are admitting that this data is sensitive—but they’re leaving it up to the spy agencies on how to use it.

Last week, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines released a “Policy Framework for Commercially Available Information.” Her office oversees 18 agencies in the “intelligence community,” including the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA), and all military intelligence branches.

In the 2018 case Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that police need a warrant to obtain mobile phone location data from phone companies. (During the case, the Reason Foundation filed an amicus brief against warrantless snooping.) As a workaround, the feds instead started buying data from third-party brokers.

Haines’ new framework claims that “additional clarity” on the government’s policies will help protect Americans’ privacy. Yet the document is vague about the specific limits. It orders the agencies themselves to come up with “safeguards that are tailored to the sensitivity of the information” and write an annual report on how they use this data.

As national security journalist Spencer Ackerman points out in his Forever Wars newsletter, the framework doesn’t require the feds to delete old purchased data. Earlier this year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) called on the NSA to purge all data that it bought without a warrant and without following the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy policies.

“The framework’s absence of clear rules about what commercially available information can and cannot be purchased by the intelligence community reinforces the need for Congress to pass legislation protecting the rights of Americans,” Wyden tells Reason. “The DNI’s framework is nonetheless an important step forward in starting to bring the intelligence community under a set of principles and policies, and in documenting all the various programs so that they can be overseen.”

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CISA, FBI Resuming Talks With Social Media Firms Over Disinformation Removal, Senate Intel Chair Says

Key federal agencies have resumed discussions with social media companies over removing disinformation on their sites as the November presidential election nears, a stark reversal after the Biden administration for months froze communications with social platforms amid a pending First Amendment case in the Supreme Court, a top senator said Monday.

Mark Warner, D-Va., who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters in a briefing at RSA Conference that agencies restarted talks with social media companies as the Supreme Court heard arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, a case that first began in the Fifth Circuit appellate court last July. The case was fueled by allegations that federal agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were coercing platforms to remove content related to vaccine safety and 2020 presidential election results.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide whether agencies are allowed to stay in touch with social media firms about potential disinformation. Missouri’s then-Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed the suit on the grounds that the Biden administration violated First Amendment rights pertaining to free speech online in a bid to suppress politically conservative voices.

According to Warner, communications between agencies and social platforms resumed roughly around the same time that multiple justices appeared to favor the executive branch’s stance on the issue, he said. 

“There seemed to be a lot of sympathy that the government ought to have at least voluntary communications with [the companies],” he said, adding that, in the event of election interference attempts akin to Russia in 2016, the Biden administration should more forcefully call out nation-state entities that attempt to meddle in the U.S. election process.

Warner said his committee will convene a hearing on elections security in two weeks. The panel was supposed to hold the session with CISA Director Jen Easterly and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines last month, but it was postponed amid GOP attempts to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

For around six months, agencies chilled their communications with social firms about election security and other disinformation flash points. Warner previously said that White House lawyers had been “too timid” in their legal interpretation of the case, especially given that the high court allowed the Biden administration to temporarily continue their talks until a ruling was made.

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FBI Brought Props To Stage Infamous Trump Crime Scene Photo

The FBI brought props to its raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago for classified documents that were pictured in an infamous photo taken at the alleged crime scene, according to court documents.

Jay Bratt, the lead Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutor now assigned to special counsel Jack Smith’s team, admitted in a recent court filing that FBI agents brought cover sheets reading “top secret” to the raid of Mar-a-Lago to use as placeholders in their gathering of classified documents. The classified documents, however, now appear to be out of order following their seizure, both Trump’s defense attorney and the special counsel have admitted, according to court documents first reported by Declassified with Julie Kelly.

The crime scene photo of classified documents allegedly found at Mar-a-Lago, complete with the bright red “classification” cover sheets, went viral in the weeks after the raid. Corporate media outlets breathlessly reported on the photo and the cover sheets as proof that Trump had been storing classified documents at his Florida property.

“[If] the investigative team found a document with classification markings, it removed the document, segregated it, and replaced it with a placeholder sheet. The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose,” Bratt wrote in a recent filing.

In a May filing, Waltine Nauta, Trump’s defense attorney, wrote that the placeholders which the FBI brought to the scene to mark classified documents in stacks were out of place.

“Following defense counsel’s review of the physical boxes…and the documents produced in classified discovery, defense counsel has learned that the cross-reference provided by the Special Counsel’s Office does not contain accurate information,” Nauta wrote, according to Kelly.

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FBI File On Jeff Bezos’ Grandfather, A DARPA Co-Founder, Has Been Destroyed

ZeroHedge reported that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, helped form the Pentagon’s supersecret Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA—renamed DARPA) in 1958. Years later, DARPA developed the internet and spurred breakthroughs in high-speed networking, voice recognition, and internet search. When Gise’s FBI file was requested through the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI responded that if there was one, it has been destroyed. News website Leading Report’s Patrick Webb wrote that “There has long been speculation that DARPA has been involved in the creation of many popular big tech companies, using “frontmen” for the allusion of a startup led by outsiders.” Questions swirl about DARPA’s involvement in creating Amazon that hosts ‘secret’ cloud services for the CIA and NSA, and other intel agencies. Some critics speculated that if not for the government contracts, Amazon would be a struggling company.

What’s not widely known is that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, helped form the Pentagon’s supersecret Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA—renamed DARPA) in 1958. Years later, DARPA developed the internet and spurred breakthroughs in high-speed networking, voice recognition, and internet search. 

John Greenewald Jr., who operates The Black Vault, a website dedicated to revealing declassified government documents through obtaining Freedom of Information Act requests, posted on X that he went after Gise’s “FBI file, but found out if there was one, it has been destroyed.” 

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