Tag: fbi

US Navy Veteran Who Feds Say Rammed FBI Headquarters Had QAnon-Linked Online Presence

A former Navy submarine technician was arrested after law enforcement says he drove an SUV into the FBI headquarters near Atlanta on Monday afternoon. It is still unclear why the suspect, Ervin Lee Bolling, attempted to force entry into the headquarters, but research conducted by the nonpartisan public-interest nonprofit Advance Democracy and shared exclusively with WIRED has found that accounts believed to be associated with Bolling shared numerous conspiracy theories on social media platforms, including X and Facebook.

Just after noon on Monday, Bolling rammed his burnt-orange SUV with South Carolina license plates into the final barrier at FBI Atlanta’s headquarters, wrote Matthew Upshaw, an FBI agent assigned to the Atlanta office, in a sworn affidavit on Tuesday. Upshaw added that after Bolling crashed the SUV, he left the car and tried to follow an FBI employee into the secure parking lot. When agents instructed Bolling to sit on a curb, he refused and tried again to enter the premises. The affidavit also stated that Bolling resisted arrest when agents subsequently tried to detain him.

Bolling was charged on Tuesday with destruction of government property, according to court records reviewed by WIRED.

Advance Democracy researchers identified an account on X with the handle @alohatiger11, a reference to the Clemson University mascot which Bolling has expressed support for on his public Facebook page. The handle is similar to usernames on other platforms like Telegram and Cash App, and also bears similarities to a Facebook page with Bolling’s name. The profile picture used in the X account also resembles a picture of the same man shown in Bolling’s public Facebook profile. The X account is currently set to private, but dozens of its old posts are still publicly viewable through the Internet Archive.

In December 2020, the X account responded to a post about a federal government stimulus bill that stated, “Wonder what it will take for people to wake up.” The X account believed to be associated with Bolling responded, “I’m awake. Just looking for a good militia to join.”

Around the same time, social media accounts seemingly associated with Bolling repeatedly boosted QAnon content and interacted with QAnon promoters, including by posting a link to a now-deleted QAnon-associated YouTube channel alongside the comment: “Release the Kraken”—in direct reference to Sidney Powell’s failed legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

On what’s believed to be Bolling’s Facebook account, there were various posts related to anti-vaccine memes as well.

The accounts also posted in support of former president Donald Trump. In December 2020, “I love you” was posted in response to a post on X from Trump that falsely claimed the election had been rigged by Democrats.

Courtney Bolling, who is identified as the suspect’s wife on Facebook, did not respond to requests for comment via phone or messages sent to her social media profiles. No legal counsel is listed on record for Bolling.

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Orwellian Tactics? Libertarian Party Fears Targeting By FBI After Letter

The Libertarian Party has questions for the Department of Justice after the FBI claimed that a “foreign threat” had accessed its Facebook account. A preliminary analysis by the LP was hindered by Meta, which has offered little clarity on the incident.

In a statement published on Friday, LP chair Angela McArdle shared a letter the party received from the bureau warning of the alleged breach. “The FBI maintains active investigations that seek to identify the activities of hostile foreign governments and their intelligence services who target the US government, private sector, and political processes,” the letter says. “The FBI recently obtained information showing that one of these foreign threat actors was in control of various IP addresses that the group used to log into a Facebook account controlled by your organization. The group accessed the account sometime between August 2023 and February 2024.”

One LP employee with knowledge of the letter told the Libertarian Institute that roughly 10 people have access to the Facebook account. The party has not changed access to the page within the past two months.

The employee said the LP was unable to access the user archive for its Facebook account to determine if it had been hacked and has so far received no assistance from Meta in resolving the issue. The organization plans to do what it can to learn more about the supposed “foreign threat actor” and why the FBI was surveilling the account in the first place.  

While the source acknowledged that the letter could be the result of “good police work,” the party is concerned the move could amount to a veiled threat from federal agents. Those worries are significantly heightened as two members of the party’s leadership have been contacted by the FBI within the past year, the employee added. 

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FBI Agent Says He Hassles People ‘Every Day, All Day Long’ Over Facebook Posts

The FBI spends “every day, all day long” interrogating people over their Facebook posts. At least, that’s what agents told Stillwater, Oklahoma, resident Rolla Abdeljawad when they showed up at her house to ask her about her social media activity. 

Three FBI agents came to Abdeljawad’s house and said that they had been given “screenshots” of her posts by Facebook. Her lawyer Hassan Shibly posted a video of the incident online on Wednesday.

Abdeljawad told agents that she didn’t want to talk and asked them to show their badges on camera, which the agents refused to do. She wrote on Facebook that she later confirmed with local police that the FBI agents really were FBI agents.

“Facebook gave us a couple of screenshots of your account,” one agent in a gray shirt said in the video.

“So we no longer live in a free country and we can’t say what we want?” replied Abdeljawad.

“No, we totally do. That’s why we’re not here to arrest you or anything,” a second agent in a red shirt added. “We do this every day, all day long. It’s just an effort to keep everybody safe and make sure nobody has any ill will.”

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Prince Harry Among A-List Celebrities Named in $30 Million Sex Trafficking Lawsuit Against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs

Prince Harry has been named in court documents in the sex trafficking lawsuit lodged against Bad Boy Records founder and media mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs.

The royal’s name appeared in the $30 million lawsuit filed by producer Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones who alleges that the music mogul participated on sexual misconduct, grooming, and sex trafficking.

According to the New York Post, the Duke of Sussex, 39, was one of several “A-List” celebrities whose names appear in the court documents.

The music mogul’s Los Angeles home was raided on Monday by federal agents in connection to the sex trafficking investigation.

“Investigators said across the coast, the music mogul’s Miami home was also raided Monday,” Fox News reported.

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‘Unconstitutional’: FBI Demanded Identities of Users Who Watched Certain YouTube Videos

The FBI demanded that Google turn over the identities of tens of thousands of users who watched certain YouTube videos.

Federal investigators obtained court-ordered subpoenas for any YouTube viewers who watched tutorials on mapping with drones and augmented reality software.

The subpoena included names, addresses, telephone numbers, and browsing history for Google accounts for at least 30,000 people, tracing traffic to the relevant videos for the first week of January 2023.

The government also wanted the IP addresses of non-Google account owners who viewed the videos.

“There is reason to believe that these records would be relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation, including by providing identification information about the perpetrators,” the authorities claimed, according to Forbes.

Google was also told to keep the request secret until it was unsealed earlier this week. It’s unknown if Google complied with the subpoena.

But that wasn’t the only case of the FBI trampling on privacy rights.

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Tennessee Federal Judge Orders FBI To Turn Over Nashville Mass Shooter’s Manifesto

A federal judge in Tennessee ruled that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surrender documents, which include the ‘manifesto’ of transgender school shooter Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who killed three adults and three nine-year old children at the Covenant Christian School in Nashville in March 2023. 

The police shot Hale inside the school after she had murdered Mike Hill, 61, Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and three 9-year-olds, Hallie Scruggs, Evelyn Dieckhaus and William Kinney.

At the time of the shooting in March 2023, Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake had told reporters that officers had recovered a “manifesto” from Hale’s car as well as other documents, including a hand-drawn map of the school, and said Hale’s manifesto would be released. It was never released.

Federal authorities had resisted releasing Hale’s manifesto, citing potential interference with enforcement proceedings. The Tennessee Star newspaper’s parent company took legal action against the FBI after denying its request for public records release laws in Tennessee under the Freedom of Information Act. 

“The public has an urgent right to know why this tragedy happened,” the newspaper’s lawyers said in the federal complaint at that time.

The parent company of the Tennessee Star, a local newspaper, sued the FBI after the bureau denied its public records request under the Freedom of Information Act.

Then the tide turned. 

“It has been long enough, and the public has an urgent right to know why this tragedy happened, how future events may be prevented, and what policies should be in place to address this and other similar tragedies,” lawyers for the newspaper wrote in a federal complaint. “[The] FBI has no right to retain a monopoly on this information,” the court ruled. 

The FBI sought to have the complaint dismissed, but Judge Aleta Trauger of the Middle District of Tennessee said the bureau had failed to support its position “with sufficient clarity or detail” and ordered it to submit the manifesto to the court, so she could review the materials.

“The FBI is ORDERED to produce ex parte all documents that are potentially responsive to the defendants’ Freedom of Information Act request for in camera review, with the exception that, based on the plaintiffs’ concessions in this litigation, the FBI need not produce any documents that could not reasonably be construed to bear on Audrey Hale’s motives,” Trauger wrote.

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Warden is ousted as FBI raids California women’s prison known as the ‘rape club’

FBI agents raided a federal women’s prison in California this week so plagued by sexual abuse that it was known among inmates and workers as the “rape club.”

The action coincided with the ouster of the new warden from the federal correctional institution in Dublin. Warden Art Dulgov — just a few months into his tenure — and three other top managers were removed from their positions Monday by the federal Bureau of Prisons. Dulgov was the third new leader of the low-security prison since Warden Ray T. Garcia, who, along with more than half a dozen employees, was convicted of sexually assaulting multiple women serving time there.

Dulgov and staff are accused of retaliating against an inmate who testified in January in a class-action lawsuit that alleges “horrific abuse and exploitation” at the prison, with rampant sexual assault of incarcerated persons, according to a court filing.

The developments are the latest twist in a years-long scandal surrounding the facility. Since an FBI investigation was launched and resulted in arrests in 2021, eight FCI Dublin employees have been charged with sexually abusing inmates. Five have pleaded guilty, and two have been convicted by juries. Another employee is slated to go on trial this year.

Last year, Garcia was sentenced to 70 months in prison for sexually abusing incarcerated women and lying to the FBI as part of a cover-up.

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FBI sent several informants to Standing Rock protests, court documents show

Up to 10 informants managed by the FBI were embedded in anti-pipeline resistance camps near the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation at the height of mass protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016. The new details about federal law enforcement surveillance of an Indigenous environmental movement were released as part of a legal fight between North Dakota and the federal government over who should pay for policing the pipeline fight. Until now, the existence of only one other federal informant in the camps had been confirmed. 

The FBI also regularly sent agents wearing civilian clothing into the camps, one former agent told Grist in an interview. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA, operated undercover narcotics officers out of the reservation’s Prairie Knights Casino, where many pipeline opponents rented rooms, according to one of the depositions. 

The operations were part of a wider surveillance strategy that included drones, social media monitoring, and radio eavesdropping by an array of state, local, and federal agencies, according to attorneys’ interviews with law enforcement. The FBI infiltration fits into a longer history in the region. In the 1970s, the FBI infiltrated the highest levels of the American Indian Movement, or AIM. 

The Indigenous-led uprising against Energy Transfer Partners’ Dakota Access oil pipeline drew thousands of people seeking to protect water, the climate, and Indigenous sovereignty. For seven months, participants protested to stop construction of the pipeline and were met by militarized law enforcement, at times facing tear gas, rubber bullets, and water hoses in below-freezing weather.

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China is Now Building our FBI Offices Inside the U.S.?

Molasky Construction of Las Vegas, Nevada cites its success in building U.S. Government Facilities, including several FBI field offices.

For our special and secure U.S. Government Facilities we need trustworthy companies that can deliver the best construction and renovation to make sure no foreign threat fills that building and network connectivity with different tricks of the trade to see, hear, and read everything going on in that facility.

It’s important that everyone, especially the key personnel in a construction company working sensitive programs are trustworthy themselves.  From experience, getting an insider is the most effective way of break into an organization.

Why try a Mission Impossible break and enter when you can have someone on the inside do the work for you? Now why would one of the individuals of this company performing sensitive construction also be a big advocate for the EB-5 Immigration Program?

Nothing necessarily wrong with being an advocate of EB-5.  But EB-5 advocacy and building of sensitive Government facilities should be an immediate screaming alarm of incompatible activities.  The EB-5 program has been fraught with fraud and abuse.  The EB-5 advocate in Molasky seems to have a strong intersection with EB-5 applicants from China.

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Social media platform X bans account promoting a forthcoming documentary about FBI’s role in Whitmer ‘kidnapping plot’

In yet another example of how alleged “free speech” platform X (formerly Twitter) is anything but, a small team of independent documentary filmmakers have had their account “permanently” suspended this week as they prepare to release a documentary that they’ve been working on for over a year.

The topic: The 2020 “plot to kidnap and kill” Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, and the FBI’s extensive involvement therein.

The account was set up to promote the film, entitled Kidnap and Kill: An FBI Terror Plot, 14 months ago, in January of 2023.

“I paid for the account for over a year and even paid to promote the trailer on X buying twitter ads,” said director Christina Urso (also known as Radix Verum) in a post on Saturday.

“No email – nothing saying we violated TOS. We only used it to promote the trailer for the documentary.”

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