Tag: fbi

The FBI Said There Were ‘Pipe Bombs’ On January 6. Evidence Points To A Coverup, Congressman Says

Democrats have strained to make the case that January 6, 2021, was a violent “insurrection,” even resorting to false claims such as that police officers were murdered to make their case. But they have gone out of their way to avoid the one incident that would seemingly best make their point — the two purported pipe bombs outside the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee.

Now a Republican lawmaker who pored over thousands of hours of video footage and other evidence from January 6 alleges that the bombs may have been planted with the involvement of law enforcement. He believes Democrats have backed off from the incidents for fear that the truth would be discovered.

“This is an ongoing coverup at this point,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), a member of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, told The Daily Wire. “If there were indeed two operable pipe bombs, that would be the biggest threat that existed on January 6 … It doesn’t make any sense why they wouldn’t be promoting that threat to advance that narrative unless they had something to do with the pipe bombs and they’re trying to memory-hole the whole thing to avoid embarrassment.”

Video identified by Massie shows officers reacting nonchalantly after they were notified of the pipe bomb, milling slowly around the area and even letting children walk in front of it afterward. The soon-to-be vice president Kamala Harris was in the building at the time, a fact that the Department of Justice made misstatements about for months.

The video raises questions about how a Secret Service sweep before she entered did not detect a pipe bomb in plain sight some 30 feet from them.

“It’s the worst scandal of January 6, that’s for sure,” Massie said. “[A pipe bomb] is made to maim and kill… And the people who were protesting that day did not have weapons meant to maim and kill. So you would think they would be very focused on these pipe bombs, but they aren’t.”

Keep reading

Judge orders release of ‘Newburgh Four’ defendant and blasts FBI’s role in terror sting

A man convicted in a post-9/11 terrorism sting was ordered freed from prison by a judge who criticized the FBI for relying on an “unsavory” confidential informant for an agency-invented conspiracy to blow up New York synagogues and shoot down National Guard planes.

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon on Friday granted James Cromitie, 58, compassionate release from prison six months after she ordered the release of his three co-defendants, known as the Newburgh Four, for similar reasons. The four men from the small river city 60 miles (97 kilometers) north of New York City were convicted of terrorism charges in 2010.

Cromitie has served 15 years of his 25-year minimum sentence. The New York-based judge ordered Cromitie’s sentence to be reduced to time served plus 90 days.

Prosecutors in the high-profile case said the Newburgh defendants spent months scouting targets and securing what they thought were explosives and a surface-to-air missile, aiming to shoot down planes at the Air National Guard base in Newburgh and blow up synagogues in the Bronx. They were arrested after allegedly planting “bombs” that were packed with inert explosives supplied by the FBI.

Critics have accused federal agents of entrapping a group men who were down on their luck after doing prison time.

In a scathing ruling, McMahon wrote that the FBI invented the conspiracy and identified the targets. Cromitie and his codefendants, she wrote, “would not have, and could not have, devised on their own” a criminal plot involving missiles.

“The notion that Cromitie was selected as a ‘leader’ by the co-defendants is inconceivable, given his well-documented buffoonery and ineptitude,” she wrote.

Keep reading

Appeals Court: FBI’s Safe-Deposit Box Seizures Violated Fourth Amendment

The FBI violated the Fourth Amendment when its agents rifled through the contents of more than 700 safe-deposit boxes in the aftermath of a March 2021 raid, a panel of federal appeals court judges ruled unanimously on Tuesday.

In doing so, the judges at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed what innocent victims of the raid and their attorneys have been arguing for years: that the FBI overstepped the bounds of its warrant issued in the case and failed to follow proper protocol when federal agents cracked open safe-deposit boxes, ran the contents past drug-sniffing dogs, and tried to seize some of the money and other valuables found in the boxes.

The 9th Circuit’s ruling pivots on a detail of the case that Reason first highlighted more than a year ago: the existence of so-called “supplemental instructions” for the handling of the safe-deposit boxes seized at U.S. Private Vaults in Beverly Hills.

The warrant authorizing the raid expressly forbade federal agents from engaging in a “criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safety [sic] deposit boxes.” Under typical FBI procedure, the boxes should have been taken into custody until they could be returned to their rightful owners. But those “supplemental instructions” drawn up by the special agent in charge of the operation told agents to be on the lookout for cash stored inside the safe-deposit boxes and to note “anything which suggests the cash may be criminal proceeds.”

It is “particularly troubling,” wrote Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. in Tuesday’s ruling, that the government was unable to provide any “limiting principle to how far a hypothetical ‘inventory search’ conducted pursuant to customized instructions can go.”

Elsewhere in the ruling, Smith theorized that if a government agency were “given the discretion to create customized inventory policies” for “each car it impounds and each person detained, the ensuing search stops looking like an ‘inventory’ meant to simply protect property and looks more like a criminal investigation of that particular car or person, i.e, more like a ‘ruse.'”

“If there remained any doubt whether the government conducted a ‘criminal search or seizure,’ that doubt is put to rest by the fact that the government has already used some of the information from inside the boxes to obtain additional warrants to further its investigations and begin new ones,” Smith wrote.

“The Ninth Circuit today held that the FBI violated the Fourth Amendment rights of hundreds of people by breaking into their safe deposit boxes to try to forfeit everything worth taking,” Robert Frommer, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal nonprofit that represented some of the plaintiffs in the case, tells Reason. He said the case should bring renewed attention to a congressional proposal to reform federal forfeiture laws in order to “stop federal cops from continuing to act like robbers.”

A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment on the ruling and referred the matter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which did not respond to Reason’s request for comment.

Keep reading

Inside The FBI-Tainted Whitmer ‘Kidnap Plot’ You’ve Heard Almost Nothing About

In a fiery exchange last month, CNN anchorwoman Abby Phillip told GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy that there was “no evidence” to support his claim that federal agents abetted protesters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Ramaswamy shot back that the FBI conspicuously has never denied that law enforcement agents were on duty in the crowd. He argued that federal officials have repeatedly “lied” to the American people about not only that investigation but one that has gotten much less attention: the alleged failed plot to kidnap and kill Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan in 2020.

“It was entrapment,” Ramaswamy said. “FBI agents putting them up to a kidnapping plot that we were told was true but wasn’t.”

His zeroing in on the Michigan case highlighted an uncharacteristic development in contemporary politics, where progressives vigorously defend law enforcement power while conservatives view it with deep suspicion. Further, Ramaswamy’s linking of Jan. 6 and the Whitmer plot resonated with many on the right who want similarities between the two episodes exposed to the general public, especially the FBI’s reliance on informants and other paid operatives.

On Oct. 8, 2020, Whitmer announced the shocking arrests of several men accused of planning to kidnap and possibly assassinate her. The case produced alarming headlines just weeks before Election Day; Democrats, including Whitmer, used news of the plot to blame Trump for inciting violence.

Joe Biden commended the FBI for thwarting the abduction plan and, in a written statement issued the same day, claimed that “there is a through line from President Trump’s dog whistles and tolerance of hate, vengeance, and lawlessness to plots such as this one.” Biden continued that line of attack during campaign speeches in Michigan, a swing state that voted for Trump in 2016, and one Biden needed to capture to win the presidency.

In the years since the election, the national press has given little attention to the case since the initial arrests, even though court documents have recast the episode as something more sinister. Instead of a heroic effort by the FBI to safeguard the country from domestic terrorists, it now appears to have been a broad conspiracy by law enforcement to entrap American citizens who held unpopular political views.

Keep reading

THE TIMELINE: How the FBI Thwarted the Investigation into the Hacked Georgia Election Machines and Targeted the Whistleblowers Instead

On Friday, in a Federal Court In Atlanta, Georgia, University of Michigan Professor of Computer Science and Engineering J. Alex Halderman testified in front of Judge Amy Totenberg’s courtroom in the Culling vs. Raffensperger lawsuit on the insecure Dominion voting machines used in Georgia elections since 2020.

As reported earlier, during his testimony, Halderman was able to HACK A DOMINION VOTING MACHINE and change the tabulations in front of U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg and the entire courtroom!

Halderman USED ONLY A PEN TO CHANGE VOTE TOTALS!

His testimony was part of a long-running lawsuit by election integrity activists set as a bench trial.

The plaintiffs seek to remove what they say are insecure voting machines in Georgia in favor of secure paper ballots.

This lawsuit was launched after the 2017 Kennesaw State University election hacks in Georgia.

As we continue to follow this explosive lawsuit on election integrity today The Gateway Pundit looked into the FBI’s role in this operation.

We can finally explain what happened over the years.

Keep reading

Confirmed: It Appears Former FBI DC Supervisor D’Antuono Was Lying to House Investigators About the Number of FBI Operatives Embedded in Crowds on January 6

As reported earlier on Tuesday, The House Judiciary Republicans sent a letter Tuesday that includes transcribed testimony from former Assistant Director-in-Charge of the Washington Field Office (WFO) Steven D’Antuono.

D’Antuono testified that the FBI had numerous confidential human sources (CHS) in the Trump crowd on January 6.

In fact, they had so many FBI operatives in the crowd they had no idea how many were actually there that day!

D’Antuono had quite a record of failures and lies during his time at the FBI.

D’Antuono was the head of the FBI’s Detroit field office as the bureau was investigating an alleged kidnapping attempt against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

As Just the News notes, trial testimony alleges the “plot” wasn’t just investigated but instigated by the FBI, with the jury hearing that the bureau’s informants gave drugs to those who were eventually charged in the plot before recording their conversations and sometimes outnumbered “plotters” during meetings.

The entire plot was hatched, planned, paid for, and executed by paid FBI informants.

The FBI informants pushed the violent plans to kidnap Whitmer. It was all a setup. And D’Antuono was in charge of the office where they ran the operation. He was then later promoted to the DC office before the Jan. 6 protests and riot.

In the letter released on Tuesday, D’Antuono told House investigators that he did not know how many FBI agents had infiltrated the crowd on January 6.

The letter suggested that “the FBI cannot adequately track the activities and operations of its informants, and that it lost control of its CHSs present at the Capitol on January 6,” D’Antuono wrote.

Later in the interview, he told investigators that “only a handful” of FBI informants were in the crowd that day.

For over two years now, The Gateway Pundit has been reporting on the FBI informants and feds who infiltrated the Trump crowds on January 6, 2021.

And we can report – for certain – that Assistant Director-in-Charge of the Washington Field Office (WFO) Steven D’Antuono is lying about the number of FBI operatives and informants in the crowd on January 6th.

Keep reading

Daughter of D.B. Cooper Suspect Calls on FBI to Release Necktie to Clear His Name

The daughter of a man suspected of being D.B. Cooper has called upon the FBI to provide access to the skyjacker’s necktie in the hopes that new DNA analysis of the evidence will clear her father’s name. The surprising development reportedly came about after researcher Eric Ulis made headlines earlier this month with his theory that microscopic metallic particles found on the object could help identify the mysterious individual behind the legendary cold case. He specifically pointed the finger at an individual named Vince Petersen, who worked as an engineer at the only facility that produced the alloy at the time of the skyjacking. As one might imagine, the man’s daughter was not too thrilled when she saw the news that her late father had somehow become a suspect in the Cooper case.

Explaining that she was surprised and dismayed by Ulis’ bold assertion, Julie Dunbar reached out to the researcher to express her considerable skepticism over his hypothesis. “I spoke to Eric about this clip-on tie,” she recalled, “as far as I know, my dad didn’t have one in his wardrobe.” While Dunbar conceded that “anything is possible” and that perhaps “it was something that he kept at work” that was subsequently borrowed by the skyjacker, she flatly dismissed the possibility that her father had anything to do with the 1971 caper. “As far as my dad being DB Cooper himself,” she declared, definitely not.”

Keep reading

FBI arrests Oregon trans ‘Nazi’ who threatened blacks, Jews

The FBI arrested a trans-identified Oregon woman on Friday who allegedly made a series of credible violent threats towards minority groups, including Jews, black people, and immigrants.

Elizabeth Ballesteros West, 56, of Cottage Grove, has been taken into custody and is being held at the Lane County Jail, according to the Oregonian.

Court records show that authorities were first alerted to West in September when she had posted on a transgender women’s support group page on Facebook claiming that she was being bullied by “transphobic” coworkers, and saying that she had reached “the end of my rope.”

West’s social media posts included a vow to carry out acts of violence and included photos of firearms, per the affidavit.

It also reported that West said in a post that she will “have to go out in a blaze of glory” and will “have to do what I have to do and pray for the gods to forgive me.”

Keep reading

FBI Defies Court Order – Refuses to Turn Over Seth Rich Evidence to Attorney

Attorney Ty Clevenger is the bulldog attorney who has been after the DOJ and FBI for years to get to the bottom of the Seth Rich murder.

Clevenger also investigated who supplied the DNC and Podesta emails to the DNC during the 2016 election cycle This was always the key to the Trump-Russia collusion nightmare.  No proof was ever offered up by the fake news legacy media, Democrats, or the intelligence community on this scandal. If Russia did not supply the DNC emails to WikiLeaks then this was more proof that the DOJ’s Russia collusion story was a complete lie used to fool the American public.

After years of denying they had anything related to Seth Rich, the FBI and DOJ were caught lying over and over again.  In September 2023, a judge finally demanded the FBI and DOJ provide all they had regarding Seth Rich to Attorney Clevenger. The FBI responded requesting another 66 years before releasing the information. They wanted it moved out like the JFK assassination reports.

Then in late November, a Federal Judge ruled the FBI must hand over evidence regarding former DNC employee Seth Rich’s murder to Ty Clevenger.

This is big news since one year earlier the FBI was attempting to bury the information on Seth Rich for 66 years.

No media outlet has covered the Seth Rich story as extensively as The Gateway Pundit.

Judge Amos L. Mazzant ruled the FBI must hand over Rich’s personal laptop, work laptop, a DVD, and thumb drive within 14 days.

It’s now been over 40 days since this ruling came down and the lawless Chris Wray FBI has defied the court order.

Keep reading