Tag: fbi

FBI Made ‘Inappropriate Use’ of Foreign Surveillance Program To Spy on Americans

A White House advisory board has recommended that Congress place new restrictions on the FBI’s access to a foreign surveillance tool to prevent the bureau from using it to spy on Americans’ electronic communications.

That surveillance program—authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—was intended to track foreign spies and potential terrorists but has predictably morphed into a way for law enforcement agencies to get a warrantless peek at Americans’ phone records, emails, and other electronic communications. In the report published Monday, the White House’s Intelligence Advisory Board said the FBI’s use of the databases created by Section 702 should be limited to investigations dealing with foreign intelligence—the same standard that is used at the other intelligence agencies with access to that data.

“FBI’s use of Section 702 should be limited to foreign intelligence purposes only and FBI personnel should receive additional training on what foreign intelligence entails,” the report recommends. The report says the FBI has made “inappropriate use of Section 702 authorities, specifically U.S. person queries.”

While the full scope of Section 702 data collection remains unknown, there’s no doubt about the FBI’s aggressive use of the database. In 2021, for example, the FBI ran more than 3.3 million queries through the Section 702 database, according to a government transparency report. Separately, a 2021 report from the secret federal court responsible for adjudicating FISA-related matters documented 40 instances in which the FBI accessed surveillance data as part of investigations into a host of purely domestic crimes, including health care fraud and public corruption.

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Feds fight Nxivm sex cult leader Keith Raniere’s bid at new trial on claims FBI planted child porn on his computer

Federal prosecutors slammed convicted Nxivm sex cult leader Keith Raniere’s bid for a new trial — denouncing his claim that he has “newly discovered evidence” that proves the FBI planted evidence on his computer.

In a response filed Friday in Brooklyn federal court, prosecutors wrote that Raniere’s third attempt at securing a new trial — like his first two — was “entirely without merit,” adding that the motion should be denied as “untimely, unfounded, legally unsupported, and contrary to the evidence adduced at trial.”

When the 62-year-old sicko — who is serving a 120-year sex trafficking sentence — filed for a new trial in May 2022, he claimed he had unearthed evidence showing the government “manufactured child pornography and planted it on a computer hard drive to tie it to him,” according to court papers.

Raniere’s lawyers also said the feds “falsified, fabricated, and manipulated all the key evidence it used” to convict him of child exploitation and child porn.

Prosecutors, in the Friday filing, detailed the evidence the FBI found in Raniere’s Halfmoon, NY, residence — including nude photos of his first sex slave, Camila, who was around 15 years-old at the time.

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Judge Reveals the FBI Illegally Spied on a U.S. Senator, FBI Gives Astonishing Response

I’d say “Another day, another example of the FBI being completely out of control,” but these stories happen multiple times a day at this point so I guess it’s time to change the saying to “Another hour, another example of the FBI being completely out of control.”

According to a recently released court opinion, FBI officials illegally accessed a foreign intelligence database to search for information on a U.S. Senator, a state senator, and a state-level judge.

According to the opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, an analyst with the FBI conducted four searches of the intelligence database using the last names of a U.S. Senator and state senator in June of 2022 — both of whom were not named in the filing.

The analyst “had information that a specific foreign intelligence service was targeting” both legislators, but a review of the search by the Justice Department’s National Security Division determined that the search still didn’t meet the proper standards because they weren’t sufficiently tailored.

In a separate instance last October, an FBI specialist ran a search of the 702 database using the social security number of a state judge who “had complained to FBI about alleged civil rights violations perpetrated by a municipal chief of police,” the filing says, that also didn’t meet sufficient standards.

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The FBI Told Twitter The Hunter Biden Laptop Story Was Real The Day The Story Broke, New Testimony Shows

In newly unveiled testimony, Laura Dehmlow, section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), disclosed that the FBI was aware of the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop as early as 2019. However, the Bureau declined to affirm its legitimacy to major tech companies during the 2020 election period.

That was already known. But it turns out that on the day the New York Post broke its report about the laptop, the FBI confirmed its validity to Twitter, only to retract their statement with a hasty “no further comment” response. From that point forward, the Bureau withheld comment on the laptop’s veracity to other tech giants, leading to widespread confusion and speculation ahead of the 2020 election.

According to a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Dehmlow revealed in her testimony that FBI staff, who had been warning social media platforms of potential Russian interference via a “hack and leak” operation prior to the 2020 election, were aware that the Hunter Biden laptop story was not an instance of Russian disinformation.

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FBI Colludes with Ukrainian Intel to Censor Americans under Biden Misinformation Campaign

In the most recently exposed Biden administration scheme to combat misinformation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) colluded with a compromised Ukrainian intelligence agency to censor the speech of Americans. The federal agency responsible for protecting the nation against terrorists, violent street gangs and serial killers joined forces with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which is widely known to be infiltrated by Russian-aligned forces, to take down the authentic social media accounts of Americans. This includes a verified U.S. State Department profile and those belonging to American journalists. Interestingly, accounts targeted for removal by the SBU and FBI criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin and expressed pro-Ukrainian views.

Details of the illicit operation are outlined in a new congressional report made public this week by the House Judiciary Committee. The document also exposes how the FBI offered Facebook and Instagram legal cover to delete social media accounts singled out by the SBU. The two agencies routinely sent the popular social media platforms spreadsheets and other documents identifying thousands of profiles to eliminate. “Regardless of its intended purpose in endorsing the SBU’s requests, the FBI had no legal justification for facilitating the censorship of Americans’ protected speech on social media,” the report states. “In contrast to the Biden Administration’s stated support for Ukraine, the FBI, on behalf of the SBU, flagged Americans’ accounts and posts that were critical of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

The report says that the FBI also delivered censorship orders from the SBU to Google and YouTube and reveals that a senior cybersecurity employee at Google said the company was “deluged with various requests” for content removal after Russia invaded Ukraine. The primary liaison between the FBI and Silicon Valley is Elvis Chan, a San Francisco-based assistant special agent in charge of the division’s cyber branch. The congressional probe highlights the FBI’s unconstitutional role in enabling the SBU’s censorship regime and raises grave concerns about the agency’s credibility and competence as the nation’s premier law enforcement organization. “Put simply, the FBI worked with and on behalf of a foreign intelligence agency—widely known to be compromised by Moscow at the time—and directly abetted efforts to censor Americans engaging in protected speech,” the report says. “As a result, the FBI agents’ actions had the potential to render substantial aid to the Kremlin’s war effort.”

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The FBI raided a notable journalist’s home. Rolling Stone didn’t tell readers why

Last Oct. 18, Rolling Stone served up a foreboding scoop: The FBI had raided the home of a renowned journalist at the top of his game months earlier, and he had disappeared from public view.

It should have been a coup. Instead, acrimony inside the newsroom over how that scoop was edited led to accusations that the magazine’s brash leader pulled punches in overseeing coverage of someone he knew. The reporter who wrote the story, enraged, accepted a position at a sister publication two months later. And her complaints prompted a senior attorney for the magazine’s parent company to review what happened.

FBI raids on journalists are rare. News organizations often respond with formal protests and legal challenges. Under a 2021 Justice Department policy, raids, subpoenas and other compulsory means of obtaining materials from reporters are banned for any investigation of matters related to their journalism. The policy became the basis for a significant shift in the stance of the Justice Department toward the press.

The Rolling Stone story created a stir. Reporter Tatiana Siegel stated that the April 22 raid was “quite possibly, the first” carried out by the Biden administration on a journalist.

In this case, the journalist was ABC News national security producer James Gordon Meek. A former investigator for the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, Meek had been with ABC News since 2013. He also was a producer of 3212 Un-Redacted, an investigative documentary that streamed on Hulu.

As published, the Rolling Stone article’s first two paragraphs lionized Meek’s record and swashbuckling style.

“Meek appears to be on the wrong side of the national-security apparatus,” it stated.

As the story noted, Siegel’s sources told her “federal agents allegedly found classified information on Meek’s laptop during their raid.” Siegel reported that Meek left his job at ABC after the raid; a publishing contract with Simon & Schuster evaporated.

As edited by Rolling Stone Editor-in-Chief Noah Shachtman, however, the article omitted a key fact that Siegel initially intended to include: Siegel had learned from her sources that Meek had been raided as part of a federal investigation into images of child sex abuse, something not publicly revealed until last month.

Why did Rolling Stone suggest Meek was targeted for his coverage of national security, rather than something unrelated to his journalism?

Neither Siegel nor Shachtman would comment for this story. This article is based on a review of some contemporaneous communications and also interviews with 10 people with knowledge of incidents described here, including several individuals at Rolling Stone, as well as people at ABC and federal law enforcement agencies.

Each asked not to be named because they were not authorized to disclose these matters publicly.

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FBI to exhume body of woman featured on Netflix series ‘The Keepers’

The FBI will exhume the body of a woman whose mysterious death was detailed in Netflix’s true-crime series “The Keepers,” as law enforcement officials explore a potential link with the cold case murder of a Baltimore nun. 

“The Keepers” investigated the unsolved murder of Sister Catherine Cesnik, a nun and Baltimore high school teacher, and allegations of sexual abuse by an influential Baltimore priest named Father Joseph Maskell in the 1960s. 

In November 1969, before Cesnik seemingly vanished, Joyce Malecki was strangled, stabbed and found submerged in a body of water at Fort Meade.

Malecki’s body will be exhumed from Loudon Park Cemetery in Baltimore with her family’s permission as the FBI explores an unspecified lead possibly connecting the two cases, Kurt Wolfgang, executive director of Maryland Crime Victims’ Resource Center, confirmed to news outlets. 

“The FBI gave us no indication other than to say the purpose of the exhumation is to collect evidence,” Wolfgang told WBAL-TV. “Our best speculation is that they may be looking for DNA evidence to match it up with a potential suspect they may already have.”

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N.C. Proud Boys had a liability — a member who was a sex offender, white supremacist and fed

Michael Alan Jones, a white supremacist, convicted sex offender and FBI informant, was a vetted member of the Charlotte, N.C., Proud Boys chapter, Raw Story has learned.

The revelation means that the Proud Boys — an extremist group that has loudly positioned itself as a guardian of public morality by protesting drag shows and other LGBTQ events — failed to properly vet a former member who had been convicted of a sex offense for having sex with a minor.

As Raw Story has previously reported, Jones recruited for the white supremacist terror network the Base, attended rallies with the more public facing white supremacist group Patriot Front, and fought with the police alongside the Proud Boys at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Following a traffic stop in upstate New York, Jones pleaded guilty in December to being a felon in possession of a gun. He is currently awaiting sentencing.

While Jones’ involvement by the Proud Boys has been previously reported, his one-time membership in the Charlotte chapter was confirmed last month during an acrimonious public spat on the social media app Telegram as a mutinous faction pushed aside the chapter’s one-time president.

Joshua Ballinger, the one-time president of the Charlotte Proud Boys chapter, referenced Jones by his nickname “Strategian” during a marathon exchange of video chats, audio chats and texts that ran up to 250 comments on June 13.

“Oh, are you talking about Strategian — the dude that was in f—ing Charlotte while you were in Charlotte and went through the same vetting that you went through, I guess?” Ballinger said. “Are you talking about that guy? That guy that was 19 and was sleeping with a 17-year-old? Even though, yeah, it is illegal and he shouldn’t have been doing it and that’s f—ing, to me, gross, but come on, man, you’re pulling a stretch.”

As previously reported by Raw Story, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police responded to a call for service at a house in Charlotte where Jones was staying in an attempt to locate a 17-year-old girl who was listed as a missing person. During the visit to the house, the police determined that the girl, described in the incident report as “mentally handicapped,” had been assaulted, while classifying the offense as “forcible rape.” The case was cleared because the victim chose not to prosecute.

While downplaying the alleged rape, Ballinger also misstated Jones’ age. He was 24 at the time of the incident.

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Not just public schools: Ohio PRIVATE school reports mothers to FBI for questioning leftist curriculum

Amy Gonzalez and Andrea Gross are suing Columbus Academy in Ohio for launching a retaliation campaign against them following complaints they made about the private school’s leftist curriculum.

According to reports, Columbus Academy reported Gonzalez and Gross to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), calling them “dangerous to the health and wellbeing of the entire Academy community. Administrators also allegedly attempted to destroy the two mothers’ reputation out of spite.

Filed on June 12, the lawsuit claims Columbus Academy overreacted to questions the two women had about critical race theory (CRT) concepts being embedded into their children’s curriculum, which they believe is “indoctrination.”

“And so, when I say an overreaction, I mean an overreaction of calling the police on us, alerting almost 900 faculty members that they had alerted the FBI that we were dangerous,” Gross told Fox News Digital.

“Just things that were so far beyond the pale that it would lead one to ask why? Why is the reaction so extreme?”

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FBI Make-Work Entrapment Schemes: Creating Criminals in Order to Arrest Them

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.

Rather, we are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

Case in point: the FBI.

The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.

Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work.

Clearly, this is not a government agency that appears to understand, let alone respect, the limits of the Constitution.

Indeed, this same government agency has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting.

Basically, it works like this: in order to justify their crime-fighting superpowers, the FBI manufactures criminals by targeting vulnerable individuals and feeding them anti-government propaganda; then, undercover agents and informants equip the targeted individuals with the training and resources to challenge what they’ve been indoctrinated into believing is government corruption; and finally, the FBI arrests the targeted individuals for engaging in anti-government, terrorist activities.

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