Tag: fbi

Who Corrupted a Top FBI Spyhunter?

IN THE FINAL days of the Cold War, a young diplomat arrived at the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco. Agents in the FBI’s San Francisco field office kept a close eye on the personnel coming and going from the consulate. The six-story building in one of the city’s toniest neighborhoods long served as a hub of espionage activity. The newly-arrived Soviet diplomat in his twenties, Evgeny Fokin, soon raised suspicions that he was a KGB officer operating under diplomatic cover on his first overseas posting. “I do remember he was an intelligence officer. He was KGB at the time,” says Rick Smith, a retired veteran of the FBI’s counterintelligence squad in San Francisco.

Three decades later, that young diplomat is now at the center of another spy story. This one involves Charles McGonigal, a former senior FBI counterintelligence officer who was indicted last month for taking money illegally from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch with ties to the Kremlin and Russian intelligence services. Fokin was the mysterious “Agent-1” described in court papers, an executive working for Deripaska who slowly corrupted the veteran FBI agent over a three-year period, according to sources and documents reviewed by Rolling Stone.

Arrested last month, McGonigal faces federal charges in New York of violating federal sanctions laws that prohibited him from taking money from Deripaska and laundering those ill-gotten gains. He is also accused in a separate case filed in Washington, D.C., of accepting nearly a quarter of a million dollars in secret payments from a former Albanian intelligence officer, including $80,000 that was handed over gangland-style in a car parked outside a New York City restaurant. “His arrest is a sorry day for the FBI,” a retired senior FBI official tells Rolling Stone. “The bureau has taken a beating the last few years with Trump and others attacking it. His arrest is all we need.” 

The damage to the bureau may go deeper than previously understood. In 2020, McGonigal took part in an Atlantic Council panel discussion titled “How Did Russia’s Security Services Capture the Kremlin?” A better question might be: Did Russia’s security services compromise a top FBI counterintelligence agent, here in America? How was one of the FBI’s top spyhunters so easily ensnared? “And how exposed is the FBI, given that it was Fokin, a suspected Russian spy, who snared him?”

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FBI whistleblower resigns from bureau, warns Congress about dangers of case ‘quota system’

An FBI whistleblower has divulged to Congress that the bureau has created a case quota system that can incentivize agents to pursue frivolous cases or delay action on real crimes to attain statistical goals.

Steve Friend, a special agent and former SWAT team member who blew the whistle on alleged civil liberties violations in the Jan. 6 investigation, told Just the News on Thursday that he resigned from the bureau this week and gave the House Judiciary Committee an extensive interview detailing his concerns about the politicization of criminal cases and the growing manipulation of investigations to attain statistical and budget goals.

Friend said he made the decision to leave the bureau after he had been denied a paycheck for 150 straight days as his security clearance was placed under review after he made protected whistleblower disclosures. The denial of pay, he said, came even though he was never accused formally of any wrongdoing or subjected to any formal disciplinary action.

“The FBI had weaponized the security clearance revocation process in order to essentially try to wait me out financially,” he said in an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “You know, I was in a position where I had some personal savings and was able to survive. But at the end of the day, you know, I’m a married father of two small children. I have to support my family.”

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The FBI’s Most Controversial Surveillance Tool Is Under Threat

AN EXISTENTIAL FIGHT over the US government’s ability to spy on its own citizens is brewing in Congress. And as this fight unfolds, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s biggest foes on Capitol Hill are no longer reformers merely interested in reining in its authority. Many lawmakers, elevated to new heights of power by the recent election, are working to dramatically curtail the methods by which the FBI investigates crime.

New details about the FBI’s failures to comply with restrictions on the use of foreign intelligence for domestic crimes have emerged at a perilous time for the US intelligence community. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the so-called crown jewel of US intelligence, grants the government the ability to intercept the electronic communications of overseas targets who are unprotected by the Fourth Amendment.

That authority is set to expire at the end of the year. But errors in the FBI’s secondary use of the data—the investigation of crimes on US soil—are likely to inflame an already fierce debate over whether law enforcement agents can be trusted with such an invasive tool. 

Central to this tension has been a routine audit by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) national security division and the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI)—America’s “top spy”—which unearthed new examples of the FBI failing to comply with rules limiting access to intelligence ostensibly gathered to protect US national security. Such “errors,” they said, have occurred on a “large number” of occasions.

A report on the audit, only recently declassified, found that in the first half of 2020, FBI personnel unlawfully searched raw FISA data on numerous occasions. In one incident, agents reportedly sought evidence of foreign influence linked to a US lawmaker. In another, an inappropriate search pertained to a local political party. In both cases, these “errors” attributed to a “misunderstanding” of the law, the report says.

At some point between December 2019 and May 2020, FBI personnel conducted searches of FISA data using “only the name of a US congressman,” the report says, a query that investigators later found was “noncompliant” with legal procedures. While some searches were “reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information,” investigators said, they were also “overly broad as constructed.”

In another incident, the FBI ran searches using the “names of a local political party,” even though a connection to foreign intelligence was “not reasonably likely.” The DOJ explained the errors away by saying FBI personnel “misunderstood” the search procedures, adding they were “subsequently reminded of how to correctly apply the query rules.” These are the mistakes that will ultimately serve as ammunition in the coming fight to diminish the FBI’s power.

Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s national security program at New York University School of Law, says that while troubling, the misuse was entirely predictable. “When the government is allowed to access Americans’ private communications without a warrant, that opens the door to surveillance based on race, religion, politics, or other impermissible factors,” she says.

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Fingerprints of Unvaccinated NYC Teachers Flagged to FBI

On February 8, 2023, while arguing on behalf of fired NYC workers who declined covid vaccination, attorney John Bursch stated in open court that unvaccinated teachers in New York City were flagged with problem codes in their personnel files, and when that occurred “their fingerprints are sent with that flag to the FBI and the New York Criminal Justice Services.”

You can listen to Bursch make this statement at the 5:30 mark of the audio recording of the court proceeding.

The source of this information is Betsy Combier, who wrote an affidavit (see .pdf below) in the Kane v. de Blasio case where she stated unvaccinated teachers were given a “problem code” label that was “then sent to the national databases at both the Federal Bureau of Investigation” (FBI) and the Department of Justice (DOJ).

In federal court on February 8th attorney Susan Paulson, who was defending NYC, stated that educators fired for declining covid vaccination were not removed for misconduct, but rather for not meeting a requirement for employment.

If there was no misconduct, why are unvaccinated educators’ fingerprints sent to the FBI?

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FBI whistleblower raises fresh concerns about bank record mining, undercover agents in J6 probe

Arecently retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst told Congress in a whistleblower disclosure that agents in Boston were improperly pressured by Washington to open criminal cases on 140 people who had simply taken a bus ride to the Jan. 6 rally in Washington. The agents refused because there was no evidence the attendees engaged in any criminality, the whistleblower said.

George Hill’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee also raised new civil liberty concerns about the FBI’s Jan. 6 probe, including whether the Bureau mined Americans’ bank records without court authority and whether the agency possesses video footage it is refusing to release because it identifies undercover agents and human sources who were at the U.S. Capitol that fateful day.

Hill, a military veteran and longtime analyst for the National Security Agency (NSA) and FBI who retired last year from the Bureau’s Boston field office, told Just the News on Wednesday night that he disclosed concerns earlier this week to the House Judiciary Committee during a transcribed deposition, including that the Bureau analyzed banking data without evidence of a crime — simply to find Americans who traveled to Washington around the time of Jan. 6 or who owned a gun.

Hill said supervisors in the Washington field office pressured to open cases, first on seven individuals who came up in a sweep of bank records provided by Bank of America, and then on the larger group of 140 Americans who paid to take bus rides to President Donald Trump’s now infamous rally on Jan. 6, 2021, the day a mob overran police lines and flooded into the Capitol as Congress met to certify the 2020 election results. He credited his supervisors in Boston for resisting the pressure.

“There’s no evidence of a crime being committed here,” he said during a wide-ranging interview on the “Just the News, No Noise” television show. “We cannot open up preliminary investigations on someone for using a financial instrument in the District. And so they pushed back, and Boston did not take any action on those names.”

Hill also said the Washington field office, which led the Jan. 6 probe, did not react well to the refusal, escalating up the chain of command, but at each step of the process the Boston office held its ground. “Getting on a bus and participating in a political rally is not predication for a crime or a preliminary investigation,” he said, explaining why Boston resisted.

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Newlywed Republican councilwoman, 30, was shot ‘SEVEN TIMES in the face as she drove her SUV outside her New Jersey home’ – as FBI investigates ‘personal attack’

FBI agents are now investigating after a Republican councilwoman was ‘shot in the face seven times’ while driving her SUV home – as Governor Phil Murphy said it was ‘not politically motivated’.

Eunice Dwumfour, 30, was shot outside of her home in Sayreville, New Jersey on Wednesday night, with friends calling it a ‘targeted and personal attack’.

According to friends, the mother-of-one was shot seven times in the face and seven times in the body.

She crashed her SUV with her slumped over the wheel, with horrified neighbors hearing multiple gunshots and then a crash.

Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office and Sayreville Police are leading the investigation, with the FBI now becoming ‘involved’ in the investigation.

Dwumfour was found inside of her white Nissan SUV with multiple gunshot wounds on Samuel Circle just before 7.30pm.

She recently married a pastor who lives in Nigeria, just before Thanksgiving, and lived in the apartment with her 12-year-old daughter from a previous relationship.

Friend and Pastor Nelia Rodriguez told The Ingraham Angle that she believes the incident was a ‘personal attack’.

She added: ‘We believe it [was] very personal because she was shot seven times in the face and another seven shots were hitting everywhere else.

‘So for somebody to get so close to somebody and shoot them so many times, it has to be personal.’

The Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office said the investigation into Dwumfour’s death is ongoing and officials have not released a motive or any information about a suspect.

There have been no arrested in the case, with officials seen searching a wooded area near her home after witnesses claimed they saw a man run off in that direction after the shooting.

Police received a tip that the murder weapon had been dumped in the area, so brought in police dogs to search the area.

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Planned New FBI HQ Is Twice the Size of the Pentagon

The federal government is proceeding with plans to build a new FBI headquarters complex twice the size of the Pentagon building. 

Riveted into the colossal new project are woke regulations to ensure that the FBI center will comply with diversity, equity, LGBTQ+, and climate change political goals. 

The plan, unveiled last September, has received little attention. For years the FBI has sought to vacate its present headquarters, a brutalist concrete bunker on stilts and occupying two city blocks between the White House and the Capitol. 

Plans for the new FBI headquarters specify that it will be built on one of three sites in suburban Virginia and Maryland. Those sites are large parcels of 58, 61, and 80 acres. 

That means, at minimum, the new FBI headquarters complex would be twice the size of the Pentagon building. Covering about 29 acres plus a five-acre courtyard, the Pentagon, until recently, was the largest office building on earth.   

The Kremlin in Moscow —a walled fortress containing the administrative offices of the Russian central government, the official presidential residence, massive auditoriums, an arsenal, a museum, four palaces, three cathedrals and several churches—is just over 66 acres in area. 

The General Services Administration, which administers federal properties, has selected the three sites. The 58-acre property in Springfield, Virginia, GSA says, is “federally owned land under the jurisdiction, custody, and control of GSA.” 

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ABC Journalist Who Went Missing Last April After FBI Seized Classified Documents From His Laptop Arrested for Transporting Child Pornography

A former ABC journalist who went missing after the FBI raided his home and seized his laptop has been arrested for transporting child pornography.

As reported last year, Emmy-winning investigative journalist James Meek went missing after the FBI raided his Virginia home and seized classified information from his laptop in April 2022.

James Gordon Meek, 52, went missing after the feds raided his Arlington penthouse apartment, the Rolling Stone reported.

Meek produced the Hulu documentary “3212 Unredacted” which detailed the 2017 Pentagon coverup of the deaths of US special forces in Niger.

The “lightning raid” was conducted after a search warrant was approved by a federal magistrate judge in the Virginia Eastern District Court, Rolling Stone reported.

“If agents got hold of Meek’s records, the move would have had to have been approved by US Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco.” The New York Post reported.

Meek’s attorneys lashed out at the US government for leaking information to Rolling Stone.

“The allegations in your inquiry are troubling for a different reason: They appear to come from a source inside the government,” Meek’s attorney Eugene Gorokhov told Rolling Stone. “It is highly inappropriate, and illegal, for individuals in the government to leak information about an ongoing investigation.”

“We hope that the DOJ promptly investigates the source of this leak.”

Meek’s last public statement was in the form of a tweet on April 27, 2022 – His colleagues at ABC said Meek “fell off the face of the earth.”

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Is the FBI secretly running dark web terrorist recruitment?

A high-level conspiracy of silence surrounding a US terrorism prosecution raises serious questions over whether the FBI possesses technological means to bypass dark web user anonymity, or alternatively manages extremist group recruitment sites in secret, in order to entrap unsuspecting visitors.

US citizen Muhammed Momtaz Al-Azhari was charged in May 2020 with attempting to provide material support to ISIS. He came to the attention of the FBI due to a series of visits he made to a dark web site, which hosts “unofficial propaganda and photographs related to ISIS” in May 2019.

The Bureau pinpointed specific pages of the site Al-Azhari perused including sections on making donations, ISIS media assets, photos and videos, and stories of military operations allegedly conducted by ISIS fighters in Iraq, Syria, and Nigeria. These actions were linked to him directly by uncovering his IP address, and therefore his identity and location.

Al-Azhari accessed the site via the TOR browser, which theoretically provides anonymity to users, and makes it difficult if not impossible for a site’s owner or external prying eyes to track visitor IPs. A recent court filing by Al-Azhari’s lawyers reveals that’s precisely what the FBI did though and exactly how they achieved this is being withheld by government decree. 

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Russian oligarch keeps showing up in the most inconvenient places for FBI, Washington elites

The bombshell indictments this week alleging that a former senior FBI counterintelligence agent had an inappropriate financial relationship with Oleg Deripaska focused fresh light on an uncomfortable truth: Washington elites have simultaneously demonized and cozied up to the controversial Russian oligarch over the last two decades.

Deripaska, a protégé of Russian president Vladimir Putin and once owner of the country’s largest aluminum company Rusal, has been courted over the years by a prominent Democrat senator seeking help from his lawyer and FBI agents seeking dirt on Donald Trump, enlisted by the bureau to spend his own money to find a missing FBI agent in Iran and lured into hiring Christopher Steele for a legal project before the former MI-6 agent penned his famous dossier.

Even Hunter Biden once crafted a plan to make money off Deripaska by seeking a handsome $80,000 fee to dig up dirt on the Russian businessman for an American aluminum company.

The efforts to court, cajole and cash in on Deripaska occurred at the same time the U.S. government was casting the Russian as a potentially nefarious actor who should be kept from U.S. shores.

In the early 2000s, it was the State Department alleging, with scant public evidence, that the Russian was tied to organized crime or brutal killings. In 2016, he became a focal point of the FBI efforts to prove Donald Trump colluded with Russia to hijack the 2016 election, an allegation that proved spurious. And in 2018, he was sanctioned by the Treasury Department as an ally of Putin and Russian influence campaigns and later indicted by the Justice Department.

Throughout the saga, Deripaska has always maintained his innocence, while his accusers have sent a tantalizing mixed message by courting his help at the same time they were vilifying him.

In a 2019 videotaped interview with this reporter for The Hill newspaper, Deripaska said his on-again-off-again relationship with the American government was symbolic of the larger drifting apart of Russia and the United States as allies after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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