Tag: fbi

FBI Follies: Bureau secretly probed Trump as a Russian asset for firing Comey: declassified memos

he FBI opened a criminal probe specifically targeting Donald Trump in May 2017, alleging the newly elected president may have been acting as a Russian asset when he fired then-Director James Comey even though the bureau’s own evidence overwhelmingly showed at the time there was no collusion with the Kremlin.

Internal memos newly declassified by the White House show the investigation – codenamed “Oxferd Comma” – was launched in the immediate aftermath of Comey’s May 9, 2017, firing and was predicated on an allegation that previously released memos show the bureau’s own agents had mostly dismissed.

“The FBI is opening a full investigation based on an articulable factual basis that reasonably indicates that President Donald J. Trump may be or has been, wittingly or unwittingly, involved in activities for or on behalf of the Government of the Russian Federation which may constitute violations of federal criminal law or threats to the national security of the United States,” the electronic communication opening the probe on May 16, 2017, stated.

Goal of the investigation was to determine if Trump was directed by or controlled by the Russian Federation 

“The goal of the investigation is to determine if President Trump is or was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with, the Russian Federation in a manner constituting a threat to the national security of the United States and/or a violation of federal criminal statutes,” it added. “In addition, this investigation will also seek to determine whether President Trump and others yet to be named obstructed and/or conspiracy to obstruct any associated FBI investigation.”

OXFERD COMMA – Opening EC – redacted and declassified by FBI 7.30.26 (2).pdf

The memo, written by the FBI’s counterintelligence division and approved by then-FBI General Counsel James Baker and then-Assistant Director for Counterintelligence William Priestap, made clear the concerns about Russian influence and obstruction included Comey’s firing, in part because of the public explanations Trump gave for the termination.

“This alternative explanation can be reasonably read to imply that the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation was a factor in President Trump’s decision to terminate Comey,” the memo stated.

Both the Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein were advised that the probe had been launched, the memos show.

OXFERD COMMA – FBI Informs DOJ – redacted and declassified by FBI 7.30.26.pdf

The FBI marked the investigation as a “sensitive investigative matter” and declared it was “the least intrusive method to address the serious national security risk posed by the activities alleged.”

But that decision proved anything but nonintrusive: it prompted the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller by Rosenstein and a nearly two-year probe that hampered the start of the Trump presidency even though Mueller’s team, like the FBI before it, was unable to substantiate any collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election.

MuellerReportFinal.pdf

A subsequent investigation by Special Counsel John Durham – released by the Biden Justice Department in 2023 – concluded there was no basis for the FBI to even open the original Crossfire Hurricane investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion.

durhamreport (1).pdf

The newly declassified Oxferd Comma memos show the case was closed on April 9, 2019, a few weeks after Mueller’s probe was sunset with a final report and no charges against Trump.

“The Special Counsel provided the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining his prosecution and declination decisions,” the closing memo noted.

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Former FBI Agent Charged With Stealing Nearly $1 Million In Crypto, Asked ChatGPT How To Hide It

A supervising U.S. FBI agent who worked in intelligence at the national headquarters has been arrested and accused in a federal court filing of stealing more than $1 million in cryptocurrency.

The high-level special agent, identified as Patrick Steven Yarmoch, allegedly turned himself in to agency colleagues, reporting that he dug crypto keys from FBI systems to make as many as a dozen transfers to himself from accounts tied to foreign individuals he’d investigated, according to an August 1 account filed with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

“During the afternoon of July 28, 2026, Yaroch contacted DOJ Employee 1 via Signal and requested to meet to discuss personal matters,” prosecutors said in the complaint.

“Upon meeting DOJ Employee 1 at FBI headquarters, Yaroch immediately started to break down as he told his story.”

Yarmoch — who held a “top secret” security clearance — had worked in counterintelligence, specifically with an investigative unit that focused on an unnamed “adversary nation,” according to the court filing, which noted he was suspended for a couple of days before being fired and arrested on July 31.

The resident of Ashburn, Virginia, had worked as a supervisory special agent at FBI headquarters in Washington, specifically in its counterintelligence and espionage division. He’d previously worked for years out of Boston, where he’d been in a national-security unit investigating the adversary nation referenced in the court filing.

In handling the digital assets, Yarmoch was said to use accounts with Kraken and also Suilend, the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem for the Sui blockchain, via a Slush wallet.

The FBI searches of his computer and phone records revealed some of his recent questions to AI apps, including, “If you had a bucket of money (around $1 million) and you wanted to leave the USA and become a resident or citizen of an EU country, what would you do?”

To which the app allegedly recommended Portugal as a favored destination.

Investigators also located travel plans for Yarmoch and his family to go to Portugal next month, and located the power of attorney forms for Portugal.

“Yaroch stated he was not planning to funnel money into Portugal,” the complaint said.

“Yaroch told FBI WF Agents that his family had a trip planned to Portugal in September 2026 to meet friends. Yaroch realized he might not be able to attend the trip but stated he hoped his wife and child would still go on the trip.”

Later searches included whether Americans need a visa when connecting through Turkey and help drafting a follow-up email about a job opportunity and life in Greece.

He was also said to take recent trips to Germany, and Grenada that he hadn’t reported internally, in violation of FBI rules.

Yarmoch was placed in detention in Alexandria, Virginia.

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FBI Pressured U.S. Customs to Ditch Plan to Question Key Fauci Ally on Return Trip From Wuhan

The FBI intervened to prevent U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents from questioning “virus hunter” Peter Daszak, Ph.D., on a return trip from Wuhan, China, according to documents released this week by Sen. Rand Paul. Three days before Daszak was scheduled to arrive in New York, a CBP Joint Terrorism Task Force liaison wrote, “Please be advised FBI New York requested we do not stop the subject.”

The FBI intervened to prevent U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents from questioning “virus hunter” Peter Daszak, Ph.D., on a return trip from Wuhan, China, according to documents released this week by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

The documents show that in February 2021, Daszak, a key ally to Dr. Anthony Fauci and then-president of the EcoHealth Alliance, traveled to Wuhan as part of a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

CBP planned to stop and question Daszak on his return to the U.S. that month. But in an email dated Feb. 2, 2021 — three days before Daszak was scheduled to arrive in New York — a CBP Joint Terrorism Task Force liaison wrote, “Please be advised FBI New York requested we do not stop the subject.”

The CBP Tactical Terrorism Response Team was prepared to question Daszak about the business he conducted in China, his contacts at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and whether he collected or was carrying any samples of viruses or other pathogens.

One document states that CBP viewed Daszak as “an extremely high person of interest” due to his longstanding ties with the Wuhan laboratory.

A Jan. 11, 2021, CBP email flagged Daszak’s participation in the WHO’s team investigating the pandemic’s origins in Wuhan as a potential “conflict of interest.”

A Feb. 2, 2021, email noted that much of the funding Daszak was receiving was “put toward gain of function research.”

Notably, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security email contained within the documents, which provided background information on Daszak’s research activity, referenced an article The Defender published in January 2021.

Paul released the documents as part of his ongoing congressional investigation into the origins of COVID-19. In a post on X earlier this week, he said the documents challenge the narrative that a lab leak was implausible.

“The American people can finally judge the evidence for themselves,” Paul wrote.

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Verizon Blames ‘Human Error’ For Burying A Jack Smith Subpoena From Congress

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and fifteen colleagues sent a letter to Verizon on Thursday demanding the telecom giant explain how a 2023 grand jury subpoena tied to Jack Smith’s “Arctic Frost” investigation vanished from its own paperwork for more than two years – only to resurface after the company chalked the omission up to “human error.”

The letter, addressed to Verizon CEO Dan Schulman, is the latest turn in Grassley’s monthslong excavation of Arctic Frost – the Biden-era FBI/DOJ probe-turned-Trump-prosecution that has already produced a House criminal referral for Smith himself, revelations that his team accessed the actual text messages of 44 lawmakers, and now a fight over what one of the country’s largest phone companies knew and sat on.

What Subpoena?

Back in October 2023, Grassley asked Verizon to search its files for every DOJ or federal law enforcement request touching Senate devices between January 2016 and October 2023, part of his long-running Crossfire Hurricane oversight. Verizon wrote back that it generally keeps legal process on file for four years and had no records predating October 2019.

What it didn’t mention: a May 25, 2023 grand jury subpoena issued by Smith’s Arctic Frost team for senators’ phone toll records, including two numbers belonging to the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms.

Congress didn’t learn the subpoena existed until 2025, when Verizon told Grassley’s office the 2023 omission came down to “human error.” Grassley isn’t satisfied with that. His new letter wants to know whether Verizon actually found the subpoena during its 2023 search and stayed quiet, or genuinely missed a live federal legal demand sitting in its own compliance files for two years.

Two of the numbers swept up in that May 2023 subpoena weren’t just any senators’ lines – they belonged to the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms. Under a contract Verizon signed with the Senate in May 2022, that’s supposed to trigger automatic notice to the SAA any time a Senate device or line gets subpoenaed. Grassley’s letter effectively asks how a contractually mandated notification simply never happened.

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Minority Report: FBI Seeks AI for Political Watch List

The FBI office in charge of maintaining the terrorist watch list is seeking an artificial intelligence system for pre-crime policing, according to procurement documents obtained by Reason. The request for information for vendors, posted by the FBI’s procurement division in March, solicits potential bidders for a project that would supercharge the Threat Screening Center (TSC) with new predictive AI capabilities—just as its focus moves from Islamist terrorism to domestic dissent.

“The solution must leverage existing enterprise datasets that include enriched or enhanced data elements with documented source attribution to develop predictive models. When new data is ingested, the system must analyze similarity, pattern alignment, and attribute correlation against existing records to predict where additional relevant information may be derived across federated systems,” the document reads, listing “Predictive Modeling Using Enhanced Data with Traceable Lineage” as one of six requirements. In other words, the TSC wants to use AI to help predict who might be a terrorist.

The FBI declined Reason‘s request for comment.

The TSC, originally called the Terrorist Screening Center, was founded in 2003. President George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Presidential Directive-6 ordered the FBI to combine all existing government terrorist watch lists into one center with a 24/7 staff on call to respond to queries from other law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Most of the hundreds of thousands of names on the TSC watch list are foreign citizens believed to be tied to jihadist organizations, with fewer than 10,000 Americans on the list at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term.

But the second Trump administration has renamed the TSC to focus on broadly defined “threats,” and oriented it toward groups the administration deems subversive—a change that has received little media coverage. Last year, the White House published National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), which instructed the entire national security apparatus to focus on incredibly broad threats, including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity;…extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The FBI’s procurement request for predictive AI explicitly mentions NSPM-7, although the reference is likely connected to a 2017 directive of the same name that expanded intelligence sharing between federal agencies about watch-listed people and groups. Nonetheless, the TSC is actively involved in carrying out the mandates of the more recent NSPM-7: “TSC also supports law enforcement and other communities at the federal, state, local, tribal, and international partners as established by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 6 and more recently, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7,” the document reads. “To help carry out its mission, the TSC requires enhanced technical solutions that will assist its operational staff by providing automation of time-intensive, repeatable manual tasks entailing large volumes of data across multiple domains.”

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Newsom’s Wife Wiretapped in Sprawling Corruption Probe

Investigators have extensive wiretap evidence and may soon charge several individuals in a sprawling corruption probe involving Gavin Newsom and his wife Jennifer Newsom.

It was reported earlier this month that the FBI used a Democrat insider as an informant to infiltrate Governor Gavin Newsom’s inner circle before the corruption probe expanded into the governor and his wife Jennifer Newsom.

Recall that Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, was indicted on federal wire fraud charges last year.

Last month, Newsom fumed as he announced the corruption probe had expanded, and he and his wife are now under investigation.

Newsom said federal agents have contacted people and organizations close to him and his wife, Jennifer Newsom.

“Today, my wife and I joined Donald Trump’s hit list. He has directed his Department of Justice to investigate us. They have not found a crime – they are simply trying to find one,” Newsom said in a video posted to X last month.

“If he can’t intimidate me, he’ll go after the mother of our children,” Newsom said.

People close to the Newsoms have been subpoenaed for records, according to the governor.

According to Semafor, there are several investigations related to Newsom and they are focused on Jennifer Newsom’s taxes (+ his chief of staff).

Contrary to Newsom’s claims, the investigations did not originate from main DOJ in DC, but are out of Sacramento and involve whistleblowers, Semafor reported.

Earlier this month, the New York Post reported that Democrat insider Alexis Podesta wore a wire and recorded conversations during the corruption probe into Dana Williamson.

The investigation is much bigger than previously reported.

According to award winning reporter Adam Housley, investigators have extensive wiretap evidence… and additional people are implicated beyond those publicly known.

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Feds Flagged Daszak As ‘An Extremely High Person Of Interest’ – Then The FBI Told Them To Stand Down

Customs officers spent three days building a border examination for the man at the center of the COVID origins fight – until Biden’s FBI put a stop to it with a single email. 

On February 2, 2021, a national targeting security specialist at U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center circulated a referral to colleagues across the agency. The subject was Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, scheduled to land at John F. Kennedy International Airport three days later aboard Qatar Airways flight 701 from Doha, arriving 2:25 p.m. He was returning from the World Health Organization’s mission to Wuhan investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

The referral asked that Daszak be considered for a Tactical Terrorism Response Team examination – a secondary inspection that can include questioning and a review of electronic devices. Which, now we know, never happened.

Senator Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released the underlying records Monday. They show CBP flagged Daszak as “an extremely high person of interest,” built out a formal targeting event, and then stood down two days before his flight at the request of the FBI’s New York Field Office.

What The Targeting Package Says

According to the materials, officers noted Daszak’s affiliation with Zhengli Shi – the WIV virologist known as “Bat Woman” – and that EcoHealth and Daszak had been working with her for more than fifteen years. They listed him as principal investigator on two NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases grants: 1U01AI151797-01, “Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Viruses Emergence in EID Hotspots of Southeast Asia,” and 2R01AI110964-06, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” running June 2014 through June 2024. A search of the latter grant, the officers wrote, returned 19 publications, many authored by Shi – who listed the grant on her own resume despite not appearing as a principal investigator on it.

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Days after Biden inauguration, FBI shielded Wuhan lab collaborator from investigation after China trip

Joe Biden’s presidency began and ended with the shielding of individuals linked to decades’ worth of dangerous gain-of-function experiments.

Biden concluded his presidency by issuing former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci a blanket pardon, going back all the way to Jan. 1, 2014 — around the time the Obama administration supposedly halted funding for gain-of-function research that makes pathogens more deadly and/or more transmissible.

Years earlier — days after the geriatric Democrat was sworn in as president and at the height of the COVID pandemic — the Biden FBI requested special treatment for Peter Daszak, the disgraced British zoologist who funneled American funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

According to documents released on Monday by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the National Targeting Center — a division of U.S. Customs and Border Protection responsible for catching travelers and detecting cargo that threaten American security — alerted other groups within the Department of Homeland Security to Daszak’s planned trip from Qatar to New York on Feb. 5, 2021.

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FBI Calls Incendiary Attack On Manhattan Federal Building An “Anti-Government Attack”

For years, left-wing political violence in the US was often treated as isolated and/or a non-issue. The Trump administration is now calling it a domestic terrorism threat.

FBI Assistant Director in Charge James Barnacle described the incident outside 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan earlier today as an “anti-government attack on a federal facility.” 

Watch the suspected left-wing radical attack the federal building, which houses offices for agencies including DHS, ICE, USCIS, the FBI, and the Social Security Administration.

Suspect identified as Andrew Arrabaca …

Barnacle also said the suspect carried a sign reading “ICE Off Our Streets,” which suggests an association with left-wing groups.

Even The Atlantic had to recently admit there was a troubling rise in left-wing terror…

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MUSKEGON UPDATE: How the Massive Michigan Democratic Voter Registration Fraud Operation Was Ignored, Buried, and Shut Down by Unscrupulous Biden FBI and DOJ Hacks

President Trump brought up the MUSKEGON, MICHIGAN 2020 coordinated election fraud scheme – buried by Biden admin – during his address to the country on Thursday.

This massive ballot registration scandal was first reported by The Gateway Pundit in August 2023 thanks to Michigan activists who tipped us off to this massive voter registration scandal.

The Gateway Pundit showed that a left-wing outfit named GBI Strategies, that was funded by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign, was attempting to fraudulently register up to 10,000 voters in a city with only 30,000 eligible voters.

The report on systemic voter fraud in the 2020 election has never been refuted or debunked; it was simply ignored and suppressed by legacy media. The blithe answer from Michigan’s corrupt far-left Attorney General is that they ‘referred it to the FBI.‘

Yet all the information is there in the Muskegon Police report, as well as another police report from the Michigan State Police, and yet there have been zero prosecutions of those involved.

The Muskegon fraudulent ballot registration case was not in suspended animation, and it certainly didn’t close itself.

It was deliberately buried under layers of AUSAs, FBI supervisors, DOJ Public Integrity Section (PIN) officials, redactions, and bureaucratic fingerprints.

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