Tag: fbi

FBI agent fatally shot person in altercation inside Washington, D.C., rail station

An off-duty FBI agent fatally shot a person with whom he got into a fight Wednesday evening inside a Washington, D.C., rail station, according to police.

The incident occurred at about 6:30 p.m. inside the Metro Center rail station, Ashan Benedict, a Metropolitan Police Department assistant police chief, said a press conference about two hours later.

He also said the altercation started on the station platform and that the agent “appears” to have been the victim. He also said the shots were fired after the agent and the victim tumbled over a wall and fell about eight feet.

However, Benedict made clear the investigation is “preliminary and subject to change.” 

He said the yet-to-be identified agent is a veteran special agent assigned to FBI headquarters, in the nation’s capital. The agent was taken to a hospital for treatment of minor injuries.

On Thursday afternoon, police identified the deceased shooting victim as 28-year-old Troy Bullock. They also said he was armed but that they remained uncertain whether the FBI agent knew that. 

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FBI and CIA Connections to Twitter Exposed Amid Massive Election Interference and Censorship Operation

Former FBI and CIA operatives have been exposed as central figures in the Twitter Files‘ recent revelations that the social media platform engaged in a sweeping censorship and election interference operation.

“Exclusive: Bari doesn’t name too many names but the head of Twitter’s Strategic Response Team when secret actions were taken to stifle conservative accounts happened under Jeff Carlton, who worked for both CIA & FBI,” Ngo wrote. “He just deleted his LinkedIn. But I have an archive. @elonmusk”

A Trust & Safety leader from Twitter named Ella Irwin chimed in to try to correct the record.

“This is actually false,” she claimed. “I would recommend checking information like this before posting. Jeff stepped into this role as part of Twitter 2.0.”

However, Jeff Carlton’s archived LinkedIn profile shows that he was on the Strategic Response Team, albeit in a different role prior to November 2022. (Carlton appears to have been promoted.)

He was a Senior Program Manager rom May 2021 to November 2022. The profile says he, “Built and led a programs team that optimizes intake, new workflow integration, training and quality, systems and tooling, and knowledge management for Twitter’s Strategic Response Team.”

In November 2022, he switched to a Senior Manager, where he now “leads Twitter’s Strategic Response Team of 50+ employees / agents in resolving the highest-profile Trust & Safety escalations. Manage crises and non-standard incidents in content moderation and customer support to promote ‘healthy public conversations’.”

In the archived LinkedIn page, it details Jeff Carlton’s experience in the intelligence community, including his assignments working with the FBI and CIA.

“Former Intelligence Officer transitioned to managing high-profile content moderation and customer support escalations in Social Media / Trust & Safety. Head of Twitter’s Strategic Response Team,” the now-scrubbed LinkedIn profile stated.

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J6 Jeremy Brown Trial Update: Mysterious CD Full of Classified Reports From Bergdahl Case Emerges During Trial

As reported earlier by The Gateway Pundit, the Jeremy Brown Trial taking place at the Middle District Court in Tampa, FL is controversial at best.

The attorney for Jeremy Brown, Mr. Roger Futerman,  alleged on Wednesday that the FBI “planted” evidence in this case during his opening statements.

The accusation is understandable when the chain of custody and documentation of evidence presented at the trial is so atrocious.

The military grade M67 grenades found in Brown’s RV during the raid can only be tracked by lot number and where they’ve been, not the dates that they were there.

They also found human hair, dog hair, and textile fibers stuck to the tape on the grenades that had allegedly been in Brown’s possession for months, since Jan. 6, 2021, but none of the hairs or fibers matched Brown, Brown’s dog, or the carpet samples taken from his RV nor his girlfriend’s home.

The DNA found on the tape of one of the grenades was of two males but neither of the samples belonged to Jeremy Brown.

Brown maintains that the two illegal firearms are, in fact, his (more on that Friday) but the plate carrier (body armor) and grenades were planted.

The other remaining charges levied against Brown involve the possession of classified materials, most of which are contained on a compact disc (CD) that was “found” in his RV back in September 2021.

The only picture of the CD from that day was a tiny peek at the corner of the blue CD case sticking out from underneath a pile of other papers and folders.  The total area of the corner that you can see may be the width of half of a credit card.  You cannot in any way identify it as a CD case.

In fact, FBI Staff Operation Specialist Elyssa Gonzalez testified that she doesn’t recall the CD in the RV at all.  One of her duties was to log all of the pictures that day as she was “attached at the hip” with the FBI photographer.   The defense showed a log of the evidentiary pictures from that day.  The CD was not on the list, according to Gonzalez.   You’d think a trained FBI specialist would remember a CD (in 2022) with big red “CLASSIFIED” tape on the cover.

The only time that Gonzalez was not documenting evidence was when the FBI handed the evidentiary camera to Detective Charles George of Tampa PD who worked to secure the grenades for over 2 hours.

Also worth noting: the FBI’s photographer passed her camera off to another agent in, Agent Mund, in order to console Jeremy Brown’s girlfriend, since a female agent normally does that with a female on the scene.

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FBI Sent Posts to Big Tech Firms for Action Ahead of Election: Agent

The FBI set up a command post ahead of the 2020 election and set up a nationwide system that conveyed election-related posts to social media platforms so the platforms could take them down, an FBI agent testified in a recent deposition.

The information would be provided by FBI field offices and the bureau’s headquarters about “disinformation,” primarily regarding the time, place, or manner of elections, according to Elvis Chan, the assistant special agent in charge of the Cyber Branch for FBI’s San Francisco Division. The posts were passed to the FBI San Francisco office’s command post, which was set up days before the election and run through election night.

The posts were then sent to Big Tech companies, Chan, the daytime commander of the post, said.

“From my recollection, we would receive some responses from the social media companies. I remember in some cases they would relay that they had taken down the posts. In other cases, they would say that this did not violate their terms of service,” Chan said. “In some cases when we shared information they would provide a response to us that they had taken them down. I would not say it was a 100 percent success rate. If I had to characterize it, I would say it was like a 50 percent success rate. But that’s just from my recollection.”

The “success rate” was defined by Chan as platforms taking some type of action because a post was determined to violate a platform’s terms of service.

San Francisco FBI officials were charged by top government authorities with serving as the final link in the chain because many of the Big Tech firms are headquartered in the area.

Chan was testifying on Nov. 29 during a deposition taken as part of the case alleging collusion between Big Tech and the government in censoring users. The transcript of the deposition was made public on Dec. 6.

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FBI Ramps Up Spending to Fight MAGA Terrorism

The FBI is conducting three times as many domestic terrorism investigations than it was five years ago, with 70 percent of its open cases focused on “civil unrest” and anti-government activity, according to FBI documents and government specialists. The Bureau has also quietly changed the general classification of white supremacy, antisemitism, abortion-, and anti-LGBTQI+-related extremism to “hate crimes” rather than “terrorism.” Since terrorism remains the top national security priority, this has lowered the visibility and resources dedicated to those issues.

The FBI considers all violent acts (and threats of violence) with a political motive to be terrorism, a senior government official explains to Newsweek. But not all acts of extremism are considered terrorism. “If an act is focused on the government, it’s terrorism,” the source says. “But if extremism is focused on private individuals or institutions, it’s considered just a crime or classified as a hate crime.” The source was granted anonymity to speak about classified matters.

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What’s missing from the Twitter files: The truth about the FBI

Elon Musk half-delivered on his promise to tell all about Twitter’s censorship of The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election. What was missing were details of specific warnings we know the FBI made to Twitter about a Russian “hack and leak operation” involving Hunter during their weekly meetings with top executives of the social media giant in the days and weeks before The Post published its exclusive bombshell.

We know that FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan testified Tuesday in a lawsuit against the Biden administration brought by Republican attorneys that he organized those weekly meetings with Twitter and Facebook in San Francisco for as many as seven Washington-based FBI agents in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.

Twitter’s then-head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth has stated in a sworn declaration that he was told during those meetings to expect “hack-and-leak operations” by state actors involving Hunter Biden.

Twitter cited its new “hacked materials” policy on October 14, 2020, when it locked The Post’s account for two weeks and censored our story revealing an email from Hunter’s Ukrainian benefactor thanking him for meeting with his father, the then-VP, in Washington, DC. The email was not “hacked material”; it came from Hunter’s laptop, which was the legal possession of Delaware computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac. The Post published an image of the Dec. 2019 subpoena issued to Mac Isaac for the laptop which Hunter had abandoned at his store eight months earlier.

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FBI Director pushes for “lawful access” to encrypted messages

FBI Director Christopher Wray last month spoke before the US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and, among the many topics dedicated to “threats to the homeland,” he addressed that of encryption.

His remarks on this are carried by the FBI website under the heading, “Lawful Access.” Wray opens by saying that the agency is a strong advocate of “wide and consistent” encryption use.

The FBI chief goes on with platitudes, and not particularly sincere ones (considering his statements that followed): protecting online data and privacy is a top priority, and encryption a key element.

But…

“Encryption without lawful access, though, does have a negative effect on law enforcement’s ability to protect the public,” Wray says, and thus continues the FBI’s long-since established stance that strong encryption prevents law enforcement from performing their duties.

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A Peek Inside the FBI’s Unprecedented January 6 Geofence Dragnet

The FBI’s biggest-ever investigation included the biggest-ever haul of phones from controversial geofence warrants, court records show. A filing in the case of one of the January 6 suspects, David Rhine, shows that Google initially identified 5,723 devices as being in or near the US Capitol during the riot. Only around 900 people have so far been charged with offenses relating to the siege.

The filing suggests that dozens of phones that were in airplane mode during the riot, or otherwise out of cell service, were caught up in the trawl. Nor could users erase their digital trails later. In fact, 37 people who attempted to delete their location data following the attacks were singled out by the FBI for greater scrutiny.

Geofence search warrants are intended to locate anyone in a given area using digital services. Because Google’s Location History system is both powerful and widely used, the company is served about 10,000 geofence warrants in the US each year. Location History leverages GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth signals to pinpoint a phone within a few yards. Although the final location is still subject to some uncertainty, it is usually much more precise than triangulating signals from cell towers. Location History is turned off by default, but around a third of Google users switch it on, enabling services like real-time traffic prediction. 

The geofence warrants served on Google shortly after the riot remained sealed. But lawyers for Rhine, a Washington man accused of various federal crimes on January 6, recently filed a motion to suppress the geofence evidence. The motion, which details the warrant’s process and scale, was first reported by journalist Marcy Wheeler on her blog, Emptywheel. 

In a statement, a Google spokesperson defended the company’s handling of geofence warrants.

“We have a rigorous process for geofence warrants that is designed to protect the privacy of our users while supporting the important work of law enforcement,” the company said. “When Google receives legal demands, we examine them closely for legal validity and constitutional concerns, including overbreadth, consistent with developing case law. If a request asks for too much information, we work to narrow it. We routinely push back on overbroad demands, including overbroad geofence demands, and in some cases, we object to producing any information at all.”

Google requires a three-step process for geofence warrants to narrow their scope to only those most likely to be guilty of a crime. In the first and broadest step, the FBI asked Google to identify all devices in a 4-acre area, including the Capitol and its immediate surroundings, between 2 pm and 6:30 pm on January 6. Google initially found 5,653 active devices that “were or could have been” within the geofence at that time. When Google added in data from devices that only connected to its servers later that day, or the next, the number increased to 5,723. (Location History works in airplane mode because phones can continue to receive GPS satellite signals.)

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Is the FBI’s “Black Identity Extremist” Label Still in Use?

It’s been over five years since the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) “Black Identity Extremist” (BIE) report was leaked to Foreign Policy magazine in early October 2017. The August 3, 2017, report – which alleged that “perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement” – drew a torrent of criticism from civil rights and civil liberties groups, as well as a backlash from Black House and Senate members. The fact that the FBI was employing overtly race-based criteria for investigating the political activities of Black Americans brought back ugly memories of the Bureau’s infamous Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) targeting the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Congress, NAACP, and a host of other prominent Black civil rights leaders and organizations from the mid-1950s through at least the late 1970s.

In the two years after the leak of the “BIE” report, FBI Director Chris Wray found himself constantly on the defensive over the report and the FBI’s use of the BIE term. In late July 2019, Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Bureau had abandoned the use of the BIE phrase, with one other FBI official claiming the term had not been used by the FBI since 2018.

FBI documents obtained by the Cato Institute via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit appear to tell a somewhat different story.

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FBI Paid Out $42 Million a Year to Confidential Human Sources – Including Thugs Who Set Up Trump, Whitmer Kidnap Hoaxers, and Others

A 2021 report by Open the Books revealed that the federal government paid over $548 million to informants in recent years. That’s over half a billion taxpayer dollars.

And the FBI paid out $42 million a year to its confidential human sources.

We know a few of the more famous FBI operatives.

Stephan Halper, a crack cocaine addict, was paid over $1.05 million to spy on Trump associates and help set up the Trump-Russia hoax.

The FBI used at least 12 informants out of 15 individuals to plot, plan, pay for, and execute the Whitmer kidnap hoax.

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