Tag: fbi

FBI flagged jokes and satirical accounts to Twitter for censorship

The sixth batch of Twitter Files, published on Twitter by journalist Matt Taibbi, has revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were regularly flagging content to Twitter for censorship between January 2020 and November 2022 and that some of the flagged content contained jokes and satirical comments.

According to Taibbi, there were more than 150 emails between the FBI and former Head of Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth and a “surprisingly high number” of these emails were FBI requests for Twitter to “take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.”

Taibi noted that the the FBI’s social media-focused task force is known as FTIF and was created in the wake of the 2016 election. Since its inception, this task force has grown to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to “identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.”

Taibbi shared several examples of the FBI’s censorship requests and said Twitter employees would often look for reasons to suspend accounts after receiving these requests.

These censorship request emails reveal that the FBI would target both large and small accounts and sometimes issue preservation letters and request location information for the flagged accounts. Some of the large accounts that were flagged include those of Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) (which has over 873,000 followers) and actor Billy Baldwin (which has over 204,000 followers). However, accounts with as few as 15 followers were also flagged to Twitter by the FBI.

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Twittergate deepens: FBI REFUSES to reveal how many social media firms it is secretly influencing – amid accusations it broke the law by pushing Twitter to remove accounts and hand over user location details, new trove reveals

The FBI has refused to say how many social media companies it works with, defending their actions after it emerged that agents from the bureau regularly met with Twitter executives and handed over lists of accounts they found questionable.

Officials from the bureau even asked for Twitter to hand over the locations from where the Twitter accounts were being operated, in a disturbing move that many saw as an attack on the First Amendment.

One user targeted by the FBI, who goes by @Lexitollah, said: ‘Seems like prima facie 1A violation.’

Charlie Hurt, the opinion editor of The Washington Examiner, said it was ‘a clear violation of the First Amendment.’ 

He told Tucker Carlson: ‘They were actually opening up new back channels on platforms I’ve not heard of before, in order to keep in touch with one another.

‘If this was happening during the Pentagon Papers, and we were seeing this level of collusion between the federal government and news, there would rightly be an outcry.’

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FBI whistleblower: Bosses cooked books on Jan. 6 inquiry to snooker feds for more funding

An FBI whistleblower has accused bureau officials of cooking the books to conceal the number of man-hours devoted to the Jan. 6 investigation and inflate time spent on other cases.

According to the anonymous whistleblower, the subterfuge is intended to bolster the bureau’s budget requests to Congress when House Republicans control the purse strings next year.

According to a whistleblower disclosure submitted to Congress, a top official in the FBI’s counterterrorism unit at the Washington headquarters pressured the bureau’s field offices to stop agents from clocking hours when they are working on investigations related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

The supervisors in the field offices were told the agents should instead claim they were working on international terrorism and other investigations when recording hours in the FBI’s time and attendance system, known as WebTA.

The Washington Times has reviewed a draft of the whistleblower disclosure.

The FBI told The Times that the allegations were inaccurate but did not elaborate.

The new allegations add to a flood of FBI whistleblower disclosures to Congress in recent months about widespread misconduct, mismanagement and politicized investigations at the bureau. As The Times has reported, the more than a dozen whistleblower disclosures will fuel congressional inquiries regarding the FBI and Department of Justice when Republicans take over the House in January.

The FBI has poured resources into investigations of crimes stemming from the pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Nearly two years later, at least 964 people have been charged.

One of the most high-profile cases resulted in the conviction last month of Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers militia, and his top lieutenant, Kelly Meggs, on rarely used charges of seditious conspiracy.

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THE TWITTER FILES: Twitter… The FBI Subsidiary

In the latest release of ‘THE TWITTER FILES,’ journalist Matt Taibbi details how Twitter acted as a ‘subsidiary’ of the FBI.

As a reminder, parts 1-3 of the series covered respectively, Twitter’s decision to interfere in the 2020 election by censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, how the company created secret blacklists, and how they justified removing former President Donald Trump despite internally agreeing that he didn’t break any rules (parts one, two and three).

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What Are They Hiding? Govt. Releases More than 13,000 Documents Related to JFK Assassination – But FBI-CIA are Still Withholding 3% of the Documents

In 2017 President Trump approved the release of approximately 2800 long-classified JFK assassination records.

News outlets from around the globe furiously combed through the files in search of more pieces to the puzzling death of President John F. Kennedy.

President Trump released a second trove of documents later that year.

One of the documents revealed that Democrat President Lyndon Johnson was a KKK member.

This was not a surprise.
The Ku Klux Klan was founded as the activist wing of the Democratic Party.

On Thursday the National Archives released thousands of the JFK documents.

But the FBI-CIA would not allow the release of all of the documents. Around 3% of the JFK documents are still being withheld from release to the public — more than 50 years after the assassination.

What are they hiding?

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FBI arrests Libyan operative charged in 1988 airline bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland

The FBI has arrested a Libyan intelligence operative suspected of making the bomb that downed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 in one of the deadliest terror attacks in history, Scottish authorities announced Sunday.

The U.S. Justice Department confirmed the arrest of Abu Agela Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, announcing “he is expected to make his initial appearance in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.”

The arrest marks a four-decade hunt for Mas’ud, who was charged with making the bomb that killed 270 passengers, including 190 Americans.

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FBI Reveals It Has More Information on Deceased DNC Staffer Seth Rich

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is fighting tooth and nail to withhold data from laptops of slain DNC staff member Seth Rich.

Rich may have been the conduit for Hillary Clinton emails published by WikiLeaks in 2016, according to journalist Sy Hersh. The journalist said an FBI source informed him in 2017 Rich’s laptop contained evidence he leaked the emails.

The truth of that claim is germane because the Biden administration is desperately trying to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from Britain. Assange angered U.S. government officials with many leaks of classified documents that portrayed officials in a bad light. Among the leaks were, of course, the damning emails of then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whom Donald Trump defeated in 2016.

U.S. government officials have long maintained Russian hackers were the source of the leaked Clinton emails published by WikiLeaks. That argument would be erased like a sandcastle at the beach in a rising tide if Hersh’s report is corroborated by evidence in FBI possession.

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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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