Tag: foia

ODNI Issues Rare GLOMAR Response to FOIA Request on Five Eyes Alliance UAP-Related Emails

In a recent FOIA release profiled on The Black Vault, researcher Grant Lavac discovered an email referencing the UAP Caucus Working Group. Within this email, a long list of redactions hid every recipient of the message, except one: Brian D. Fishpaugh. This revelation prompted a targeted FOIA request by The Black Vault aimed at uncovering any potential communication related to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) within Fishpaugh’s email records.

Fishpaugh, who serves as the Deputy National Intelligence Manager for Aviation (NIM-A) within the ODNI, became the focal point of FOIA case DF-2024-00285. The request, filed on June 18, 2024, by The Black Vault, sought emails from Fishpaugh’s inbox that contained various UAP and UFO related keywords, along with those mentioning named individuals (which included alleged “UFO whistleblowers”) connected to the topic.

The objective was to uncover any communication that could shed light on the collaboration and research efforts within the Five Eyes alliance regarding UAPs, or the UAP issue as a whole.

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FBI File: Bacteriological Warfare

This FBI file relates to bacteriological warfare. It contains investigative information gathered over several decades. Significant portions of the file have been redacted or entirely withheld due to security or privacy concerns, using exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Reports detail the use of bacteriological weapons in the Korean War, allegedly by U.S. forces, as claimed by various organizations in China and North Korea. Chinese trade unions and women’s organizations made appeals to international bodies to denounce and act against these actions .

Some sections include accounts of individuals suspected of being involved in subversive activities or espionage. For instance, John T. Brady alleged bacteriological warfare conducted in Illinois, raising concerns about potential German agents during World War II. Further investigation found Brady had a neurotic obsession with disease and that his claims were largely unfounded .

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Watchdog sues Treasury Dept. for records on foreign purchases of US farmland

A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit has been filed by the watchdog Judicial Watch against the Department of Treasury for records of communication between the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA) regarding the purchase of US farmland by foreign entities.

Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit after the Treasury Department failed to respond to an April 10, 2024, FOIA request for:

  • Any and all records of communications between the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture concerning, regarding, or relating to the purchase of U.S. agricultural real estate by foreign entities.  

On January 19, 2024, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report which found significant gaps in information collection and timely information sharing between the Committee on Foreign Investment and other government agencies, including the USDA, concerning foreign investment in U.S. agricultural land.

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CARNIVORE (DCS1000): FBI Files on Their Email and Electronic Communication Monitoring Software

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the FBI’s Carnivore system drew considerable attention and debate. Unveiled during this period, Carnivore was a sophisticated email wiretapping system designed to intercept and analyze digital communications. The system’s capabilities and the implications for privacy and civil liberties were subjects of intense scrutiny and concern among privacy advocates, Internet service providers (ISPs), and the public at large.

Carnivore, officially known as DCS1000, was a network diagnostic tool utilized by the FBI to monitor and intercept email and other online communications. The system was installed at an ISP’s premises and was capable of scanning vast amounts of digital data passing through the ISP’s network. Carnivore specifically targeted communications of suspects under investigation, allowing the FBI to capture emails, chat sessions, and other forms of online interactions.

The Carnivore system operated by tapping into the ISP’s network and filtering the data packets that flowed through it. According to an internal FBI document, the system was designed to “ensure that only the exact communications authorized by the court to be intercepted are what is intercepted”​​. This meant that Carnivore could be configured to capture only the communications of a specific target while excluding all other traffic.

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“It Needs to Get Out As Soon As Possible” – New FOIA Emails Reveal CIA Panicking as They Rushed Approval of Hunter Laptop Letter

New FOIA emails obtained by Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch show the CIA panicking and making sure all hands were on deck to stop the Hunter Biden laptop from hell spreading like wildfire shortly before the 2020 election.

In October of 2020 – just days before the presidential election – 51 former intelligence officials signed and published a letter that baselessly decried the contents of Hunter’s ‘laptop from hell’ had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

This was a lie.  They all knew it was a lie. The fake news media ran with the story anyway.

Mike Morell, former CIA acting director under Obama immediately sent out an email making sure the infamous Hunter laptop letter by the 51 spies who lied was approved.

“This is a rush job, as it needs to get out as soon as possible,” Morell wrote in an email on Monday, October 19, 2020, at 6:36 a.m., to the CIA’s Publications Classification Review Board (PCRB) with a copy to Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA senior intelligence officer.

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FBI Wants 20 Years To Produce Records On Its Involvement W/ OKC Bombing

It’s been about nine years since Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue filed a Freedom of Information Act request for records about a CIA asset and FBI informant who helped fund the Oklahoma City bombing, as well as for records about a neo-Nazi bank-robbery gang also involved in the attack.

Tired of waiting, Trentaudue sued the FBI over the matter in February, demanding the bureau to produce the 69,375 pages of documents that it’s holding. But now, the FBI wants to take another nearly 12 years to fork over those documents to him, which means that it would take at least 20 years for the bureau to comply with his initial FOIA request.

Such a slow production rate is unacceptable, Trentadue said in a Tuesday court filing.

“The FBI proposes to process these records/documents for release to Plaintiff in monthly increments of 500 pages over a period of 11.5 years!” he said.

“If the Court accepts the FBI’s proposed snail-pace processing of these materials, Plaintiff will be close to 90-years of age when he finally receives all of them,” he said.

“He has already waited almost a decade for these documents/records, with the FBI having made no effort during the interim to produce them, and should not have to wait another 11.5 years to receive them.”

Trentadue has been suing the U.S. government for OKC bomb-related records for nearly 30 years, ever since his brother was murdered in a federal penitentiary. The complex story of how the death of Trentadue’s brother relates to the OKC bombing can be read in this Mother Jones article.

Trentadue’s latest lawsuit seeks records on FBI informant and CIA asset Roger Moore (not the James Bond actor), and the bank-robbery gang, the Aryan Republican Army, which he says was an FBI front group.

According to Trentadue’s lawsuit, Moore was an FBI informant as part of the bureau’s 1980s- and early 90s-era Operation Punchout, which was designed to identify and apprehend surplus dealers that bought and sold government property stolen from Department of Defense facilities in Utah.

Furthermore, Moore build patrol boats for use by the US Navy in the Vietnam War, as well as speedboats for the CIA, according to Aberration in the Heartland of the Real—historian Wendy Painting’s PhD thesis-turned-book about OKC bomber Tim McVeigh.

As for the Aryan Republican Army, Trentadue believes that was an FBI front group that also helped fund the bombing.

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What Can You Do While Waiting for a FOIA Response?

The government is slow, especially at answering questions about itself. In theory, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lets Americans ask any federal agency for any public record and get a response back within 20 days. All 50 states have similar records laws. After all, government documents are the property of the taxpayer.

In practice, almost no government agency meets its own deadlines. FOIA requests can take weeks, months, or even years longer than the legal deadline. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are notorious for sitting on requests for ages before handing back pages that are almost entirely censored with a black highlighter.

Using data from the public records site MuckRock, Reason calculated the average response times for several agencies. It turns out that you can do a lot of fun (and not so fun) things while waiting for bureaucrats to give you the documents that your taxes paid for.

The averages only include cases where the agency actually managed to turn up documents. It doesn’t count requests that are still pending or cases where an agency straight-up ghosted the requester.

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Dr. Fauci Caught in Scheme to Hide Emails from FOIA Requests — Hid Information on Source of COVID from the Wuhan Lab — Paid Off Doctor to Keep Silent with Millions in Funding and Grants

On January 31, 2020, Danish-born and British-educated scientist Kristian Andersen emailed Dr. Tony Fauci, saying the virus looked lab-made.

According to the email (emphasis added):

“[O]ne has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered . . . . Eddie [Holmes], Bob [Garry], Mike [Ferguson] and myself all find the genome inconsistent with evolutionary theory.”

Then on February 4, 2020, after a call with Dr. Tony Fauci, British scientist Kristian Anderson wrote that the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory.

Kristian Anderson, “The main crackpot theories going around at the moment related to this virus being somehow engineered… and that is demonstrably false.”

So what happened between January 31, 2020 and February 4, 2020?

Dr. Tony Fauci called Dr. Kristian Anderson and ordered him to publicly say the COVID-19 virus was NOT lab-made. And, Tony Fauci offered Andersen a sweet deal if he did so. A huge grant from the NIH!

The New York Times reported on Anderson’s early email to Dr. Fauci in an article published in June 2021.

Over the past year, Dr. Andersen has been one of the most outspoken proponents of the theory that the coronavirus originated from a natural spillover from an animal to humans outside of a lab. But in the email to Dr. Fauci in January 2020, Dr. Andersen hadn’t yet come to that conclusion. He told Dr. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, that some features of the virus made him wonder whether it had been engineered, and noted that he and his colleagues were planning to investigate further by analyzing the virus’s genome.

The researchers published those results in a paper in the scientific journal Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, concluding that a laboratory origin was very unlikely. Dr. Andersen has reiterated this point of view in interviews and on Twitter over the past year, putting him at the center of the continuing controversy over whether the virus could have leaked from a Chinese lab.

When his early email to Dr. Fauci was released, the media storm around Dr. Andersen intensified, and he deactivated his Twitter account. He answered written questions from The New York Times about the email and the fracas. The exchange has been lightly edited for length.

As The Gateway Pundit reported in March 2023, Dr. Anderson switched his story four days after his call with Tony Fauci.

But, The New York Times conveniently omitted in their reporting that after his call with Dr. Fauci on February 1, 2020, Dr. Anderson was given a $1.88 million grant and $16.5 million in funding from NIAID, Dr. Fauci’s personal piggy bank.

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The government has been making plans for finding aliens

The government is officially gearing up for the discovery of aliens, a move described as ‘long overdue’ by the UK’s leading UFO expert.

A Freedom of Information request has revealed the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) is currently researching how it will react to the so-called ‘black swan’ event that is discovering extraterrestrial life. 

A black swan event is an unpredictable event that has wide-ranging consequences, but in hindsight appears to have been inevitable.

The report is investigating whether a plan already exists – none has ever been made public – what a plan would look like and how the UK can be ‘on the front foot’ should such an astounding scientific discovery finally be made.

It is being conducted over six months and will be finalised in July, at which point a new government could be in receipt of it.

An internal report will be presented to the DSIT Permanent Secretary setting out recommendations for an action plan including opportunities, challenges and areas of expertise.

While a summary of the work states the primary focus of the report will be ‘the impact on the science landscape’, it will also consider the wider impact.

Humans have pondered the existence of other lifeforms, at least on record, since medieval times. In recent decades, reports of UFOs have soared, the most famous being the Roswell incident in 1947, when a craft allegedly crashed in the New Mexico desert.

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NIH adviser David Morens can’t recall if he deleted COVID records, laughs off Fauci FOIA evasions

A top adviser at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) deleted records critical to uncovering the origins of COVID-19 — and used a “secret back channel” to help Dr. Anthony Fauci and a federal grantee that funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, evade transparency.

NIH senior adviser Dr. David Morens improperly conducted official government business from his private email account and solicited help from the NIH’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office to dodge records requests, according to emails revealed in a memo by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which The Post obtained Wednesday.

“[I] learned from our foia [sic] lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d [sic] but before the search starts,” Morens wrote in a Feb. 24, 2021, email. “Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail [sic].”

“I ask you both that NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail [sic],” he emphasized again in a Nov. 18, 2021, email to EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak, whose organization was suspended this month from receiving federal funds for the next three years and who was himself proposed for debarment on Wednesday.

In the most shocking exchange, on May 28, 2021, NIH’s Office of the General Counsel instructed the agency’s FOIA office to “not release anything having to do with EcoHealth Alliance/WIV,” referring to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

 “[T]here is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail [sic], or hand it to him at work or at his house,” Morens wrote in an April 21, 2021, email. “He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

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