Tag: secrecy

Appeals Court Blocks Release of Audiotapes of Biden’s Conversations with Ghostwriter

A federal appeals court on Friday temporarily blocked the DOJ from releasing 70 hours of Joe Biden’s conversations with his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer.

Last month, a federal judge cleared the way for the Justice Department to release recordings of Biden’s conversations with his ghostwriter to the Oversight Project.

US District Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee, said the redactions were sufficient.

Biden’s lawyers immediately requested an injunction pending appeal.

Last month Judge Friedrich stayed her own order pending appeal and gave the DC Circuit Court of Appeals three weeks to make a decision on whether the DOJ can release Biden’s audiotapes.

On Friday, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the release of the audiotapes to the Oversight Project for 10 days.

CBS News reported:

A federal appeals court temporarily blocked the Justice Department from turning over to a conservative think tank redacted transcripts and audio recordings of conversations former President Joe Biden had with his biographer roughly a decade ago.

A panel of three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed to issue an administrative injunction that stops the release of the material to the Heritage Foundation for 10 days.

The court said in a brief unsigned order that the purpose of its injunction, which expires at 11:59 p.m. on July 20, is to “give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the emergency motion for an injunction pending appeal and should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion.”

The recordings at issue in the legal fight date back to 2016 and 2017, when Biden sat down with his biographer, Mark Zwonitzer, for his memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.” But they gained interest from the Heritage Foundation several years later following an investigation by former special counsel Robert Hur into Biden’s handling of sensitive government records after his vice presidency, which ended in 2017. The former president was not charged with any crimes stemming from Hur’s investigation.

Robert Hur in February 2024 released a 345-page report on his investigation of the stolen classified documents.

Robert Hur found that Joe Biden “willfully retained” classified information, however, he decided not to charge him. Hur said there is evidence Biden retained classified notebooks, “knowing he was not allowed to do so.”

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Roswell’s biggest mystery might not be the UFO

Four University of New Mexico students are revisiting one of New Mexico’s most enduring mysteries, the notorious 1947 Roswell UFO Incident.

Not to determine whether aliens landed near Roswell, but to examine what the incident reveals about the law, government transparency and public trust.

UNM constitutional law/pre-law students Nicole Osborne, Caden Salazar, Tatiana James and Miguel Serna recently participated in an online panel discussing the Roswell incident through a legal lens, setting aside the long-running debate over whether the debris found approximately 75 miles northwest of Roswell was extraterrestrial.

That debate began in 1947, when something crashed onto William Ware “Mac” Brazel’s ranch near Corona.

Brazel reported the incident, and personnel from Roswell Army Air Field traveled to the ranch to retrieve the debris.

Soon afterward, the U.S. Army Air Force announced that it had “come into the possession of a flying saucer.”

Less than a day later, the military retracted the statement, saying the recovered object was a weather balloon.

The abrupt reversal fueled decades of speculation about a government cover-up.

“While there is this alien background to everything and a conspiracy background to everything, we’re also able to look at this incident from a legal lens and view the relationship between the people and their government and understand why it’s so applicable to our day-to-day life,” Osborne said.

The four UNM constitutional law/pre-law students are looking at it from a legal angle.

The panel stemmed from an assignment from their professor, Lawrence R. Jones, intended to help students apply constitutional knowledge to real-world scenarios.

“It’s not just about whether there were aliens or not, but there are a whole lot of other issues here on Earth that matter and should matter,” Jones said.

The panel was sponsored by the New Mexico State Library, the New Mexico Museum of Space History and the University of New Mexico Political Science Department.

Moderators asked the students several questions about the crash. They were asked background and summary questions and whether the government or military has the right to enforce a citizen’s silence on what they consider classified material.

Students discussed government secrecy, free speech, property rights, military authority and constitutional protections.

The panelists had been preparing since May and researching the Roswell crash before that.

“I actually invite the whole community to learn about the whole Roswell incident, because it just opens up opportunities for them to learn about their constitutional rights,” Serna said. “I think that one of the most important things that you have is your rights.”

Katherine Miles, bureau chief of the public services bureau at the New Mexico State Library, served as a mediator for the program.

“The Roswell incident has become a pop culture staple, fueling endless speculation about aliens and their intentions,” she said. “But in all the noise, we often lose sight of the human story at its core. These students, with their deep curiosity and insight, have brought that humanity back into focus. Their work reminds us to look at the everyday world around us with a wider, more thoughtful lens.”

You can watch the panel on the New Mexico State Library’s website. https://libguides.nmstatelibrary.org/UFOs

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Hillary Clinton Tells Deep State Officials to Refuse to Share Information with Acting DNI Bill Pulte

Twice-failed presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton urged Deep State officials to refuse to share information with Acting DNI Bill Pulte.

Clinton made the comments during an appearance on the “Democracy Docket” podcast with host (and gutter DC lawyer) Marc Elias.

Marc Elias asked Hillary Clinton what she thought of President Trump’s decision to make federal housing regulator Bill Pulte the Acting DNI after Tulsi Gabbard resigned.

Clinton said Pulte is “dangerous” called him a “loose cannon” because he has no experience in the intel community.

“The DNI has access to everything, everything that they want to see,” Hillary Clinton, according to Just The News. “I mean, I hope there are career and even political appointees in various of the agencies that are slow-walking or refusing to share information with Pulte.”

Last week Bill Pulte fired over 50 career Deep State intel officials so far.

“The Deep State firings have begun,” a source told CNN last Monday.

Last Tuesday, CBS News reported that Pulte fired six political intelligence staffers and sent 45 others to their home agencies.

CNN reported that Pulte fired six political appointees chosen by Tulsi Gabbard.

“Today, I spent time with the National Counterterrorism Center team, who is doing an incredible job protecting our Country under President Trump’s leadership. The room was filled with true professionals and American patriots. It is a privilege to work beside them,” Pulte said last Tuesday evening.

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Massie Introduces Resolution to Honor USS Liberty Crew, Declassify All Records.

America First GOP Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky introduced a resolution today honoring the crew of the USS Liberty, which Israel attacked 59 years ago as the ship patrolled international waters.

The resolution, which condemns the “unprovoked” Israeli attack, names the 34 dead, and calls upon the president to declassify records related to the attack.

It also condemns Israel.

Top U.S. military officials at the time called the attack deliberate, while Israel weakly claimed the attack was a case of “mistaken identity.”

Weeks ago, Massie called for a new investigation into the attack. Those who oppose discussing the Liberty or investigating it often call questions about it “antisemitic.”

The Unprovoked Attack

Sailing in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of the Sinai Peninsula on June 8, 1967, the Liberty was collecting signals intelligence related to Israel’s Six-Day War with nearby Arab states, notably Egypt.

The ship flew an American flag and was otherwise clearly marked.

Israeli reconnaissance aircraft surveilled the ship for more than six hours, flying as low as 200 feet, the Liberty Association website explains. Despite that surveillance, Israeli jets attacked the ship relentlessly for almost 25 minutes.

When it was over, 34 Americans were dead and 171 wounded. Captain William McGonagle received the Medal of Honor for heroism in secret. His citation says he received the Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War. It does not name the country that attacked the Liberty. 

Fighter jets sent to defend the ship from two American aircraft carriers, the USS America and USS Saratoga, were recalled.

Recalling the aircraft, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer wrote for the Houston Chronicle in 2004, “was the most disgraceful act I witnessed in my entire military career.”

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Congress Confronts MKULTRA: Testimony Warns Of Ongoing CIA Mind Control Capabilities

The deep state’s favorite tools of control just got dragged back into the light. Today, the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets held the first congressional hearing on the CIA’s MKULTRA program since 1977.

What could have been a dusty historical review turned into a direct warning that the same machinery of mind control, memory manipulation, and behavioral experimentation may never have shut down – and could now run on far more powerful modern engines.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna and her colleagues are doing what previous Congresses largely refused to do: forcing sunlight on one of the intelligence community’s darkest chapters.

The testimony made one thing unmistakable. The CIA lied to lawmakers decades ago about the program’s success. Advances in neuroscience, cyber tools, and artificial intelligence have handed covert operators capabilities Sidney Gottlieb could only dream of. And American citizens remain potential targets.

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DOJ Sues States Over Alleged Failure To Turn Over Food Stamp Data

The Trump administration has sued four states, accusing them of withholding crucial data on food stamp applicants.

Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania refused to turn over information to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that would let federal officials identify fraud, Trump administration lawyers said in lawsuits filed on June 26 against the states.

Officials are asking judges to enter injunctions that would force state authorities to hand over the last five years of applications for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the food stamp program known as SNAP.

The USDA requested the SNAP data in 2025, citing an executive order from President Donald Trump that directed agencies to stop waste, fraud, and abuse, and many states complied with the request.

Data from those states showed that states had enrolled some 186,000 people in SNAP despite those people being deceased, among the discrepancies that added up to $3 billion in wasteful spending, the department said in a report.

The government spends nearly $100 billion a year on SNAP.

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They Classified It So No One Could See It: The Obama Team’s War on a Duly Elected President

Consider what it takes to lie to a free people at scale. A private liar can deceive a neighbor. A campaign can deceive a district. But to deceive an entire nation, and to do it durably, you need something rarer. You need an institution the public has been trained to trust, and you need to borrow its authority. The intelligence community is that institution. When career officers say a thing is so, citizens reasonably assume the judgment rests on secret evidence too sensitive to share. That trust is precisely what makes the apparatus so dangerous when it is turned, because a borrowed badge of credibility can launder a falsehood into a fact. This is the heart of the matter, and it is why the events of 2016 through 2020 deserve a stark description. The coordinated politicization of US intelligence by the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign, and an interlocking network of operatives was the single greatest disinformation campaign in American history.

I want to be careful with that claim, because careless conservatives have squandered credibility by overreaching, and the fact-checkers are waiting. So let me say plainly what I am not arguing. This was not treason in the strict constitutional sense, which requires levying war against the US or adhering to its enemies, proven by two witnesses to an overt act. That high bar is not met here, and pretending otherwise only hands critics an easy rebuttal. What I am arguing is more precise and, in some ways, more damning. The conduct fits the ordinary legal definition of conspiracy, a secret agreement to achieve unlawful ends through unlawful means, and it carries the unmistakable character of sedition, the deliberate poisoning of public perception against a lawful government. The aim was to subvert an election and, having failed at that, to cripple the presidency the voters chose.

Begin with the money, because money leaves a paper trail, and the trail here is not seriously contested. The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee routed roughly $1.02 million to the law firm Perkins Coie for what they would later report to regulators as legal services. Perkins Coie retained the research firm Fusion GPS, which in turn hired a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele, paying his firm roughly $168,000. The product of this arrangement was the now-infamous Steele dossier, a collection of unverified and largely uncorroborated allegations. The political origin of that document is not a matter of conjecture. In 2022 the Federal Election Commission fined the Clinton campaign $8,000 and the DNC $105,000 for misreporting these payments as legal expenses rather than the opposition research they were. A campaign paid for a smear, mislabeled it, and then the smear migrated into the machinery of federal law enforcement.

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Five Years Of Secrets: Motion Filed To Expose Hidden J6 Evidence The Government Won’t Let America See

For more than five years, Americans have been told that January 6 was among the most thoroughly investigated events in our nation’s history. Thousands of hours of surveillance footage were collected. Millions of pages of documents were produced. One of the largest criminal investigations in Department of Justice history unfolded in federal courtrooms across Washington, D.C.

Yet one question has persisted:

Why can’t the American people see the evidence for themselves?

That question is now squarely before a federal judge.

On Friday, attorney Roger I. Roots and paralegal Emily Lambert of The Ticktin Law Group filed a motion on behalf of January 6 defendant Dominic Pezzola asking the court to lift the sweeping protective order that has restricted public access to much of the government’s January 6 discovery.

The motion asks not only that the protective order be dissolved, but that the government’s Evidence.com and Relativity databases be preserved and ultimately made available for journalists, historians, researchers, and the American people to examine.

The filing rests on a straightforward proposition: transparency strengthens confidence in the justice system. It cites longstanding Supreme Court precedent recognizing a presumptive right of public access to criminal proceedings and judicial records and argues that circumstances have changed dramatically since the protective orders were first entered in 2021.

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Minister strips parental access to children’s health records

Newfoundland parents just got the memo: Once your kid turns 12, the government says you’re no longer automatically entitled to know what’s in their medical records.

A June 19 letter from NL Health Services quietly ended automatic parental access to children’s health information. From age 12 to 15, parents now need the child’s permission to see the records. At 16, the teenager takes full control.

Sarah James Furlong, a concerned parent, took to social media in a bid to raise awareness of the apparent government assault on parental rights. Furlong is calling on parents to contact the Minister of Health, Lela Evans, to reverse the decision.

“I respect children’s rights and understand the importance of privacy,” Furlong said in a Facebook post. “However, I believe parents have a fundamental responsibility to protect, support, and advocate for their children—and that responsibility doesn’t end when a child turns 12.”

The move fits a pattern. Newfoundland and Labrador already lets students in Grade 7 and up change their names and pronouns at school without parental consent. Now the same province is extending that logic into medical records.

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Police officer charged with possessing objectionable publications can be named

One of the police officers charged with possessing objectionable publications after investigations arising from a rapid review of police information security controls, has appeared in court and can be named.

Earlier this month, police announced three officers had been charged after the rapid review in the wake of the McSkimming scandal.

On Wednesday, officer Matthew Rogers appeared at the Manukau District Court facing nine charges relating to alleged offending spanning from 2023 through to 2025.

The 59-year-old’s lawyer, Todd Simmonds KC, confirmed name suppression was not sought, and asked Rogers to be remanded without plea to reappear in court at a later date.

The second officer, who faces 11 charges of possessing objectionable publications, some of which depicted child exploitation, bestiality and rape, appeared in court on Wednesday afternoon.

He was also represented by Todd Simmonds KC, who sought interim name suppression to continue.

Judge Frances Eivers granted the interim application, remanded the officer at large and without plea until a court date in August.

Another Wellington officer has had an initial appearance.

Acting Deputy Commissioner Tim Anderson previously said the decision to prosecute police employees was a “serious but important step to take”, and it reflected the seriousness of the allegations uncovered during the investigations.

Anderson said three investigations remained ongoing as part of the rapid review.

In total, police investigated 22 cases connected to the rapid review. Of those, 12 have been resolved through disciplinary action or performance management processes.

Four people have resigned during the review process.

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