Tag: secrecy

Sitting Congressman Reveals Secret Underground Tunnel Beneath U.S. Capitol — Claims There are Still Hidden Network of Passageways Still Unknown to Public

Congressman Tim Moore (R-NC) has revealed a clandestine network of underground tunnels beneath the U.S. Capitol, exposing what he calls “hidden passageways” that have remained largely unknown to the American public.

In a video posted to X, Moore lifted a floor panel to reveal a steep staircase, which appeared to have graffiti on both the entrance and the steps.

According to the congressman, this tunnel may have played a role in the British invasion of 1814, when the Capitol was attacked and burned during the War of 1812.

Tim Moore:
This is one of the neat things about the U.S. Capitol, of course. This building—construction started in the 1700s—has all sorts of little hidden passageways. You saw I just pulled this cover up. You can see, if we get the camera to come over, but you can see there’s a passageway.

These are long stairs that used to be here but were closed off. We’re just off of what’s called Statuary Hall, which at one time was the actual House chamber, and it’s right outside there. But this is just an example of some of the little hidden secrets in the Capitol.

One of the things we do when we bring tour groups in—if it’s a small enough group, it’s a big group of people, but if it’s a small group—we’ll actually take them down this hall.

Believe it or not, my big self has actually gotten down, and more importantly, out of this hall. I’m not going to debut that again today, but suffice to say, I’ve been able to live, tell about it, and get out of there.

It goes all the way down to an old staircase, and I’m told—I can’t verify this—but I’m told that this staircase, which opens to the outside if you go down, was one of the staircases British soldiers used when they breached the Capitol during the War of, I think it was, 1814, when they actually attacked Washington.

When they came in, it was one of the stairs that British soldiers actually came up. There’s a lot of amazing history in this building. When folks come from North Carolina, we try to show things that, if it’s a small enough group and the timing is right, you can actually let folks go down there.

The kids seem to love it. A lot of older folks—not so much. But it’s just one of the neat things about the Capitol, as well as the other day-to-day things that folks see all the time. Thought I might share that with you.

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Syrian officials visited Israel for secret security talks: Report

Syrian officials visited Israel in April to meet with Israeli defense officials after Tel Aviv opened a direct line of communication with Damascus, Haaretz reported on 8 May, citing Syrian sources.

According to one source speaking with the Hebrew daily, a Syrian delegation, reportedly composed of officials from the Quneitra province and one senior defense official, secretly visited Israel for several days at the end of April.

Syria’s government is led by former Al-Qaeda in Iraq commander Ahmad al-Sharaa. Militants from the former Al-Qaeda affiliate, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), toppled the government of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in December.

The Israeli military supported HTS, at the time known as the Nusra Front, during the CIA-backed covert war to topple Assad that began in 2011, including by bombing positions of the Syrian army in defense of Nusra fighters.

The April visit of Syrian officials to Israel coincided with the highly publicized visit by Syrian Druze religious leaders to northern Israel to visit Jethro’s Tomb. The Druze identify Jethro with the Prophet Shuayb, the most revered prophet in the Druze faith.

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Top ex-NASA official claims he saw footage of large, white flying saucer marked with Air Force logo: report

A retired NASA flight surgeon said he saw footage of a 20-foot-wide flying saucer emblazoned with the US Air Force logo performing deft maneuvers in a military hangar more than 30 years ago, according to a report.

Dr. Gregory Rogers, former NASA Chief Flight Surgeon and Air Force Major, came forth with his testimony on the 1992 event after a recent uptick in whistleblowers in the military community on the secretive projects investigating, recovering — and perhaps crafting — anomalous flying objects, according to the Daily Mail.

“I know exactly what I saw that day, and it was in no fashion a conventional flying vehicle,” Rogers, 68, told the Mail.

The space doc relayed that he was stationed at Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 1992, conducting an inspection when an Air Force major approached him in a hallway and offered to show him something that would “knock his socks off,” according to the report.

Rogers was then taken into a room, where the major shut the blinds and locked the door before pulling up CCTV footage that showed a white flying saucer purportedly owned and operated by the US Air Force utilizing unknown engineering, he said.

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The National Endowment for Democracy goes dark

The National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S.-government backed nonprofit designed to influence the domestic politics of countries across the globe, says its efforts are part of a campaign to promote “open and transparent government.”

The group, funded by Congress and working in tandem with the State Department, has backed activists and civil society groups across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa to push for greater disclosure among government entities. For instance, a recent NED report argues that “enhancing transparency” is vital for building trust in institutions and democratic governance, and urges the adoption of new disclosure laws for countries in the Balkans.

Despite the altruistic goals of disclosure for the developing world, NED is now going dark. In a new “duty of care” policy published this week, NED quietly announced a new rule to conceal the names of recipients of its programs from the public. Its 2024 grant list, attached to the policy, features dollar figures and one sentence summaries for over 1,700 grants. All of the external recipient names and identities have been wiped.

The move amounts to a fundamental shift in NED programming. For decades, the group, in accordance with its public demands for transparency, has published annual lists disclosing its grant recipients.

Formed in the early years of the Reagan administration in response to increasing controversy surrounding the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, NED set out to engage in pro-American foreign influence initiatives that were once the domain of covert operations. “This program will not be hidden in the shadows. It will stand proudly in the spotlight, and that’s where it belongs,” stated Reagan in 1983.

“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” stated former acting NED president Allen Weinstein in a widely quoted 1991 interview with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. “The biggest difference is that when such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection,” he continued.

The primary U.S. funder of overt operations has been the NED, the quasi-private group originally headed by Carl Gershman that is controlled by the U.S. Congress, Ignatius explained. Through the late 1980s, it did openly what had once been covert — such as dispensing money to anti-communist forces behind the Iron Curtain and funding dissident media known as ‘samizdat’.

The endowment was initially active inside the Soviet Union. It gave money to Soviet trade unions; to a foundation headed by Russian activist Ilya Zaslavsky; to an oral history project headed by Soviet historian Yuri Afanasyev; to the Ukrainian independence movement known as Rukh, and to many other projects. Avoiding the scandal of journalists and governments uncovering covert political action funding has been the raison d’être.

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CIA “Can Neither Confirm Nor Deny” Whether Secret Virginia Site Is Theirs

A low-profile government complex in northern Virginia – long rumored to be a CIA spook site – briefly appeared on a federal real estate for-sale list last month, only to disappear from the market within hours, in a mysterious vanishing act worthy of a spy novel.

The nondescript Parr-Franconia warehouse complex, tucked just off I-95 a few miles from the Pentagon, popped up on a Trump administration list of “non-core” federal properties slated for potential sale, Bloomberg reports, noting that the list was yanked down less than 24 hours later – including more than 400 other buildings and offices, some housing cabinet-level agencies.

But it was the Springfield cluster that raised eyebrows — 14 buildings, some going by names like “Franconia Building B” and “Butler Building 12,” which don’t appear on any other public database of government real estate.

The CIA’s official response? A non-denial denial.

“The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence” of records related to the proposed sale, the agency said Monday in a response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Bloomberg News – deploying its classic “Glomar” language, coined during a Cold War submarine recovery op in 1974.

That’s spy-speak for: Don’t ask us – we’re not telling.

The site, which dates to 1952, has been the subject of decades of local speculation. Foreign Policy once identified it as a heavily guarded compound used to store “classified files, equipment, and supplies.” Marc Ambinder of The Week called it “perhaps the worst-kept secret in Springfield,” where neighbors talk openly about the strange security measures and rotating surveillance.

“It’s been identified in numerous public forums. The bad guys know it exists; the CIA and the Air Force often assign counter-surveillance teams to the area,” wrote Armbinder.

Even Fairfax County assigns a hefty valuation: the 1.2 million-square-foot property is tax-exempt but carries an appraisal of over $115 million.

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US Universities Don’t Like Unmasking Their Foreign Donors. A New Trump Order Aims To Make Them.

For decades, federal law has required U.S. universities to disclose the sources of large foreign donations to the federal government. But the Biden administration sparsely enforced the law, allowing foreign nationals from adversarial countries to funnel cash to top American schools and stay anonymous.

In some cases, it’s unclear whether the schools themselves are keeping close track of the foreign money they accept. In early February, the Washington Free Beacon filed state records requests with 11 public universities for the identities of foreign donors that gave the schools more than $20,000 in the past two years. Some, like the University of California, Los Angeles and University of Michigan, said it would take months of searching or more than $1,500 in fees to provide an answer.

That won’t fly with President Donald Trump, who last week signed an executive order outlining more robust enforcement of the Higher Education Act of 1965’s foreign donor disclosure requirements. In some cases, it already appears to be spurring action. Another recipient of the Free Beacon‘s records requests, the University of California, Berkeley, for weeks did not respond. On Friday, shortly after Trump signed the order and launched a foreign funding investigation into the school, it sent a list of major foreign donors from 2023 and 2024.

Trump’s order calls on Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to “take appropriate steps to reverse or rescind any actions by the prior administration that permit higher education institutions to maintain improper secrecy regarding their foreign funding,” a reference to the Biden administration’s unusual policies that shielded foreign donors. Historically, the Department of Education disclosed foreign donor names in a public database. During the Biden administration, it stopped publishing names, instead only releasing the countries where each donation came from.

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Tulsi: Assassination Docs on RFK Sr. and MLK Jr. To Be Released Soon

Important documents related to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy Sr. and Martin Luther King Jr. will be released “in the next few days,” according to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

The documents, which have spent “decades” in storage, are currently being scanned for release, Gabbard revealed during a public cabinet meeting with President Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Sr.’s son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now Secretary of Health and Human Services.

“We’ve been scanning—I’ve had over a hundred people working around the clock to scan the paper around RFK, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination,” Director Gabbard said. 

“These have been sitting in boxes in storage for decades, they have never been scanned or seen before. We’ll have those ready to release here in the next few days.”

In response to the announcement, RFK Jr. said he felt, “very gratified.”

RFK Sr., brother of President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in June 1968, after he had won the Democrat presidential primary. The official story that RFK Sr. was killed by a lone gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, has been the subject of intense dispute, just like the circumstances of President Kennedy’s assassination.

In January, President Trump signed an Executive Order to declassify records related to the assassinations of President Kennedy, RFK Sr. and MLK Jr.

After two attempts on his own life during the 2024 presidential campaign, President Trump also vowed to create a commission into presidential assassinations. He said it would be dedicated to RFK Jr.

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Secretive Billionaire-Filled City in California Is One You’ve Likely Never Heard of—Because Residents Don’t Want You To

Tucked into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains is a tiny California town that is home to approximately 1,000 people and just 355 houses—yet it is also one of the wealthiest ZIP codes in the country, with many of its residents boasting either billionaire or multimillionaire statuses.

But unlike Beverly Hills or Bel-Air, the odds are that you have never heard of Bradbury, CA—largely because the wealthy and very secretive people who live there prize their privacy above all else, helping to turn the tony enclave into a veritable sanctuary for high net-worth individuals who want to hide their lives from prying eyes.

According to the Census Bureau‘s 2023 statistics, 39.5% of households in the community, which is bordered by Monrovia and Duarte and is located just a 20-minute drive east of Los Angeles, earn more than $200,000.

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REDACTED: Crossfire Hurricane answers remain blacked out years after Trump declassification order

Key documents from the FBI’s politicized Crossfire Hurricane investigation into false allegations of Trump-Russia collusion remain hidden from public view, but a new order from President Trump will reveal more answers — and documents already obtained by Just the News provide clues on what is to come.

Just the News obtained a portion of the Crossfire Hurricane documents slated for declassification in January 2021, although the majority of the FBI records remain out of the public’s reach due to the Justice Department thwarting Trump. The documents revealed by Just the News in 2021 were interesting both for the new details they revealed and for what remained. Large sections still remain blacked out and hidden from public view behind ongoing redactions.

The declassified documents included transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, who the bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

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UK Tribunal Blocks Government’s Attempt to Keep Apple Surveillance Case Secret

With a necessary reality check, a UK tribunal has told the government that, no, it cannot hold a secret legal battle against Apple over encryption. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the body meant to oversee the country’s surveillance powers, has dismissed efforts by the Home Office to keep the entire case hidden from public view. And in doing so, it has delivered a quietly important win for press freedom and digital rights. Although, things are far from over.

The case revolves around Apple’s Advanced Data Protection system, or ADP. It’s a security feature that gives users the option to encrypt their iCloud data in a way that even Apple itself cannot access. Not through a backdoor, not with a master key, not at all. It’s the kind of robust end-to-end encryption that governments around the world have grown increasingly nervous about.

The UK, it turns out, is no exception.

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