Tag: secrecy

NED leader cut off in Congress after boasting of ‘deploying’ 200 Starlinks to Iran amid violence

The National Endowment for Democracy’s president, Damon Wilson, bragged to a House committee of his group’s aggressive efforts to spark unrest in Iran, including by smuggling Starlink terminals and fashioning anti-Iran narratives for the media.

Damon Wilson, the head of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), was interrupted by a member of Congress during a House oversight hearing on February 24 after revealing that his agency “began supporting the deployment [and] operation of about 200 Starlinks early on” amid the violence which swept through Iran last month.

Before he could finish the sentence, he was cut off by the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs, Rep. Lois Frankel, who told Wilson: “You know what, I’m going to interrupt you – we’d better not talk about it.”

Wilson’s comments had been prompted by a question from Frankel, who requested details of what appears to be a new and apparently secret initiative by the State Department to provide Starlink terminals to Iranians.

Wilson appeared to take credit for both the recent unrest and Iran and subsequent media framing of the chaos. “What we’re seeing today, the Endowment has been making investments over years that have ensured that there have been secure communications, including Starlinks… that allowed information to go both in and out of the country,” he stated.

According to the New York Times, the Elon Musk-produced internet systems had been smuggled into the country by a “ragtag network of activists, developers and engineers [who] pierced Iran’s digital barricades.” It is clear now that the NED was at least partly responsible for funding and coordinating that network.

With Starlink emerging as a key weapon in the information war waged against Iran, it’s unclear how anti-government actors have managed to smuggle the devices into the country. But a recent incident in which a senior Dutch diplomat was caught trying to sneak multiple Starlink units and satellite phones through security at Iran’s Imam Khomeini Airport gives a hint.

The National Endowment for Democracy was founded in 1982 under the auspices of then-CIA Director William Casey to topple socialist and independent governments through the direct sponsorship of NGO’s, media organizations and political parties. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” NED co-founder Allen Weinstein said of the Endowment’s work in 1991. 

Despite its mission of promoting transparency and “fundamental freedoms” abroad, the NED is now a dark money group which conceals the names of its local partners under a “duty of care” policy announced in 2025. During his congressional testimony this February, Wilson insisted the policy was necessary for the security of grantees on the ground.

The NED’s work to smuggle Starlink terminals into Iran is therefore a covert operation aimed at promoting unrest. And according to Wilson, it is now a key part of the Endowment’s most aggressive initiative.

Keep reading

The Deep State Strikes Back: James Comey’s Leaker Claims ‘The Epstein Files Shouldn’t Have Been Released’

Decades from now, when historians finish poring through the millions of Epstein documents and 300+ gigabytes of data, the uproar of today, I suspect, will be lumped into the same category as the Satanic panic of the 1980s and the daycare sex-abuse hysteria of the 1990s: More hype than substance; more conspiratorial fearmongering than fact-based reporting.

Because, after both Republican and Democratic administrations reviewed them, there’s just not any there there. Instead of an avalanche of evidence about foreign espionage, blackmail schemes, and Jeffrey Epstein being the James Bond of pedophilia, a far gloomier image emerges:

Epstein wasn’t abusing children because a foreign government told him it was a good idea. He did it because he’s a disgusting, vile sociopath who enjoyed abusing young girls — as did his “friends.”

He’s not a puppeteer. He’s simply a pervert.

And he’s a pervert whose financial model demanded constant, high-level networking with wealthy businessmen, VIPs, and powerful dignitaries. Epstein leveraged his personal connections into business partners; that’s how he made money. I’m sure his parties and/or harem were part of his pitch.

Sex sells. That’s the sad reality.

Fun fact: Early in my career, I worked for a PR firm that had a prostitute on standby. When an important brand manager visited Tampa, he (and it was almost always a he) would go partying with the PR executives — and wouldn’t you know it, he’d just so happen to bump into a beautiful woman and have a fantastic time.

From the firm’s perspective, it was the cheapest, most cost-efficient way to protect a six-figure PR account: If the brand manager had fun, he’d be less likely to dump us for another firm.

I’m not saying it was right, honorable, or ethical. Obviously, it’s sleazy as hell. No, it wasn’t my decision — but I was aware of it and didn’t quit, which says something ugly about my moral character, too.

Nor is it a perfect parallel to the Epstein situation: For starters, this prostitute was an adult woman. Furthermore, nobody forced, intimidated, or coerced her; she happily did it for the money — and she could (and did) reject certain assignments.

But the common thread of leveraging sex to monetize relationships is 100% applicable. It happens a lot.

And that’s the biggest blessing of the Epstein Files: It took the repulsive practice of peddling flesh for financial favors out of the shadows. Today, the whole world knows the truth.

Sunlight really is the best disinfectant.

Keep reading

Epstein Hid Secret Files in Storage Units Across the US, May Include Unseen Evidence of Crimes

The secretly stashed Epstein files.

It’s long been known that late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein kept a trove of files on his ‘friends and clients’, but a new report by British paper The Telegraph reveals that he secretly hid computers, photographs, and other equipment in storage units scattered across the US.

It is also believed that he paid private detectives to shuffle the material around when police started closing in on him.

The New York Post reported:

“Financial records and emails […] revealed that the dead pedophile rented at least six storage lockers nationwide, some starting in 2003, and paid for them until 2019.

[…] The units were used to house items from Epstein’s homes, including computers and CDs from his private Caribbean island, Little Saint James.”

Keep reading

FBI Wins Court Ruling to Keep Twitter Payments Secret

A federal judge has handed the FBI a win in its attempts to keep secrets. On February 4th, Chief Judge James Boasberg ruled that the bureau can keep secret the precise amounts it paid Twitter between 2016 and 2023 for complying with legal process requests.

Judicial Watch, which had sued under the Freedom of Information Act, walked away empty-handed.

We obtained a copy of the opinion for you here.

You may remember our earlier reporting on how the FBI was paying Twitter. The payments totaled at least $3.4 million between October 2019 and February 2021 alone. That figure emerged from the Twitter Files released in December 2022. The FBI has never confirmed it. Neither has Twitter. And now, thanks to Boasberg’s ruling, the quarterly breakdown that would show exactly when the money flowed, and how much, stays buried.

Keep reading

Boasberg Rubber-Stamps DOJ Request To Keep FBI-Twitter Payments Secret

When the Twitter files hit in December of 2022, they revealed that the Biden administration had paid Twitter at least $3.4 million between October 2019 and February 2021 to reimburse the pre-Musk, left-leaning social media giant for a flood of requests. 

During this period, the Biden DOJ was going after vaccine skeptics, lab-leak proponents, 2020 election ‘deniers,’ Catholic parents, Hunter Biden laptop / Burisma content, and conservative news outlets. We also learned that the FBI’s Elvis Chan and crew were holding weekly meeting with Twitter on “misinformation,” and flagged thousands of accounts for the above. 

Days after the Twitter files were released, watchdog group Judicial Watch sued the Biden DOJ, which oversees the FBI, over a FOIA request demanding to know how much the FBI paid Twitter from 2016 onward. The FBI initially refused, but eventually released 44-pages of documents with the key payment details redacted – claiming the data was protected under FOIA’s “Exemption 7(E),” which lets agencies hide info about law enforcement methods if releasing it could help criminals or enemies dodge detection.

Judicial Watch then narrowed their claims to just those redacted payment amounts (JW dropped other issues such as vendor names), however in December of 2025, the Trump DOJ asked Judge James Boasberg for a Motion for Summary Judgement to deny Judicial Watch’s request – effectively concealing the extent to which the FBI, under Trump and Biden, was going after Americans. 

In its request for summary judgement, US Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office (say it ain’t so!) argued that revealing payments that are tied to real investigations could reveal super secret investigative methods – such as how much the FBI is “engaging” with Twitter vs. other platforms, which could lead to ‘bad guys’ (criminals, hackers, foreign spies) to switch to platforms with less FBI activity, and that it might reveal shifts in FBI priorities over time.

Revealing the quarterly totals could also betray “mosaic theory,” where seemingly harmless info (like one quarter’s payment) can be pieced together with public data (e.g., Twitter’s transparency reports) to form a big picture of FBI strategies.

Earlier this month, Boasberg agreed – ruling that revealing the payments could expose FBI “techniques and procedures” (how they monitor online threats) and help bad actors figure out what the FBI is focused on, allowing them to adapt and change strategies. 

Boasberg wrote in his opinion that the 7(E) exemption is valid because it could “risk circumvention of the law.” 

Keep reading

Trump blasts Obama for sharing ‘classified’ alien secrets: ‘Big mistake’

Donald Trump claims that Barack Obama acted improperly by allegedly sharing classified information with Americans when he said that aliens exist. 

Podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen asked the former president in an episode that aired January 14 if aliens are real.

‘They’re real, but I haven’t seen them,’ the former president replied. He joked that they aren’t being kept at Area 51, as far as he knows.

The clip went so viral and sparked so much speculation that Obama had to post a clarification the following day where he explicitly stated: ‘I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!’

Rather, he said, the former president was sharing his personal belief that ‘the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there.’

But Trump said on Thursday on his way to Georgia that Obama was ‘not supposed’ to be sharing this ‘classified information.

‘I don’t know if they’re real or not,’ Trump told Fox News reporter Peter Doocy aboard Air Force One.

‘I can tell you he gave classified information. He made a big mistake,’ he added.

Keep reading

$1.2 Billion Suspicious Epstein Transactions? Wyden Demands Investigation After JP Morgan Failed To Report For Years

Now that we’re making progress on Epstein – after President Trump and Mike Johnson were forced to cave under overwhelming pressure for DOJ disclosure – a logical next step is to look into who was funding the notorious sex-trafficker. 

On Thursday morning, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) called for an investigation into whether JPMorgan Chase deliberately concealed suspicious transactions by Epstein. 

You really just need to look at Exhibit A in Wyden’s memo (dated Wednesday) based on unsealed court records: the number of transactions flagged as suspicious between 2002 – 2016, vs. a flurry of almost $1.3 billion in suspicious transactions that the bank scrambled to file right after Epstein died in jail awaiting trial. 

Wyden writes: 

The unsealed court records include copies of SARs that JPMC filed on Epstein’s accounts between 2002 and 2019. Between 2002 and 2016, JPMC filed 7 SARs flagging only $4.3 million in suspicious transactions from Epstein’s accounts.¹ Only after Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges did JPMC report the full extent of Epstein’s suspicious financial activity. In August and September of 2019, JPMC filed two SARs flagging more than 5,000 suspicious wire transfers moving approximately $1.3 billion in and out of Epstein’s accounts.² This is the strongest evidence yet that JPMC should face an investigation for failure to appropriately monitor and report Epstein’s financial activity.

According to internal bank emails, JPMorgan may have held off on filing the SARs (suspicious activity reports) because it wanted “to continue working with Epstein,” who was a great source of referrals despite firing him as a client in 2013, the report found.

The bank said in late October that “it was flagging about 4,700 transactions, totaling more than $1 billion, because they were potentially related to reports of human trafficking involving Mr. Epstein. It also mentioned Mr. Epstein’s wire transfers to Russian banks and sensitivities around “his relationships with two U.S. presidents.” Mr. Epstein at times was close with President Trump and former President Bill Clinton,” according to the NYT.

Wyden said in a statement that it was “clear that JPMorgan Chase ought to face criminal investigation for the way it enabled Epstein’s horrific crimes,” and that both Congress and the DOJ should investigate the bank – which has repeatedly issued statements of regret for working with Epstein, and claims it did all it could with the information it had at the time.

“The second the government finally made public the sex trafficking details in 2019 — information they clearly had for years — we identified for law enforcement a range of Epstein’s past transactions intended to assist with the investigation,” said bank spokeswoman Patricia Wexler on Thursday. 

Will Wyden actually follow the money?

Keep reading

Newly Declassified FBI Memos Reveal Bureau Ran SECRET ‘J6 Tabletop Exercise’ in Summer 2020 — Planned ‘Mass Prosecutions’ and ‘Embedded Informants’ MONTHS Before Capitol Event

The deep state’s fingerprints are all over the events of January 6, and a newly declassified memo has just blown the lid off the entire operation.

Documents obtained by Just the News and recently turned over to Congress by FBI Director Kash Patel at the request of Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), show the FBI’s Boston Field Office led an internal intelligence assessment warning that “domestic violent extremists (DVEs)” could escalate violence if the 2020 election results were contested.

This wasn’t just a routine drill. It was a blueprint for the very tactics used to hunt down and persecute Trump supporters: undercover informants and “heavy-handed” mass prosecutions for minor offenses, according to the news outlet.

The documents show that while the American public was focused on the 2020 campaign, the FBI’s Boston office was busy conducting a “tabletop exercise” imagining election-related violence.

According to the FBI’s own internal Executive Analytical Report dated August 21, 2020, the Bureau assessed that:

“…Domestic violent extremist (DVE) threats related to the 2020 elections likely will increase as the election approaches… ‘Election-related threats’ include but are not limited to those against candidates, campaign events, presidential conventions… and threats or plots related to electoral outcomes.”

While the bureau looked at “anarchists” on the left, their primary focus, and their eventual implementation, was laser-targeted at the American right.

Perhaps the most stunning revelation is the Bureau’s recommendation to build what it called a “robust source base” embedded within groups deemed capable of post-election violence.

The assessment explicitly recommended embedding Confidential Human Sources (CHS) within potentially violent groups to provide “early detection and disruption of planning for future events.”

This is exactly what played out. We now know, thanks to whistleblower reports and congressional oversight, that there were informants embedded in the crowd on January 6.

Keep reading

Members of US Congress see the unredacted Epstein files

Members of Congress in Washington DC can now view the millions of documents from the investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein files, without the extensive redactions made by the Justice Department. According to a letter sent to lawmakers they can take notes of the documents, but not make electronic copies. Also: lawyers for Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein, say she will speak fully and honestly about her relationship with the late sex offender, but only if President Trump grants her clemency. The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, has told his MPs that he will not quit after the leader of his party in Scotland called on him to resign. A lawyer at a landmark trial in California has accused the technology giants, Meta and Google, of deliberately making their platforms addictive to children. Australia’s prime minister has defended a visit by the Israeli president, after clashes in Sydney between police and pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Officials at the Winter Olympics in Italy are to investigate why medals keep breaking.

Keep reading

Pritzker’s “Blind” Trust and $20B in Taxpayer Contracts Raise Waste, Fraud and Abuse Questions

Illinois taxpayers are being asked to believe a fairy tale.

They are told that Gov. JB Pritzker’s massive personal fortune sits inside a “blind trust,” safely sealed off from the decisions of the state government. But the numbers tell a different story – one that is becoming impossible to ignore.

Since Pritzker took office in 2019, companies tied to his blind trust have received more than $20 billion in Illinois state contracts, all paid for with taxpayer money.

That is not blindness. That is precision.

A blind trust is supposed to prevent conflicts of interest, not repeatedly intersect with state spending on a scale that dwarfs most state budgets. Yet under Pritzker, taxpayer-funded contracts continue to flow to companies within his financial orbit – healthcare giants, Medicaid contractors, and corporate entities deeply embedded in Springfield’s lobbying culture.

This is not a one-off coincidence. It is a pattern – and patterns are what expose systems.

Illinois has lived under one-party Democratic rule for years. When competition disappears and oversight weakens, corruption doesn’t need to hide. It operates in plain sight, wrapped in legal language and dismissed as “normal.”

That same pattern extends beyond healthcare and into the Pritzker family’s hospitality empire.

Recent disclosures uncovered show that more than $180 million in taxpayer-funded renovations and upgrades have flowed to the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place since 2011.

Keep reading