Tag: secrecy

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.

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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.” 

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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.

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$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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Massie, Khanna spotted 6 individuals ‘likely incriminated’ in unredacted Epstein files

Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said they spotted at least six names of individuals “likely incriminated” by their inclusion in the Epstein files after the two reviewed an unredacted tranche of the documents.

Members of Congress were permitted for the first time Monday to review the unredacted versions of all the Department of Justice (DOJ) files related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Massie and Khanna were the two lead sponsors of the bill that forced the public release of the files.

“There are six men. We went in there for two hours. There’s millions of files, right? And in a couple of hours, we found six men whose names have been redacted, who are implicated in the way that the files are presented,” Massie told reporters outside the Justice Department office where lawmakers can review the files.

The two lawmakers did not name the men but said one is a high-ranking official in a foreign government while another is a prominent individual.

“None of this is designed to be a witch hunt. Just because someone may be in the files doesn’t mean that they’re guilty. But there are very powerful people who raped these underage girls — it wasn’t just Epstein and [his close associate Ghislaine] Maxwell — or showed up to the island or showed up to the ranch or showed up to the home knowing underage girls were being paraded around,” Khanna said.

Massie said he would not be releasing the names himself.

“I think we need to give the DOJ a chance to go back through and correct their mistakes,” he said.

“They need to themselves check their own homework.”

The law that mandated the release of the files allowed for narrow redactions, but lawmakers and victims of Epstein have raised questions about the breadth of what was blacked out and the fact that some names of victims were not.

Massie described an FBI form that listed conspirators in which the Justice Department redacted the name and photo of one of the men who was listed.

The lawmakers also shed light on one email in the latest tranche that garnered significant attention, in which one redacted individual thanked Epstein for a “fun night” and added, “Your littlest girl was a little naughty.” 

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Andrew ‘shared confidential information with Epstein as trade envoy’

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor knowingly shared confidential information with Jeffrey Epstein from his official work as trade envoy in Asia, according to information in the latest release of the Epstein files.

Emails in the files show the former prince passing on secret details of investment opportunities to the convicted paedophile following his visits to Singapore, Hong Kong and Vietnam in 2010 and 2011.

This was after Epstein was first convicted for soliciting a prostitute and procuring a child for prostitution in 2008, for which he was jailed for 18 months.

Trade envoys are legally bound to confidentiality over sensitive, commercial or political information from their visits abroad.

Emails suggest Andrew had told Epstein of his official upcoming trips to Singapore, Vietnam, Shenzhen in China and Hong Kong on October 7, 2010. He was then accompanied by business associates of Epstein on these visits, the BBC reported.

After the trip, he forwarded official reports of the visits to Epstein on November 30, five minutes after he had been sent them by his then special adviser Amit Patel.

In further emails from the files dated Christmas Eve 2010, it appears he sent Epstein a confidential briefing on investment opportunities in the reconstruction of Helmand Province, Afghanistan, which was being managed by the British armed forces and funded by UK government money.

The messages contradict Andrew’s claim that he broke off his friendship with the paedophile in December 2010, which he asserted in his disastrous BBC Newsnight interview in 2019.

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DOJ limits congressional review of Epstein records to publicly released files

Lawmakers set to review unredacted Jeffrey Epstein records at the Justice Department beginning Monday will be allowed to examine only documents that have already been released to the public, not the full universe of Epstein-related materials the department has identified, according to Justice Department correspondence and congressional aides.

In a Jan. 30 letter to Congress, the Justice Department said it identified more than 6 million pages as potentially responsive to the Epstein Files Transparency Act but has released roughly 3.5 million pages in total, including about 3 million pages disclosed last week. The department said the remaining materials were duplicative, non-responsive, privileged, sealed by court order, or otherwise protected from disclosure.

Under the review process announced Friday, members of Congress may view unredacted versions of the publicly released documents in person at Justice Department headquarters. The arrangement does not provide access to materials outside the public release, according to reporting by the Associated Press.

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