Tag: war on whistleblowers

Hunter Biden drops lawsuit against IRS whistleblowers, who say suit was ‘attempt to intimidate’

Hunter Biden has agreed to drop his federal lawsuit against IRS whistle-blowers who publicly argued federal investigations against then-President Joe Biden’s son were being mishandled by their agency and by the Justice Department.

“Intimidation and retaliation were never going to work,” IRS supervisory special agent Gary Shapley and IRS special agent Joseph Ziegler, who publicly raised concerns about what they considered the federal government’s slow-walking of the investigation, they said following the announcement Wednesday evening that the suit had been dismissed.

The lawyers for Hunter Biden filed a joint notice with the IRS telling the federal judge that they “hereby give notice of the dismissal with prejudice of all claims asserted in the Amended Complaint” that had been filed by their client. 

The dismissal being made “with prejudice” essentially means that the lawsuit cannot be brought again.

“It’s always been clear that the lawsuit was an attempt to intimidate us,” Shapley and Ziegler said. “However, we were always motivated by doing the right thing, defending our work, and honoring our duty to the American people.” 

Biden attorneys filed a lawsuit against the IRS in September 2023, alleging “agents have targeted and sought to embarrass Mr. Biden via public statements to the media in which they and their representatives disclosed confidential information about a private citizen’s tax matters.”

“While Mr. Biden has been the victim of various leaks regarding the IRS investigation previously, most recently, two IRS agents – Mr. Gary Shapley and Mr. Joseph Ziegler – and their attorneys raised the stakes to unprecedented levels with their numerous public appearances,” they said.

The lawyers doubled down on these claims in a February 2024 amended complaint to the federal court.

The legal team for the IRS whistle-blowers, at Empower Oversight, on Wednesday said: “Hunter Biden brought this lawsuit against two honorable federal agents in retaliation for blowing the whistle on the preferential treatment he was given by President Biden’s Department of Justice,” they said. “Shapley and Ziegler did nothing wrong.”

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Pentagon whistleblower fears execution after revealing bombshell UFO program secretly studying alien tech

The whistleblower behind a stunning report submitted to Congress – exposing what he claims is a secret Pentagon program tracking unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) – has now revealed his identity and says he fears for his future in speaking out.

Matthew Brown is a former U.S. national security official who previously served as a Policy Advisor for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, a Technical Advisor for the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security, and a Program Advisor for the Department of State. 

He publicly identified himself as the whistleblower in WEAPONIZED Episode 74 – a podcast released Tuesday that is hosted by investigative journalists and UFO experts Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp.

Brown is the author of the Immaculate Constellation Field Report, a document entered into the Congressional Record earlier this year that alleges the Executive Branch has been secretly managing UAP programs for decades – without congressional oversight.

‘This is absolutely what I did not want to do,’ Brown said during the podcast. ‘I am, on a personal level, giving up the future that I made for myself and was going to try to make for a family. My hope is that the stakes are not paid out, but they are life imprisonment and the possibility of execution.’

Brown, who held Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) clearances with a Counterintelligence Scope Polygraph (CI Poly) during his government career, is bound by strict secrecy agreements that carry steep penalties if classified information is improperly disclosed.

Speaking to DailyMail.com, Corbell said those fears are not unfounded – even if rarely enforced to the extreme.

‘When you’re in the classified world, you sign your life away,’ Corbell explained. ‘There are serious consequences for leaking national security information – and yes, on paper, that includes life imprisonment or even capital punishment in rare cases tied to espionage.’

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Senators Peddle Debunked Lies To Attack Gabbard for Supporting Snowden Pardon

Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination as Director of National Intelligence is one of the more hopeful signs that President Donald Trump will make good on his pledge to be a peacemaker.

While Gabbard is not a peacenik, she has fought against some of the worst abuses of the American Empire. She opposed the “regime change” wars in Syria and Libya, the NSA’s mass surveillance of Americans, and demanded a pardon for whistleblower Edward Snowden.

To little surprise, these are the issues that Senators attempted to attack during Gabbard’s confirmation hearing on Thursday. Among the smears were claims that Snowden recklessly disclosed the documents and that he fled to Russia.

The attacks on Snowden leveled by the Senators were outright lies. They shamelessly misrepresented his heroic decision to inform the American people that their government was running a massive surveillance program that violated the Constitutional rights of every American.

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California drops case against David Daleiden for exposing Planned Parenthood baby parts scandal

California prosecutors have finally agreed to dismiss the remaining counts against the investigators of Center for Medical Progress (CMP) for using undercover video to expose Planned Parenthood’s criminal fetal organ harvesting side business, putting an end to a nearly decade-long attempt to punish pro-life journalism.

Starting in 2015, CMP began releasing a series of secretly recorded conversations with officials from Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation that set off a firestorm of controversy and a string of revelations about the abortion industry breaking multiple federal laws against profiting off human tissue, altering abortion procedures for the sake of procuring more useful tissue samples, and potentially even committing partial-birth abortions or infanticide, as well as video examples of abortion workers displaying callousness toward the humanity of the children their “work” killed. 

Neither the Obama nor first Trump administrations took action against the abortion organizations over the revelations, but the pro-lifers who exposed their activities were instead hit with various lawsuits and felony charges on claims of trespassing, misidentifying themselves with fake driver’s licenses, and recording people without their consent.

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Did Keir Starmer destroy the Assange files, illegally pursue Assange for 14 years, and attempt to destroy Assange’s mind?

After nine years of legal battles, a British judge has finally challenged the wall of secrecy erected by British and Swedish authorities around the legal abuse of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Judge Foss, sitting at the London First-Tier Tribunal, has ruled that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) must explain how it came to destroy key files that would have shed light on why it pursued Assange for 14 years. The CPS appears to have done so in breach of its own procedures.

Assange was finally released from Belmarsh high-security prison last year in a plea deal after Washington had spent years seeking his extradition for publishing documents revealing US and UK war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The CPS files relate to lengthy correspondence between the UK and Sweden over a preliminary investigation into rape allegations in Sweden that predate the US extradition case.

A few CPS emails from that time were not destroyed and have been released under Freedom of Information rules. They show that it was the UK authorities pushing reluctant Swedish prosecutors to pursue the case against Assange. Eventually, Swedish prosecutors dropped the case after running it into the ground.

In other words, the few documents that have come to light show that it was the CPS – led at that time by Keir Starmer, later knighted and now Britain’s prime minister – that waged what appears to have been a campaign of political persecution against Assange, rather than one based on proper legal considerations.

It is not just Britain concealing documents relating to Assange. The US, Swedish and Australian authorities have also put up what Stefania Maurizi, an Italian journalist who has been doggedly pursuing the FoI requests, has called “a wall of darkness”.

There are good grounds for believing that all four governments have coordinated their moves to cover up what would amount to legal abuses in the Assange case.

Starmer headed the CPS when many highly suspect decisions regarding Assange were made. If the documents truly have been destroyed, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to ever know how directly he was involved in those decisions.

Extraordinarily, and conveniently for both the UK and Sweden, it emerged during legal hearings in early 2023 that prosecutors in Stockholm claim to have destroyed the very same correspondence deleted by the CPS.

The new ruling by Judge Foss will require the CPS to explain how and why it destroyed the documents, and provide them unless it can demonstrate that there is no way they can ever be retrieved. Failure to do so by February 21 will be treated as contempt of court.

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Judge Threatens To Break the UK’s Wall of Secrecy Around Assange’s Persecution

After nine years of legal battles, a British judge has finally challenged the wall of secrecy erected by British and Swedish authorities around the legal abuse of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Judge Foss, sitting at the London First-Tier Tribunal, has ruled that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) must explain how it came to destroy key files that would have shed light on why it pursued Assange for 14 years. The CPS appears to have done so in breach of its own procedures.

Assange was finally released from Belmarsh high-security prison last year in a plea deal after Washington had spent years seeking his extradition for publishing documents revealing US and UK war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The CPS files relate to lengthy correspondence between the UK and Sweden over a preliminary investigation into rape allegations in Sweden that predate the US extradition case.

A few CPS emails from that time were not destroyed and have been released under Freedom of Information rules. They show that it was the UK authorities pushing reluctant Swedish prosecutors to pursue the case against Assange. Eventually, Swedish prosecutors dropped the case after running it into the ground.

In other words, the few documents that have come to light show that it was the CPS – led at that time by Keir Starmer, later knighted and now Britain’s prime minister – that waged what appears to have been a campaign of political persecution against Assange, rather than one based on proper legal considerations.

It is not just Britain concealing documents relating to Assange. The US, Swedish and Australian authorities have also put up what Stefania Maurizi, an Italian journalist who has been doggedly pursuing the FoI requests, has called “a wall of darkness”.

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Suspicious OpenAI Whistleblower Death Ruled Suicide

The November death of former OpenAI researcher-turned-whistleblower, 26-year-old Suchir Balaji was ruled a suicide, the San Jose Mercury News reports.

According to the medical examiner, there was no foul play in Balaji’s Nov. 26 death in his San Francisco apartment.

Balaji had publicly accused OpenAI of violating US copyright law with ChatGPT. According to the NY Times;

He came to the conclusion that OpenAI’s use of copyrighted data violated the law and that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet.

In August, he left OpenAI because he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit.

“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he said during a recent series of interviews with The New York Times.

The Times named Balaji a person with “unique and relevant documents” that the outlet would use in their ongoing litigation with OpenAI – which claims that the company, and its partner Microsoft, are using the world of reporters and editors without permission.

In an October post to X, Balaji wrote: “I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them. I initially didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies. When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense for a lot of generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they’re trained on. I’ve written up the more detailed reasons for why I believe this in my post. Obviously, I’m not a lawyer, but I still feel like it’s important for even non-lawyers to understand the law — both the letter of it, and also why it’s actually there in the first place.”

He then made a lengthy post on his personal blog outlining why he thinks OpenAI violates Fair Use. Four weeks later he was dead.

Balaji, who grew up in Cupertino, California, studied computer science at UC Berkeley – telling the Times that he wanted to use AI to help society.

“I thought we could invent some kind of scientist that could help solve them,” he told the outlet.

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OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

A former OpenAI researcher known for whistleblowing the blockbuster artificial intelligence company facing a swell of lawsuits over its business model has died, authorities confirmed this week.

Suchir Balaji, 26, was found dead inside his Buchanan Street apartment on Nov. 26, San Francisco police and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said. Police had been called to the Lower Haight residence at about 1 p.m. that day, after receiving a call asking officers to check on his well-being, a police spokesperson said.

The medical examiner’s office has not released his cause of death, but police officials this week said there is “currently, no evidence of foul play.”

Information he held was expected to play a key part in lawsuits against the San Francisco-based company.

Balaji’s death comes three months after he publicly accused OpenAI of violating U.S. copyright law while developing ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence program that has become a moneymaking sensation used by hundreds of millions of people across the world.

Its public release in late 2022 spurred a torrent of lawsuits against OpenAI from authors, computer programmers and journalists, who say the company illegally stole their copyrighted material to train its program and elevate its value past $150 billion.

The Mercury News and seven sister news outlets are among several newspapers, including the New York Times, to sue OpenAI in the past year.

In an interview with the New York Times published Oct. 23, Balaji argued OpenAI was harming businesses and entrepreneurs whose data were used to train ChatGPT.

“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he told the outlet, adding that “this is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole.”

Balaji grew up in Cupertino before attending UC Berkeley to study computer science. It was then he became a believer in the potential benefits that artificial intelligence could offer society, including its ability to cure diseases and stop aging, the Times reported. “I thought we could invent some kind of scientist that could help solve them,” he told the newspaper.

But his outlook began to sour in 2022, two years after joining OpenAI as a researcher. He grew particularly concerned about his assignment of gathering data from the internet for the company’s GPT-4 program, which analyzed text from nearly the entire internet to train its artificial intelligence program, the news outlet reported.

The practice, he told the Times, ran afoul of the country’s “fair use” laws governing how people can use previously published work. In late October, he posted an analysis on his personal website arguing that point.

No known factors “seem to weigh in favor of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data,” Balaji wrote. “That being said, none of the arguments here are fundamentally specific to ChatGPT either, and similar arguments could be made for many generative AI products in a wide variety of domains.”

Reached by this news agency, Balaji’s mother requested privacy while grieving the death of her son.

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Federal Whistleblower Alleges Retaliation for Reporting Hatch Act Violation and Anti-Trump Rhetoric

A shocking claim from a federal employee has surfaced, alleging political persecution, retaliation and discrimination for reporting Hatch Act violations and partisan rhetoric within the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Tom Cullerton, a disabled Veteran and seasoned federal employee, detailed his concerning experience in exclusive comments to The Gateway Pundit.

Cullerton had previously exposed what he describes as blatant violations of federal ethics rules and a hostile work environment orchestrated by USDA and in the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) officials related to illegal hiring practices and discrimination.

As well, Cullerton says the staff are regularly receiving “partisan content” from bosses who are overly partisan and political. Cullerton says these officials have posted articles talking about the origins of the Civil Service originating from the assassination of President Garfield in 1881 as a positive thing, indicating further hostility to the incoming President-Elect.

Cullerton also says his complaints, which were supposed to be confidential, were quickly shared with his bosses causing workplace retaliation. He further claims he was illegally removed and transferred without a personnel action for past protected reports to a no-work environment for 1-year before an agency settlement agreement reversed all of these illegal actions. He claims he was further retaliated against as a disabled Veteran.

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Netanyahu Knew All Along – Israeli Government Staffer Reveals All

Eli Feldstein is accused of unlawfully acquiring sensitive military information and leaking it to influence public opinion.

The lawyer representing Eli Feldstein, spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security office and accused of leaking classified security documents, has stated that Netanyahu was aware of both the documents and the plan to leak them, Israeli media reported on Wednesday.

Feldstein’s lawyer, Oded Savoray, reportedly accused the prime minister of “shirking responsibility for an event he caused” and stated that Feldstein chose not to remain silent, effectively sacrificing himself for Netanyahu.

“There was a stage in the investigation where he decided to stop taking the fall for the Prime Minister and his office,” attorney Savoray told the Kan public broadcaster, referring to Feldstein’s assertion that Netanyahu knew about the document before it was published in German tabloid Bild.

“(Feldstein) did not say that Netanyahu ordered the document to be released to foreign media, but that he knew about the document and the decision to release it to the media,” the lawyer added.

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