Tag: war on whistleblowers

Judge Rules Assange Visitors May Sue CIA For Allegedly Violating Privacy

A federal judge ruled that four American attorneys and journalists, who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange while he was in the Ecuador embassy in London, may sue the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for their role in the alleged copying of the contents of their electronic devices.

The Americans sufficiently alleged that the CIA and CIA Director Mike Pompeo—through the Spanish security company UC Global and its director David Morales—“violated their reasonable expectation of privacy” under the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Richard Roth, attorney for the four Americans, reacted, “We are thrilled that the court rejected the CIA’s efforts to silence the plaintiffs, who merely seek to expose the CIA’s attempt to carry out Pompeo’s vendetta against WikiLeaks.”

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Nineteen Years Ago, Journalist Gary Webb Was Murdered After Exposing CIA Drug Trafficking

On December 10, 2004, the body of journalist Gary Webb, 49, was discovered in his home near Sacramento after a moving company worker found a note posted to his front door that read: “Please do not enter. Call 911 and ask for an ambulance.”

Webb’s death was listed as a suicide, but Webb was found with two bullet holes in the head, indicating that he was executed.[1]

In the days leading up to his death, Webb had told friends that he was receiving death threats, being regularly followed by what he thought were government agents, and that he was concerned about strange individuals who were seen breaking into and leaving his house.

In the late 1990s, Webb had written a series of stories for the San José Mercury News, which provided the basis for his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998).

In it, Webb detailed how the explosion of crack cocaine in South Central Los Angeles during the 1980s was sparked by two Nicaraguan émigrés, Danilo Blandón and Norwin Meneses, who sold huge amounts of cocaine to raise funds for a CIA-backed rebel army—the Contras.

Webb was a Pulitzer Prize winner whose “Dark Alliance” series went viral in the early days of the internet. It caused a firestorm that led to the resignation of CIA Director John Deutch after he was grilled by angry Black activists at a meeting in L.A.[2]

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Seven Nashville cops are placed on leave after manifesto written by trans shooter Audrey Hale was released

Seven Nashville police officers have been placed on administrative leave amid an investigation into how the ‘manifesto’ of school shooter Audrey Hale leaked online. 

Nashville Police Department told WSMV that the officers were suspended after a probe into how three pages of notes written by Hale before she opened fire at The Covenant School in March. 

She fatally shot three nine-year-olds and three teachers before being shot dead by police. 

The manifesto had been shrouded in secrecy since the shooting, until they were leaked on Monday by controversial podcast host Steven Crowder, who claimed his reporters obtained it from a detective on the scene. 

Police sources told Fox 17 that the documents were authentic, and purport to show Hale’s plan to target ‘white privileged’ ‘cr*****s’ and ‘f****ts’ before killing herself.  

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CPS DOESN’T KNOW WHAT RECORDS IT DESTROYED RELATED TO KEIR STARMER’S WASHINGTON TRIPS

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), England and Wales’ public prosecutor, has no knowledge of what records it has destroyed related to its previous head Keir Starmer, it can be revealed.

In June, Declassified revealed that the public body had deleted all records of Starmer’s four trips to Washington while he was Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). 

Starmer made trips to Washington in 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2013 at a cost to the British taxpayer of £21,603. It was his most frequent foreign destination while in post and included a meeting with the US Attorney General.

Starmer served as DPP from 2008-13, a period when the body was overseeing Julian Assange’s proposed extradition to Sweden to face questioning over sexual assault allegations. 

During Starmer’s time in post, the CPS was marred by irregularities surrounding the case of the WikiLeaks founder, destroying key emails related to the Assange case, mostly covering the period when Starmer was in charge. 

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He told on ‘badge bending’ and was fired. Now, former Vallejo cop will get nearly $1 million

A former police captain who alleges in a lawsuit that he was fired for whistleblowing on his colleagues and exposing corruption within the Vallejo Police Department will receive nearly $1 million in a settlement with the city.

John Whitney and his attorney, Jayme Walker, agreed to the settlement last week, in which the city will be required to pay Whitney $900,000 as well as all costs, liens and attorney fees.

“I feel vindicated by the settlement agreement because of the amount,” Whitney told The Times in an interview Monday. “You don’t settle for nearly $1 million if you did everything correct.”

Whitney alleges in a lawsuit filed against the city and his former employers in 2020 that he was fired after he told Vallejo City Manager Greg Nyhoff, Mayor Bob Sampayan and then-City Atty. Claudia Quintana that members of the Police Department were bending the corners of their badges to commemorate every time an officer killed a civilian.

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Ex-CIA agent convicted of largest leak in agency’s history faces NYC trial for child porn

A Manhattan jury is expected to hear opening arguments Tuesday at a former CIA engineer’s third New York City trial in as many years, this time including child pornography allegations.

Joshua Schulte – convicted in July 2022 of carrying out the most prolific leak in the CIA’s history — is accused of transporting and possessing thousands of images and videos showing the rape and sexual abuse of children.

The feds say Schulte brought the sick trove to New York in 2016 when he moved to the city from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., for a job at a financial services firm. It was allegedly stored on his home desktop computer, buried under layers of encryption, and categorized by victims’ identities and characteristics.

Prosecutors say the FBI found the disturbing libraries on Schulte’s computer, which included images of very young children, after decrypting files using a password on one of his cellphones during the probe into his leaks at the CIA.

Schulte has previously argued without evidence that the FBI framed him because of what he did at the CIA. He won’t be permitted to make that argument at trial.

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Police stage ‘chilling’ raid on Marion County newspaper, seizing computers, records and cellphones

In an unprecedented raid Friday, local law enforcement seized computers, cellphones and reporting materials from the Marion County Record office, the newspaper’s reporters, and the publisher’s home.

Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the newspaper, said police were motivated by a confidential source who leaked sensitive documents to the newspaper, and the message was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”

The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.

The raid followed news stories about a restaurant owner who kicked reporters out of a meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving.

Meyer said he had never heard of police raiding a newspaper office during his 20 years at the Milwaukee Journal or 26 years teaching journalism at the University of Illinois.

“It’s going to have a chilling effect on us even tackling issues,” Meyer said, as well as “a chilling effect on people giving us information.”

The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists. The law requires law enforcement to subpoena materials instead. Viar didn’t respond to a request to comment for this story or explain why she would authorize a potentially illegal raid.

Emily Bradbury, executive director of the Kansas Press Association, said the police raid is unprecedented in Kansas.

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General, West Point Professor Ran Shadow Investigation to Hunt Down and Silence Military Whistleblower for Mean Tweets

An Army three-star general and a West Point associate professor used government resources in an unofficial investigation to hunt down and punish an anonymous active-duty whistleblower who criticized Army leaders and the Biden administration on social media, according to private emails and text messages obtained exclusively by Breitbart News.

Army Training and Doctrine Command Deputy Commander Lt. Gen. Maria Gervais and Army Maj. Jessica Dawson — who is also an “information warfare research scientist” at the Army Cyber Institute — used their official authority and access to government resources to track down the whistleblower and get him identified publicly and punished by his chain of command.

Despite the lack of evidence, they repeatedly accused the whistleblower of being a “counterintelligence” and “insider threat” in a seeming effort to trigger action by Army Criminal Investigative Division (CID) — an independent federal law enforcement agency with expansive powers designed to investigate serious felonies.

Pat Wier, a civilian defense attorney and Navy reservist, said a CID investigation would require an assumption or designation of a serious threat and called Gervais and Dawson’s trumping up of accusations for exercising free speech rights “wrongful.”

“His alleged actions did not rise to the level of a serious crime, or any crime at all,” he said.

Rather, it appeared to be an attempt by rogue military officials seeking to use the levers of government to punish political dissent.

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DOJ announces multiple indictments against whistleblower who alleged Biden received payments from CCP-affiliated individuals

The Department of Justice has announced multiple indictments against Dr. Gal Luft, the Israeli-American co-director of a Maryland think tank who gained notoriety as the “missing witness” in the investigation into Joe Biden’s corruption. The New York Post recently shared a video of Luft wherein he broke down allegations against Biden and claimed that he had been arrested to prevent him from testifying to the House Oversight Committee with damning evidence against the first family.

Now, long after coming out as a whistleblower, Luft himself has been charged by the Biden DOJ for allegedly engaging in “multiple serious schemes” involving the Chinese and Iranians alongside a “former high-ranking US Government official.” The charges include numerous offenses related to failing to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, arms trafficking, Iranian sanctions violations, and making false statements to federal agents.

According to the DOJ, Luft allegedly “subverted foreign agent registration laws in the United States to seek to promote Chinese policies by acting through a former high-ranking U.S. Government official, acted as a broker in deals for dangerous weapons and Iranian oil, and he told multiple lies about his crimes to law enforcement.”

The agency explained that Luft had allegedly conspired with others to “advance the interests of the People’s Republic of China … as agents of China-based principals, without registering as foreign agents as required under US law.”

He supposedly used his position as co-director of the think tank to recruit and pay the aforementioned government official at the behest of Chinese bosses, to “publicly support certain policies with respect to China.”

In the video shared by the Post, Luft alleged that he had provided potentially inciminating evidence against Biden during a meeting with FBI and DOJ officials in 2019, but that his warnings were not heeded, but rather, covered up.

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Biden’s DOJ Is Pressuring Journalists to Help Build Its Case Against Assange

THE DEPARTMENT OF Justice and FBI are pressuring multiple British journalists to cooperate with the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, using vague threats and pressure tactics in the process. I know because I am one of the British journalists being pressured to cooperate in the case against him, as someone who used to (briefly) work and live with him, and who went on to blow the whistle on WikiLeaks’ own ethical lapses.

Assange is facing extradition to the United States from the U.K., where he is currently in Belmarsh prison in south London, over charges related to dissemination of material leaked by Chelsea Manning and published by WikiLeaks and a coalition of five newspapers through 2010 and 2011. 

That material exposed details of the conditions and deteriorating mental and physical health of Guantanamo Bay’s detainees. And it revealed the details of hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, including shedding new light on the deaths of two Reuters journalists via the shocking Collateral Murder video. 

Under Barack Obama, the DOJ decided it could not prosecute Assange without threatening U.S. journalists and their First Amendment protections — given that the 2010 charges relate to the handling and publication of classified documents in conjunction with reporters and organizations including The New York Times and other major outlets. But first under Donald Trump and then Joe Biden, the department has reversed itself.

The first approach to get me to cooperate with the Assange prosecution came via London’s Metropolitan Police in December 2021. On legal advice, I had stayed quiet about these attempts at the time. But now more journalists have told me that police have turned up on their doorsteps, too, in the last month. Those approached are former Guardian investigations editor David Leigh, transparency campaigner Heather Brooke, and the writer Andrew O’Hagan.

The prosecution of Julian Assange is already a threat to the free media, even before his first day in a U.S. courtroom. Law enforcement trying to coerce journalists into aiding that prosecution makes matters even worse. So I’ve decided to speak out. 

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