Tag: whistleblowers

The Outrageous Persecution of Julian Assange

Today marks the second and final day in what could very well be Julian Assange’s last extradition trial in front of the British High Court. For almost five years now, the United States government has been working to get the Wikileaks founder extradited to the US to face charges that he violated the Espionage Act.

Inspired by Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers back in 1971, Julian Assange founded Wikileaks in 2006. Assange’s vision was to develop an online portal where whistleblowers could submit evidence of corporate or government wrongdoing without needing to identify themselves or risk exposure. Once submitted, teams of volunteers and journalists would parse the documents to determine legitimacy. And, if it was determined to be authentic, publish the material straight to the internet so the public could see for itself.

For the last decade and a half, Wikileaks has broken a number of major stories. Many of the biggest came from the Afghanistan and Iraq War Logs, along with the so-called Diplomatic Cables leak, all published in 2010. The leaked documents revealed that not only had the US government committed numerous war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade of the war on terror, but there had been official efforts to cover them up.

The Iraq War Logs also brought many details to light about the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) use of torture. And, as journalist Keven Gosztola writes in his excellent book about Assange’s current case, after President Barack Obama famously refused to prosecute anyone involved or compensate survivors of the program, the Diplomatic Cables revealed that American officials “had meddled in the justice systems of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain to shield CIA agents, US military officers, and Bush administration officials from prosecution” related to the torture program.

In 2016, tens of thousands of emails of senior Democratic officials and higher-ups at the Democratic National Committee were leaked to Wikileaks. The emails contained politically damaging revelations for the Hillary Clinton campaign—such as details about a series of private speeches the candidate gave to Wall Street executives—and even some evidence of outright corruption, like the fact that the Democratic National Committee had been sharing upcoming questions with Clinton before primary debates.

A year later, the organization obliterated any resulting goodwill it might have enjoyed from the Donald Trump White House when it published the so-called Vault 7 documents. The leaks detailed aspects of the CIA’s cyber warfare capabilities—most notably the agency’s ability to monitor and remotely control newer cars, smart TVs, personal computers, web browsers, and most smartphones.

The leaks infuriated CIA director Mike Pompeo. In response, he turned the agency’s sights on Assange, who had been granted asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London five years earlier. The CIA got UC Global, the Spanish company in charge of the embassy’s security, to secretly record Assange, including while he met with his lawyers, and to send the recordings back to the CIA—a scheme the head of the company would later be charged for in Spanish court.

And according to a stunning Yahoo News report by Zach Dorfman, Sean Naylor, and Michael Isikoff, Pompeo’s CIA then “plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder” by getting UC Global employees to “accidentally” leave the embassy door open. And further, “some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ for how to assassinate him.” According to depositions from UC Global employees, the preferred plan was to poison the Wikileaks founder.

Evidently, a different approach was chosen. In 2018, the US indicted Assange for conspiring to obtain classified material all the way back in 2010. A year later, Ecuador revoked Assange’s asylum, leading to his April 2019 arrest by London police. The following month, the US requested extradition and added seventeen espionage charges against Assange.

The extradition process has dragged on for almost five years, in large part because of concerns over Assange’s safety in US custody. And based on Dorfman, Naylor, and Isikoff’s reporting, that’s a very reasonable concern.

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Multiple US military whistleblowers reveal how a disc-shaped UFO intercepted nuclear missile and disabled it with ‘laser-beams’ in mid-air over California

The US military is in possession of a video of a UFO apparently disabling a nuclear warhead during a routine test, according to multiple former officials.

They claim the video in question captured a saucer-shaped craft circling the unarmed, dummy warhead shortly after it detached from the Atlas missile booster, then shooting four beams of light at the warhead, disabling it.

Retired US Air Force officers Lieutenant Bob Jacobs and Major Florenze Mansmann claim to have viewed the recording of the 1964 encounter before the tape went missing.  

The former officials were part of a team responsible for capturing video of missile test launches in California with telescopic photography and videography equipment. 

Two days later, after they screened the video, they claim that two plain-clothed CIA agents confiscated the footage and swore them to secrecy.

The incredible account is part of a pattern that some UFO experts have identified, where UFOs seem to interfere with nuclear weapons. 

The alleged incident occurred nearly six decades ago, on September 15, 1964, but it has more recently come into public knowledge due to author Robert Hastings investigating it.

Luis Elizondo acknowledged the existence of the video and claimed he has seen it, according to a February 10 post by Hastings on The UFO Chronicles website. 

Elizondo says he was the former director of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) program to study UFOs, and he has been involved in several high-profile leaks of military footage purporting to show UFOs.

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Tucker Carlson Met with Joe Biden’s Rape Victim Tara Reade and NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden While in Moscow

On February 5th Citizen Free Press noted that Tucker Carlson may also interview Edward Snowden and Biden rape accuser Tara Reade while in Moscow.

Semafor reported on this earlier.

Tucker Carlson has kept a busy agenda in Moscow, meeting with two key American figures living in exile there.

The former Fox News host met for hours Thursday with the NSA leaker Edward Snowden, Semafor has learned. While the former NSA whistleblower was a regular figure in the press in the years after he fled to Russia, he has largely receded from public appearances in recent years, citing the desire for wanted greater privacy for his family.

The Snowden interview was not for Carlson’s video program, but he did tape an interview with Tara Reade, a former junior Senate aide who decades later accused President Joe Biden of sexual assault (an allegation he denied). Reade moved to Russia last year after several years of increasingly speaking out in support of pro-Russian policies. In 2022, the Russian delegation to the United Nations called her to speak in 2022 on “weapons diversion,” and hosted Russia’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations on her YouTube channel. When she made her allegations in 2020, Carlson stood out on the right for his skepticism.

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CIA terminates whistleblower who prompted flood of sexual misconduct complaints

The CIA this week terminated a woman whose whistleblower account of being assaulted in a stairwell at the spy agency’s headquarters prompted a flood of colleagues to come forward with their own complaints of sexual misconduct. The woman’s attorney called the action a brazen retaliation.

While the CIA said that accusation was “factually inaccurate,” it wouldn’t comment further on the case and declined to explain why the 36-year-old did not make it through the agency’s clandestine officer training program known as “the Farm” and, unlike many of her classmates, was not hired into another job.

“To be clear, the CIA does not tolerate sexual assault, sexual harassment or whistleblower retaliation,” CIA spokesperson Tammy Thorp told The Associated Press, adding the agency uses “consistent processes to ensure the fair and equal treatment of every officer going through training.”

The woman’s termination came less than six months after she filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging the CIA retaliated against her for reporting what she said was a 2022 stairwell assault in Langley, Virginia, to law enforcement and testifying about it in a closed congressional hearing.

The lawsuit accused the agency of giving her harsher performance reviews and “slut shaming” her by improperly releasing her personal information during the state prosecution last year of Ashkan Bayatpour, a then-fellow CIA trainee convicted of assaulting her with a scarf.

The woman’s attorney, Kevin Carroll, told the AP that the CIA has now “unlawfully ended a young woman’s career only because she had the moral courage, lacking in her managers, to stand up and be a witness about her sexual assault.”

“The agency’s festering workplace sexual violence problem,” Carroll said, “is now harming the retention of young women who won’t put up with it any longer.”

The woman, who is not being identified because the AP does not generally identify victims of alleged sexual abuse, was credited with launching a reckoning, of sorts, at the CIA because hers was the rare allegation of sexual misconduct at the super-secret spy agency to make it into a public courtroom.

An AP investigation found the case helped embolden at least two-dozen women to come forward to authorities and Congress over the past two years with their own accounts at the CIA of sexual assaults, unwanted touching and what they contend is a campaign to keep them from speaking out.

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FOIA’d Emails Reveal MI AG Nessel Personally Visited Detroit USPS Distribution Center Day Before 2020 Election After Whistleblower Claimed “Thousands of ballots are sitting” Inside Post Office Warehouse

On Monday, November 2, 2020, only one day before a critically important presidential election, Michigan’s Democrat Attorney General was busy investigating a claim by a USPS whistleblower who worked at the Detroit USPS distribution center.

According to FOIA’d documents obtained by independent investigator Yehuda Miller and shared on Twitter,  a postal worker, who asked to remain anonymous, first told MI Rep. Ellissa Slotkin’s office that “thousands of ballots are sitting in the main Detroit postal service distribution center (references their warehouse).” The whistleblower mentioned that “there are boxes and boxes of ballots that have not been counted and the reason being given is because there are not enough sorters.”

The whistleblower complaint was forwarded to MI AG Nessel’s Chief of Staff, Zaineb Hussein.

Good Afternoon Zaineb,

I hope you are safe and well.

Today, our office received a message from another congressional office regarding a postal worker concerned about absentee ballots being held at a local postal distribution facility.

The postal worker reached out to Rep. Slotkin’s office to express concerns about the facility they work at. The postal worker didn’t want to provide a lot of details and wanted to remain anonymous. The worker reported to Slotkin’s office that thousands of ballots are sitting in the main Detroit postal service distribution center (references their warehouse).

The worker mentioned that there are boxes and boxes of ballots that have not been counted and the reason being given is because there are not enough sorters.

We wanted to flag this issue for Secretary Benson’s awareness, but we will also be reaching out to our postal liaison to bring this matter to their attention as well.

Please feel free to let us know if you have any additional questions.

Larissa Richardson | District Director
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, MI-13
O: (313) 463-6217
Personal Pronouns: She, Her, Hers

Instead of contacting the MI AG’s office, Democrat Rep. Ellisa Slotkin’s office contacted Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s office with the complaint.

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Former CIA coder sentenced to 40 years in prison for WikiLeaks ‘Vault 7’ breach

A federal judge sentenced former CIA programmer Joshua Schulte to 40 years in prison on Thursday afternoon on espionage charges for the largest leak in agency history, in addition to child pornography convictions.

Comparing the WikiLeaks “Vault 7” leak of top secret Central Intelligence Agency cyber-espionage tools to a “digital Pearl Harbor,” U.S District Judge Jesse Furman said Thursday he was “blown away by Mr. Schulte’s complete lack of remorse and acceptance of responsibility.”

“The impact on our nation’s intelligence operations was enormous and we will likely never know the extent of the damage caused, but no doubt it was massive and real,” Furman said before imposing the 480-month sentence.

“It did have, as substantiated by the deputy director’s unclassified letter and even more substantiated by a confidential letter, an immediate and catastrophic effect on the CIA, and caused untold damage to national security,” the Obama-appointed judge said at the conclusion of the two-hour sentencing hearing.

Furman sentenced Schulte to 400 months imprisonment on the espionage counts and separately to 80 months for child pornography counts.

Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York asked for the judge to impose a sentence of life prison for Schulte’s convictions of what they called “some of the most heinous, brazen violations of the Espionage Act in American history.”

“Schulte’s theft of an arsenal of extremely sensitive intelligence-gathering cyber-tools from the Central Intelligence Agency and subsequent dissemination of that information to WikiLeaks — which in turn publicized it to America’s adversaries — is ‘one of the largest unauthorized disclosures of classified information in the history of the United States’,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing letter.

Schulte, who has been detained at federal jails in Manhattan and Brooklyn for over six and a half years, requested nine years’ imprisonment followed by five years’ supervised release.

Federal prosecutors argued an additional terrorism enhancement on his sentence was warranted because Schulte’s theft of the arsenal of extremely sensitive, intelligence-gathering cyber-tools from the Central Intelligence Agency — and subsequent dissemination of that information to WikiLeaks — was intended to satisfy a personal vendetta and “clearly calculated to retaliate against the United States as a whole.”

The 35-year-old asked for a sentence of time served, citing the “immoral human rights abuses” he says he endured during his pretrial detention at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

In his lengthy 28-minute sentencing statement, Schulte decried the conditions of his “torture cage” at the Bureau of Prison facility, calling it “New York City’s very own Auschwitz,” and “something only the SS could come up with.”

Judge Furman during sentencing called Schulte’s comparison to Nazi concentration camps “offensive”.

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Fani Willis Axed Employee Who Blew Whistle on Misuse of Federal Funds

Fani Willis may have fired the employee who warned her about mishandling federal funds. But she didn’t deny her allegations.

Less than a year into her tenure as Fulton County district attorney, in 2021, Willis met with Amanda Timpson, an employee in the district attorney’s office responsible for giving nonviolent juvenile offenders “alternatives to the juvenile court system.” During their conversation, a recording of which was reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, Timpson claimed to Willis that she had been demoted after attempting to stop a top Willis campaign aide from misusing federal grant money meant for a youth gang prevention initiative.

According to Timpson, the aide, Michael Cuffee, planned to use part of a $488,000 federal grant—earmarked for the creation of a Center of Youth Empowerment and Gang Prevention—to pay for “swag,” computers, and travel.

“He wanted to do things with grants that were impossible, and I kept telling him, like, ‘We can’t do that,'” Timpson told Willis in a Nov. 19, 2021, meeting. “He told everybody … ‘We’re going to get MacBooks, we’re going to get swag, we’re going to use it for travel.’ I said, ‘You cannot do that, it’s a very, very specific grant.'”

“I respect that is your assessment,” Willis responded. “And I’m not saying that your assessment is wrong.”

Later in the conversation, Willis apologized to Timpson, and said Cuffee had “failed” her administration.

Less than two months later, Willis abruptly terminated Timpson and had her escorted out of her office by seven armed investigators, according to Timpson. When Timpson filed a whistleblower complaint the following year that alleged wrongful termination, Willis’s office issued a statement describing Timpson as a “holdover from the prior administration” who was terminated because of her “failure to meet the standards of the new administration.”

Timpson’s experience sheds further light on how Willis—who campaigned on the promise of restoring “integrity” to the district attorney’s office—does business. The Democrat has come under fire amid revelations that she tapped her lover, Nathan Wade, to handle the office’s racketeering case against former president Donald Trump. Willis is also alleged to have misappropriated taxpayer funds to facilitate her affair with Wade, a married man with scant prosecutorial experience.

To Timpson, these twin incidents demonstrate “a pattern” in Willis’s conduct.

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FBI Blocked Interview of Ex-Gov’t Official Suspect in J6 Pipe Bomb Case, Says FBI Whistleblower

The FBI blocked the surveillance team investigating the January 6 pipe bomb incident from interviewing the suspect tied to the case, a former FBI agent claims.

An individual was caught on security cameras placing a pair of pipe bombs outside the Republican and Democratic National Committee buildings in Washington, D.C. the night before Jan. 6, 2021.

Former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin told the Daily Wire that his surveillance team used the security footage to track the suspect’s movements shortly after he placed the bombs, where he first used a fare card at the Metro station then transferred to a car in Northern Virginia.

Apparently, the person of interest was also identified as a former U.S. military official.

Both the car and the fare card were in the name of “a retired Air Force chief master sergeant who was now working as a contractor with a security clearance.”

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Air Force Whistleblower’s Concerns “Legit” Over US Govt UFO Program Cover-Up; House Oversight Committee

A classified briefing on UFOs delivered to members of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on Friday elicited a mixed response, with some saying they were dissatisfied by the fragmented information presented, while others were grateful to receive some more clarity.

Interest in UFOs, which officials now call unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), surged in July 2023 when the Oversight Committee invited Air Force veteran David Grusch to speak after he’d filed a formal complaint with the Inspector General of the U.S. intelligence community, claiming “the U.S. government is operating with secrecy—above Congressional oversight” on the subject.

During that hearing, Mr. Grusch accused the Pentagon and its private contractors of covering up a “multi-decade” program to reverse-engineer technology retrieved from crashed UFOs piloted by “non-human” beings, or “biologics” as he called them.

He also mentioned knowledge of people harmed or injured in efforts to cover up or conceal the extraterrestrial technology program.

Though apparently only limited information was disclosed during Friday’s 90-minute briefing at the Capitol Building in Washington, the attendees agreed that the hearing seemed to confirm Mr. Grusch’s claims.

“Based on what we heard,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) said, “many of Grusch[’s] claims have merit!”

“I think everybody left there thinking and knowing that Grusch is legit—if they didn’t think that before,” attested Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.).

The Tennessee legislator, one of the stronger voices calling for transparency on the issue of UAPs, nevertheless left the meeting somewhat frustrated, saying the meeting was just “more of the same.”

“By design this issue is very compartmentalized,” he explained. “It’s like looking down the barrel of a .22 rifle. All they know is just right in that little circle.”

“Now it’s just whack-a-mole—you go to the next [briefing], until we get some answers.”

For Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) the limited information presented only proved there was a “concerted effort to conceal as much information as possible—both in Congress and to the general public.”

“I asked very specific questions and was unable to get specific answers,” he said. “And so that’s a problem, and we’re not going to stop until we get the truth.”

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UFO community grows rapidly after whistleblower testimony makes national headlines: ‘Watershed moment’

UFOs, also known as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), are at the center of a “watershed moment” in American politics as the community continues to grow, according to some professors and enthusiasts. 

“We are living in a watershed moment,” Dr. Christopher Bader, a professor at Chapman University, told The Wall Street Journal in a story published Monday, adding that congressional hearings on alien life “have legitimized the discussion of UFOs in a way that is virtually unprecedented.”

UFO whistleblower David Grusch intimated that he was threatened to stay silent on secret government programs and records of alien life during a highly publicized July 26 House Oversight Committee hearing.

Since that hearing, six members of Congress signed an Aug. 21 letter to Inspector General Thomas Monheim to ask for more details on UFO technology and government evidence of extraterrestrial life. 

The Wall Street Journal interviewed longtime UFO believers and newcomers into the community, many of whom said they became interested in extraterrestrial life after Grusch gave his explosive testimony to Congress. 

“With little green men now a subject of serious scrutiny on Capitol Hill, aliens are taking over the American mind,” The Post reported. “Skepticism is declining, with 34% of Americans believing UFOs are probably alien ships or are controlled by nonhuman life-forms in 2022, compared with 20% in 1996, according to polls by YouGov and Newsweek.”

Colleges and universities are also taking note of the increased public interest in UFOs. 

“Following the release of the U.S. Pentagon UFO report, there has been a surge of interest,” a description for a University of Michigan online course titled, “UFOs: Scanning the Skies,” reads. 

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