FBI Dragnet for Google Data Pertaining to Jan. 6 Should Concern Us All
Now, if it sounds to you like that’s problematically overbroad, that’s what it sounds like to the attorneys of one of the defendants, David Rhine, as well.
DOJ Corruption and Malfeasance
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Now, if it sounds to you like that’s problematically overbroad, that’s what it sounds like to the attorneys of one of the defendants, David Rhine, as well.
Jordan threatens to subpoena ex-FBI official after she backs out of interview before House Judiciary Committee
EXCLUSIVE: House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jim Jordan is threatening to subpoena the former FBI official who has been accused by whistleblowers of ordering agents to classify cases as domestic violent extremism even if they did not meet standards for such, after she backed out of a scheduled transcribed interview before the panel Friday.
Jill Sanborn, the former executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Branch, had offered to sit for a transcribed interview with Jordan, R-Ohio, and Republicans on the committee to discuss the bureau’s focus and case work with regard to domestic violent extremism. The interview was set for Friday, Dec. 2.
Fox News has learned that Sanborn has decided not to testify voluntarily on Friday. Her attorney, Carter Burwell, notified the committee this week, and instead proposed several dates for Sanborn to voluntarily appear for an interview in early 2023.
Why do you need a lawyer when you are talking about what you did on your job .? Is a lawyer there because you know you did something wrong.
ICE Is Underreporting Illegals It Releases Into The Country Without Tracking Equipment By Over 18,000%
ICE disseminated the document to participants, including ICE Director Tae Johnson and other top agency officials as well as leaders from nonprofit organizations, of a Thursday event about ICE’s “Alternatives to Detention” program, which the agency put in place in 2004 to monitor illegal aliens released into the U.S. interior with ankle bracelets and cell phones. ICE disclosed to the attendees that there are 49,459 illegal aliens that aren’t monitored with any tracking equipment as of Nov. 14, while its own website says there are 266 as of Nov. 19.
The figure sent to the program attendees is over 18,000% more than the figure ICE has on its website. ICE didn’t respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
“The Biden administration is hostile to transparency, and when it does publish data, it refuses to respond to media inquiries regarding significant discrepancies like this,” a former ICE official with knowledge of the Alternatives to Detention program told the DCNF, confirming the figure was underreported. “Likely, ICE communication staffers are having a lot of difficulty defending this administration’s chaotic and lawless policies.”
Jim Jordan turns up heat on Obama intel chiefs and FBI brass implicated in bias complaints
Jordan renewed his requests to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former Director of the CIA John Brennan for documentation related to their October 2020 claim that the information on Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop was Russian disinformation.
"James Clapper & John Brennan are on notice," Jordan tweeted on Thursday along with copies of the letters.
Jordan is also seeking documentation and information from FBI officials pertaining to whistleblower complaints that the agency is engaging in a "purge" of employees with conservative views.
He wrote again to Jennifer Moore, executive assistant director of the FBI's Human Resources Branch, about the whistleblower complaints.
"Recently, we received information suggesting you have retaliated against at least one whistleblower who has made protected disclosures to Congress," Jordan wrote to Moore in September. "As we informed Director Christopher Wray, we take whistleblower retaliation seriously and we therefore require that you appear for a transcribed interview as soon as possible."
Bare-ya-cuda
Well-Known Member
Get yourself a faraday bag for your electronic devices.
How the FBI’s nod and a wink got social media to censor The Post’s Hunter Biden reporting
Just don’t look for a smoking gun. We’re not going to see an FBI document that says, “Tell Twitter the Biden evidence is Russian disinformation.” When the new Chief Twit, Elon Musk, released the so-called Twitter Files over the weekend, Matt Taibbi’s consequent thread of reporting observed there’s no evidence of a specific warning to social-media platforms that the Biden information was sourced to Russia or hacked. As Devine countered, however, there is significant evidence of FBI collusion in the scheme.
I can explain the apparent disconnect. It is not necessary for FBI officials to issue specific warnings to convey the message that a story should be killed.
In these schemes, there are sophisticated actors in each camp, including former government officials in media and social media. When government officials do their nod-and-a-wink routine, these execs get the hint. The higher-ups at Twitter and Facebook knew the FBI wasn’t holding regular pre-election meetings with them idly. They would also have understood that when briefing private parties the FBI can’t accuse people of specific criminal misconduct — such as espionage and hacking. So it keeps things “general” (as Taibbi described the warnings). That, along with its perceived authority, allows it to get its accusatory message across but later deny it did so.
Such machinations would have been quite familiar to the likes of James Baker, the former FBI general counsel who was a top lawyer at Twitter in 2020. The game is also the stock-in-trade of national-security veterans who feign nonpartisanship — such as the 51 former intelligence officials who claimed, based on a hunch rooted in no hard evidence, that Hunter Biden’s laptop bore the earmarks of Russian disinformation, a bogus claim Joe Biden repeated as if it were established at a presidential debate tens of millions of Americans watched.
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As Grassley explains, Democrats persuaded the FBI to give a gratuitous briefing about evidence he and Johnson had amassed. Conveniently, Auten composed an intelligence assessment that theorized the Biden evidence was disinformation — even though (as a September 2020 Grassley/Johnson report shows) much of it was based on suspicious-activity reports financial institutions filed, based on eye-popping money transfers to the Bidens from foreign sources, which were easily verifiable.
The Democrat-generated FBI suspicions were promptly leaked to the media. By August, the Associated Press was reporting that US intelligence agencies assessed that a Biden “narrative” Republicans peddled could be Russian disinformation. Meantime, FBI whistleblowers have informed Grassley that Thibault took internal steps to shut down the Biden investigation while hiding his rationale for doing so.
jrt_ms1995
Well-Known Member
Or a Librem 5 with hardware kill switches.
FBI wouldn’t discuss Hunter Biden probe after convincing Facebook to suppress laptop stories
“From my recollection, at one meeting with Facebook after the regular agenda had been completed, one of the Facebook analysts asked if the FBI had any information they could share about the Hunter Biden investigation.
“To that I recall Ms. Dehmlow saying that the FBI had no comment… She said something to the effect that the FBI has no comment on this.”
Under questioning by Missouri Solicitor General John Sauer, Chan could not “recall” if the discussion included the “laptop in particular that had been the subject of the news stories.”
Why Isn’t Homeland Security Monitoring A Muslim-Only Immigrant Shelter At The US Border?
Those 121 suspected terrorist border crossings should strike President Joe Biden’s homeland security establishment and the general public as a “system blinking red” moment, to requote the infamous 9/11 Commission Report line about failures to act on threat information.
But my recent fact-finding trip to Mexico’s first and only shelter that expressly caters to U.S.-bound Muslim immigrants indicated Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sees no blinking red lights amid this current mass-migration border crisis.
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A recent Milenio newspaper investigation based on leaked classified Mexican Ministry of National Defense documents revealed a variety of cases where Mexican and American intelligence agencies working together discovered Islamic terrorists in Mexico in 2015, 2016, and 2017 — a number of them in Tijuana. Some were working on behalf of the Islamic State. The Milenio story details extensive Mexican collaboration with American intelligence agencies on these cases, for example on a January 2017 investigation of an Algerian in Mexico that resulted in the dismantling of an ISIS cell in Algeria.
Between 2014 and 2018, Mexico’s National Institute of Migration identified 19 suspected terrorists in its territory and deported them all, undoubtedly at American behest.
A Massive Government Force Is Quietly Forming Against Trump Supporters
“The FBI is conducting three times as many domestic terrorism investigations than it was five years ago, with 70 percent of its open cases focused on ‘civil unrest’ and anti-government activity,” the FBI documents reviewed by Newsweek found.
The FBI’s reclassification of the term “domestic terrorism” may be a more precise definition. The FBI stipulates that while terrorism is “an act is focused on the government,” extremism is “focused on private individuals or institutions.” But a senior government source explained how the new definition “inserts the FBI and counterterror investigators into the political life of the nation,” Newsweek reported.
“It’s not because the FBI is partisan, but more because society … and Washington remains obsessed with January 6 and Donald Trump,” said Newsweek’s source. “It doesn’t matter whether the activity is left or right, anti-Biden or anti-Trump,” the official says. “That’s the pool of suspected terrorists. In other words, the focus now is political terrorism.”
Biden's DHS Signals It Wants to Criminalize Political Dissent
DHS warned that “targets of potential violence” include “the LGBTQI+ community” and “racial and religious minorities,” as well as “government facilities and personnel” and “perceived ideological opponents.” Clearly, these “terrorism experts” have in mind the Leftist stereotype of someone who rejects the dominant Leftist ideology: anti-gay, racist, opposed to the government as long as Joe Biden or others like him are in the White House, and determined to do violence to those they hate. The genuine terror threat of the Leftists who rioted all over the country in the summer of 2020, causing billions of dollars in damage, is completely ignored: DHS doesn’t even contemplate the existence of terrorists who are aggressively pro-LGBTQI+, ostentatiously anti-racist (or at least claim to be), and love Joe Biden’s authoritarian America-Last regime.
And aside from one mention in the DHS bulletin of an Islamic State (ISIS) plot, likewise ignored is the jihad terror threat, particularly in connection with the tens of thousands of Afghans the Biden regime has brought into the country. The Washington Times reported on Oct. 30, 2022, that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) isn’t sending Afghan evacuees who have been convicted of crimes back to Afghanistan. In March 2022, DHS “announced Temporary Protected Status, effectively a deportation amnesty, for Afghans who were in the U.S. by March. Under TPS, the administration concluded that Afghanistan was too mired in chaos to accept returning nationals.”
Tom Homan, who ran ICE during the Trump administration, explained that instead, these criminals are likely to end up free inside the U.S.: “Under a 2001 Supreme Court ruling, ICE has a limit on the length of detention for immigrants. What is known as the Zadvydas ruling said immigration detention is an administrative procedure meant to facilitate deportation. If the government has no firm prospect of deportation after six months and cannot show exceptional national security or public safety reasons, then the person should be freed.” This includes even convicted rapists and child molesters.
FBI agent's testimony implicates headquarters brass in social media censorship
Elvis Chan, the FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Cyber Branch in San Francisco, told lawyers for the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general in a lawsuit over social media censorship that he supervised a "command post" in his home city that helped the nationwide disinformation censorship operation function in fall 2020.
He described a sprawling operation that at time enlisted the help of FBI field offices around the country, federal prosecutors, and FBI and Justice Department lawyers before his unit would make the final request to social media to block content deemed by the operation to be disinformation or in violation of each company’s term of service.
"We would receive some responses from the social media companies," he recalled. "I remember in some cases they would relay that they had taken down the posts. In other cases, they would say that this did not violate their terms of service."
Chan's description, released as part of his deposition this week, was the most detailed to date of how extensive the FBI's censorship activities were during the 2020 election, raising immediate flags among incoming House Republican committee chairmen worried the operation may have violated constitutional prohibitions on government infringing free speech.
Ex-intel chief sharply questions FBI's approach on Russian disinformation, warns on censorship
"I struggle with the idea that the Russians are able to mount enough influence to impact our electorate," retired FBI Assistant Director for Intelligence Kevin Brock told the "Just the News, No Noise" television show.
"Their whole goal is to sow discord in this country, to divide us as a people, to create chaos," he said. "But a lot of the issues that they pick on, like racial tensions, Black Lives Matter, Second Amendment rights, abortion rights" are the same ones we are bombarded with "every night through cable television news" and are arguably "equally as divisive."
"I haven't seen any empirical data that these influence campaigns are really having some type of effect on Americans," Brock added. "And so I sometimes question the amount of effort that goes into or concern about all of this stuff and whether or not resources are being applied appropriately."
Brock's comments Friday night came after two bombshell revelations last week — one from Twitter owner Elon Musk and the other from a deposition of an FBI agent — exposed the toll the FBI's war on disinformation is taking on Americans' civil liberties.
FBI LGBT Guidance Quietly Scrubbed After Employee Backlash, Whistleblower Says
The test, sponsored by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI), intended to boost agents’ awareness of the LGBT community and show how to be “an ally for LGBT+ colleagues,” documents provided to the Daily Caller show.
The 56-page test showed guidance on the definitions of gender identities and sexual orientations, how to write or talk about a transgender person, how to use the word “queer,” what one can ask an LGBT person and how to use pronouns.
The FBI originally mandated the test for all employees, but it was removed after backlash in the online comment section, suspended FBI agent Kyle Seraphin told the Caller.
“The comment section was so negative, and the reviews were so negative of this training, that the [FBI] just removed it and didn’t tell anybody,” Seraphin said.
DOJ snooped on House Intelligence Committee investigators during Russia probe, subpoenas show
In an extraordinary intrusion on congressional oversight, the Justice Department used grand jury subpoenas to secretly obtain the personal email and phone data of at least two top House Intelligence Committee investigators back in November 2017 just as they and their boss, then-Chairman Devin Nunes, were assembling bombshell evidence of FBI abuses in the Russia collusion probe, Just the News has learned.
The subpoenas, obtained by Just the News, show the DOJ demanded that Google turn over personal email and phone data from the two senior staffers on Nov. 20, 2017 and that responsive materials were to be returned to DOJ by Dec. 5, 2017.
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Nunes said the subpoenas gave the DOJ and FBI unprecedented potential to learn in real-time what his investigation was learning about misconduct in the Russia probe. He called on the new Republican Congress to probe the subpoenas aggressively.
“The FBI and DOJ spied on a presidential campaign, and when Congress began exposing what they were doing, they spied on us to find out what we knew and how we knew it," Nunes told Just the News. "It’s an egregious abuse of power that the next Congress must investigate so these agencies can be held accountable and reformed.”
The subpoenas demanded a broad swath of records from Google, including "all customer and subscriber account information" for Patel and the other staffer, "addresses (including mailing addresses, residential addresses, business adresses, and e-mail addresses," user names, "screen names," "local and long distance telephone connection records" and even the "means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number) and billing records."
The subpoena does not specify which component of the DOJ was leading the investigation, but included a numbering system suggesting it was being handled by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington D.C. At the time, DOJ had Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigating Russia collusion, the department's inspector general was probing FBI misconduct related to the Russia case, and several agencies were investigating leaks, including one traced to a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer.
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Nunes and Patel said they have long suspected the FBI or DOJ might be monitoring their communications, especially after Rosenstein made a threat during a January 2018 meeting to subpoena committee members or staff.
"“In this one meeting, in particular, Rod Rosenstein, who's known for losing his temper, had done so before and in this meeting, screamed at the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and myself. And he literally said verbatim, if you're going to continue this investigation, I'm going to subpoena you and your records, looking at the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and looking at his senior counsel and chief investigator on the Russiagate," Patel recalled.
Harvard University law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told Just the News that while more information needs to be learned that the subpoenas raised serious concerns about separation of powers between Congress and the executive branch.
"It's a violation of the separation of powers. Look, our Framers specifically separated legislative, executive and judicial powers. And that was saying -- all kinds of efforts to overcome them -- that Congress is independent and has the right to investigate.
"And the Justice Department shouldn't be investigating the investigators unless there is fairly substantial proof of, of criminal conduct. So we don't know the whole story yet. But I'm very suspicious of subpoenas being issued by the grand jury," he added.
Nunes accuses DOJ of seeking blackmail material during Russia probe after bombshell revelation
The subpoenas were served on Nov. 20, 2017 during a critical time frame in the committee's effort to expose the Donald Trump-Russia collusion investigation as having been driven by an uncorroborated political opposition dossier funded by Hillary Clinton. Nunes' committee was locked at the time in a bitter struggle to force the FBI and DOJ to turn over records to the committee.
"I think they probably were spying on quite a few of my staff," Nunes told the "Just the News, No Noise" television show. "The only reason they would possibly be doing that is because we caught the DOJ and the FBI coordinating with the Democratic Party in 2016 ... in order to spy on the Trump campaign and the Republican Party ...
"Lo and behold, at about the same time as as we are investigating them for illegal spying, they go to a grand jury to get what I would call an illegal warrant or subpoena just to target me when I was part of the legislative branch at the time — remember, I'm chairman of the Intelligence Committee at the time.
"Clearly what they are doing ... is targeting me to figure out what do we know, how do we know it, and how do we learn it, what are we going to do with the information And secondly, most likely, to look for anything that they could potentially blackmail us on."
The extraordinary intrusion on congressional oversight belatedly came to light in the last few days when the former committee staffers were informed by Google that their records had been taken back in late 2018, consistent with the Big Tech company's policy of alerting customers five years after law enforcement takes such actions.
FBI Admits It Meddles In ‘Numerous Companies,’ Not Just Twitter
While this should be a smoking hot gun (and it is), what makes it worse is that the FBI is openly admitting that this kind of “working together” with private sector companies is normal behavior for U.S. intelligence agencies. The FBI tried to characterize its censorship requests as voluntary ones Twitter technically could ignore, although such “requests” read like commands and courts have long recognized that “requests” from government officials can be in themselves coercive because of the power differential.
The question now is this: how many so-called “private” companies, such as Facebook, Google, Fortune 500 firms, and more, do the bidding of U.S. intelligence agencies that are renowned for their wildly partisan application of unequal standards? According to this recent statement by the FBI, many of them.
Merrick Garland Links 5 Capitol Police Deaths to January 6 Riot
In a statement on the second anniversary of the Capitol riot, Garland appeared to link the riot to the deaths: