WASHINGTON, DC – DECEMBER 19: Attorney Steven Metcalf (2nd L), representing seditious conspiracy defendant Dominic Pezzola for his role in the attacks of January 6 at the U.S. Capitol, arrives at the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse December 19, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
By Gary Bai for The Epoch Times
March 9, 2023Updated: March 10, 2023
FBI agents ordered to alter or destroy evidence
The trial of Dominic Pezzola, one of the defendants of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach, was paused on Thursday due to classified FBI messages revealed in court, which the defense attorneys say show FBI agents discussing the altering of evidence.
Pezzola is one of the Proud Boys members on trial for obstruction and conspiracy charges related to the Jan. 6 Capitol breach. He was arrested on Jan. 15, 2021, and indicted the same month. Pezzola’s trial began in January of this year.
“There are a couple of emails between FBI agents casually discussing altering a document and destroying hundreds of pieces of evidence. It’s very disturbing and right now we have more questions than answers,” Roger Roots, an attorney at John Pierce Law, wrote to The Epoch Times. Roots confirmed that Washington District Court Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee, paused the trial on Thursday after the leaked messages were shown in court.
The exchange Roots referred to came into light on Wednesday during the testimony of FBI special agent Nicole Miller, who was involved in the agency’s investigations of the Jan. 6 defendants.
When cross-examining Miller, Nick Smith, an attorney representing Proud Boys member Ethan Nordean (listed as co-defendant on Pezzola’s case), revealed classified FBI emails that were hidden in a tab in an Excel spreadsheet. Roots, in Pezzola’s case, used this evidence to support a motion to dismiss (pdf) the charges against Pezzola, which Roots’s team filed on Wednesday.
In the motion, Pezzola’s team said the emails showed that the FBI monitored communications between Nordean and his lawyer, violating the Sixth Amendment, which prohibits invasions of the right to counsel (Matter of Fusco v. Moses).
“In the Nordean case, confidential attorneys-client trial/defense strategy and position was wrongfully obtained by the government, about which was overheard, shared, utilized, where potentially ‘338 items of evidence’ were ordered to be ‘destroyed,’ said Pezzola’s legal team in the motion to dismiss.
According to a separate filing by Nordean’s lawyers, Miller said in one correspondence that “[her] boss assigned [her] 338 items of evidence [she has] to destroy”; Nordean’s lawyers allege that another email show an agent requesting Miller to “go into [a] CHS [informant] report” that Miller “just put [together] and edit out that [the agent] was present.”
The emails show Miller “admitted fabricating evidence and following orders to destroy hundreds of items of evidence,” Pezzola’s lawyers wrote in its motion to dismiss, and that the government obtained information that benefitted itself in the trial, causing substantial prejudice to each of the defendants, including Pezzola.
“If justice means anything, it requires this case to be dismissed,” Pezzola’s lawyer said.
Roots is representing Pezzola on a pro bono basis. Legal non-profit National Constitutional Law Union (NCLU) is helping cover Roots’s expenses while he is in Washington, according to NCLU Executive Director Natalie Danelishen.
“My thoughts are we need a longer pause to get to the bottom of some of Agent Miller’s emails,” Roots told The Epoch Times.
As of Thursday evening, the court has not issued an order responding to the motion to dismiss.
Alleged Brady Violations
In addition to their argument about the Sixth Amendment, Pezzola’s lawyers also argued in their motion to dismiss that newly surfaced footage of events of the Jan. 6 Capitol breach constitutes exculpatory evidence. The defendants’ lawyers say the government, by withholding that evidence, violated their client’s constitutional rights as defined in Brady v. Maryland, a 1963 case in which the Supreme Court held that prosecutors must make available exculpatory evidence to defense counsel.
The defendants’ motion comes two days after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) released more than 40,000 hours of Jan. 6 footage to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who then aired some of the footage on his show on Monday and Tuesday.
One tape aired Monday showed Capitol Police officers walking alongside Jacob Chansley, a Jan. 6 defendant serving a 41-month sentence after pleading guilty to an obstruction charge. Chansley was unarmed and walked past several Capitol police officers.
The aired footage “is plainly exculpatory,” Pezzola’s lawyers said in the motion.
The FBI declined to comment and referred The Epoch Times to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for comment.
U.S. Attorney’s Office did not provide The Epoch Times with comment by
This is a CBS News report. But why did this come out now? The Report says the Capitol Police knew, so Schumer, the DC Mayor, and Pelosi Knew ahead of time. I’m guessing that if the FBI knew and did tell Trump, that’s why he wanted to send in the National Guard.
Government watchdog report finds FBI, Capitol Police identified but didn’t share “credible threats” before Jan. 6.
Federal agencies responsible for protecting the U.S. Capitol did not “fully process” or share critical information — including about militia groups arming themselves ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — a failure that stymied the response that day, according to a new 122-page report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.
The FBI and the U.S. Capitol Police had seen “threats that were true or credible” days ahead of the assault on the Capitol building, the report said. But much as with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a failure by multiple agencies to share information and connect dots left those securing the Capitol unprepared for the onslaught.
“Some agencies did not fully process information or share it, preventing critical information from reaching key federal entities responsible for securing the National Capital Region against threats,” the report said.
The GAO report also revealed specific tips that were obtained by some federal agencies ahead of the attack. For example, the Capitol Police obtained information “regarding a tip that a member of the Proud Boys had recently obtained ballistic helmets, armored gloves, vests, and purchased weapons, including a sniper rifle and suppressors for the weapons.”
The tip, which the Secret Service also obtained from its Denver Field Office, revealed the individual flew with others to Washington D.C. “on January 5, 2021” to incite violence. According to the report, the Secret Service interviewed the individual and his son when they arrived in Washington, D.C., and investigated whether they were traveling with “loaded weapons.” Capitol Police also attempted to locate the individual using “cell phone pings.”
According to the report, investigators from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reviewed a tip a day before the Jan. 6 attacks about an individual who had “staked out parking lots of federal buildings to determine how to bring firearms into D.C. at January 6th events.”
The report also indicates there was a threat against the D.C. water system between Dec. 16, 2020 – Jan. 4, 2021. Information about the threat was obtained by the Architect of the Capitol and was shared with the Capitol Police.
In addition to the Capitol Police and the FBI, five other federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, United States Secret Service, Park Police, Senate Sergeant at Arms and Postal Inspection Service “developed a total of 27 threat products specific to the planned events of January 6 prior to the attack on the Capitol,” according to the obtained report. The GAO found that “14 products included an assessment of the likelihood that violence could occur.”
A tip shared by intelligence officials from New York State with their counterparts in Washington D.C., included a social media post where the user “described intent to conduct an attack in Washington D.C. on January 6 — targeting Democratic members of Congress.”
The report singled out the FBI, concluding the agency “did not consistently follow policies for processing tips.”
“FBI officials we spoke with said that from December 29, 2020 through January 6, 2021, they tracked domestic terrorism subjects that were traveling to Washington, D.C. and developed reports related to January 6 events,” said the report. “As of January 6, 2021, FBI officials noted that the Washington Field Office was tracking 18 domestic terrorism subjects as potential travelers to the D.C. area.”
In response to the GAO’s findings, the Justice Department said that the FBI would be working “diligently to address the recommendations in the GAO’s report,” and at the same time, the department would “incorporate GAO’s conclusion that, despite collecting and sharing significant pieces of threat reporting, the FBI did not process all relevant information related to potential violence on January 6.”
“The FBI continues to be introspective regarding its roles in sharing intelligence regarding the event of January 6,” Justice Department official Larissa Knapp said in a letter to the GAO.
U.S. Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger told the GAO his department is “currently drafting policy that will provide guidance for sharing threat-related information agency-wide” and said this policy is “currently under executive review.”
The U.S. Park Police concurred with GAO’s findings, and an Interior Department official stated that the agency is working to update policy by March 2023, regarding the “collection, analysis, and distribution of intelligence information.”
Far-left HuffPost sided with a man who slashed a mother’s throat and killed a cop in order to score a sleazy political point against Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday.
The site obviously never hides its left-wing slant, and serious people never expect substantive reporting or opinions from its pages.
But a story written by “reporter” Jessica Schulberg and published by the junk outlet sent Ariana Huffington’s creation to a shocking new low.
The website offered up this abomination of a headline: “Florida Executes Man Used As ‘Political Pawn’ By Ron DeSantis.”
In reality, the man committed murders in a state where capital punishment was on the table and the state carried out its lawful duty to exact justice for the victims.
Schulberg led a Thursday-evening story with a quote from twice-convicted killer Donald Dillbeck, 59, who politicized his own death before he was killed by lethal injection in Starke, Florida, on Thursday evening.
“I know I hurt people when I was young. I really messed up,” Dillbeck stated in a comment to open Schulberg’s piece. “But I know Ron DeSantis has done a lot worse.”
Schulberg’s angle to the story, which was sympathetic to Dillbeck in its tone, cleverly left out the grisly details of how he ended up on death row.
As a teen, Dillbeck stabbed a man in Indiana while he attempted to rob the victim of his CB radio.
While on the lam in Florida, Dillbeck shot and killed Lee County Deputy Dwight Lynn Hall in Fort Myers Beach with his own gun.
After almost a decade into a life sentence for the cold-blooded murder, Dillbeck escaped.
While he was out, Dillbeck procured a paring knife and stabbed 44-year-old Faye Vann 20 times with it before he slashed her throat in Tallahassee.
HuffPost postured as if it had taken issue with the fact Dillbeck’s jury voted 8-4 when it sentenced him to death. Schulberg slanted her article in favor of unanimous decisions.
DeSantis supports capital punishment by a majority vote, which was the law when Vann was brutally murdered. Meanwhile, Schulberg cited sources who explained to her how archaic they believed Dillbeck’s execution was.
But none of that was the point of her article. The point was not to highlight Dillbeck as a man done wrong by the justice system.
The narrative was certainly was not to shed light on Vann and other female victims of violent crime.
The story was published and disseminated purely as an attack against DeSantis.
Vann’s adult children actually thanked the governor personally in a hand-written letter for not stopping their mother’s killer from meeting his fate. Schulberg left that out of her piece until DeSantis ally Christina Pushaw shared it online.
Perspective… this monster killed a police officer, went to jail, escaped, stabbed this mom to death in a parking lot at the Tallahassee Mall at random, and Huffington Post thinks HE is the victim.
HuffPost was rightly eviscerated on Twitter all evening after it shared Schulberg’s obscene piece on its opinion page.
This is beyond pathetic. In an attempt to own a politician you don’t like, you quote and thus implicitly support, even if in some roundabout, attenuated sense, a literal murderer. This man was a scumbag who robbed two children of their mother. You should delete this in shame.
HuffPost’s editors are so desperate for content they feel could harm a popular Republican they opened an article with a quote that accused him of doing “worse” than two gruesome murders.
In doing so, the outlet is currently at rock bottom — which is saying a lot.
Side effects include a multitude of things the shot should NOT be doing.
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How stupid are these people? Of course more vaccinated are dying. Maybe because the vaccine doesn’t work like they thought it would? Not so long ago I thought I explained this, but I guess there a few folks who don’t get it.
Some on the left have two things they always say. Sure we’re getting COVID, but it’s mild and we’re not being hospitalized. That worked for some until August of 2022. More vaccinated than unvaccinated were dying from COVID. And more vaccinated than unvaccinated were being hospitalized. So now what?
Not to worry. The new slogan went something like this. Sure more vaccinated are being hospitalized and dying because more are vaccinated than unvaccinated. Does that work?
So the WHO, CDC, and the FDA claimed that the vaccination would prevent the death and hospitalizations less a few rare cases. But when more vaccinated are dying, getting sick, and being hospitalized, how was the vaccine beneficial for those folks? Remember the first claim. Vaccinated protects you from dying and getting hospitalized.
Don’t even get me started on the side effects the vaccinated are having.
Side effects include a multitude of things the shot should NOT be doing.
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That means that over 40 million women in the United States have had their menstrual cycles affected by the C19 jab.
Project Veritas released another breaking story last night (Feb. 2) featuring Pfizer executive Jordan Trishton Walker. This time, he was caught on camera openly admitting concern about women’s cycles and their fertility. As a result, #Pfertility is trending on Twitter.
BREAKING: @Pfizer Director Concerned Over Women's Reproductive Heath After COVID-19 Vaccinations
"There is something irregular about their menstrual cycles...concerning...The vaccine shouldn't be interfering with that...It has to be affecting something hormonal..."#Pfertilitypic.twitter.com/XAuMPJNShD
In light of Project Veritas’ latest bombshell, we have compiled an array of respected voices speaking out about menstrual and fertility concerns. Doctors, scientists, thought leaders, and women across the globe have been screaming from the rooftops on this subject for years now.
(In the interest of brevity, I’ll just post the videos from Vigalent Fox [there are quite a few]. The full article, with Twitter comments, can be found HERE , Some may be out of order —TPR)
Basically, Pfizer knew that there would be problems, they knew that lipid nanoparticles such as in the clot shot accumulated in the ovaries, and Bill Gates (bless his heart) was studying ways to interfere with reproduction.
Scene from the Dexter TV show, for illustrative purposes
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First, let’s define what we mean by “most dangerous” because there are many different “most dangerous” lists out there. Here we are talking about the overall crime rate. Not just the violent crimes that grab headlines. and the list we are using is a live database that is constantly being updated.
For instance, according to WorldAtlas.com St Louis, MO is the 7th most dangerous in the world based on the murder rate per 100k. It is a democrat-run city.(Tishaura Jones). The first six are all in Mexico.
OTOH, The Boutique Adventurer drops St. Louis to #10 with 8 of the 9 above it in Mexico — the ninth being Caracas, Venezuela at #6. Baltimore comes in at #15, the same as on our main database. New Orleans is at #18 and Memphis at #20 while Detroit clocks in at #26.
Curiously, this one doesn’t list ANY US cities in their top 27.
These, like the one I’ll devote the rest of this article to are listed as being compiled in(or for) 2023.
DANGER!
Eleven U.S. cities rank among the 50 most dangerous in the world, according to a recent reportpublished by Numbeo, a global quality of life database. All 11 are governed by Democratic mayors.
Three U.S. cities — Baltimore, Memphis, and Detroit — are ranked among the 20 most dangerous cities on the planet.
The three cities have more in common than just violent crime. All three are run by Democrats.
Baltimore ranks #15 on the annual dangerous cities list, with Memphis and Detroit close behind at #18 and #19, respectively.
Brandon Scott, just 38 years of age, is the mayor of Baltimore. Jim Strickland Jr., an attorney and politician, is the 64th and current mayor of Memphis, where the Memphis police department has just announced plans to permanently deactivate the unit that five of the officers involved in the vicious beating of Tyre Nichols belonged to. Mike Duggan, meanwhile, is currently serving as the mayor of Detroit.
Two more U.S. cities run by Democrats appear among the 30 most dangerous in the world: Albuquerque (#23), where 45-year-old Tim Keller serves as the 30th mayor, and St. Louis (#27), where Tishaura Oneda Jones has served as mayor since April of 2021.
Tracking back for a wider view yields a still grimmer perspective for Democrats, as another six Democrat-run cities rank among the world’s 50 most dangerous: New Orleans (#35), Oakland (#38), Milwaukee (#40), Chicago (#43), Philadelphia (#46), and Houston (#50). Again, all of these cities are run by Democrats.
Numbeo’s report contains both a Crime Index, which is an estimation of overall levels of crime in a given city, and a Safety index. A city with a high safety index is considered very safe. A city with a high crime index is considered anything but. If a city’s crime levels are lower than 20, for instance, this is considered excellent. Crime levels between 20 and 40 are considered good; crime levels between 40 and 60 are moderate; crime levels between 60 and 80 are considered high. Finally, crime levels higher than 80 are considered dangerously high.
The Safety Index, meanwhile, is ranked in the completely opposite way, with scores higher than 80 indicating that a city is very safe, and scores under 20 indicating that a city is borderline uninhabitable.
Baltimore has a Crime Index score of 75.5 and a Safety Index score of 24.5. “Charm City” finds itself sandwiched between Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, and Rosario, Argentina’s third-most populous city.
In 2019, then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr referred to Baltimore as the country’s “robbery capital.” Although the comment was deemed controversial by some commentators, it is amply substantiated by crime statistics. Last year, the city of 576,000 experienced a sharp spike in robberies, with robberies of convenience stores jumping by 300%. Baltimore also suffered a sharp increase in homicides.
Some 900 miles away, in Memphis, overall crime increased by more than 8% last year. By August of 2022, 4,501 crimes had been reported in the downtown area of the city, 600 more than had been reported by August of 2021, according to the city’s Data Hub.
In Detroit, more than 220 officers left the police department last year. Long known as the automobile capital of the world, Detroit has, in recent times, become more closely associated with assaults, shootings and homicides. On New Year’s Day, for instance, a total of 6 people were shot, one of them fatally. Five days later, a 16-year-old was killed and an 11-year-old was injured in yet another shooting.
Democrats have often been labeled “soft on crime” by their opponents. The latest Numbeo report will do little to stem such denunciations.
Here is an abbreviated list from the Numbeo list linked above:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, pictured May 17 during a Senate subcommittee hearing, became a hated figure on the right in part because of what he represented—the arrogant, corrupt, and often incompetent bureaucratic managerial class that believes it has a right to make decisions for our society. (Photo: Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)
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Fauci will be the 2023 commencement speaker at Yale’s School of medicine
By Jordan Schachtel
We’ve been bamboozled.
Despite claiming to have retired at the end of last year, Dr. Anthony Fauci remains on staff in the Government Health bureaucracy at the NIH and maintains his status as the highest-paid bureaucrat in the federal government. Additionally, Fauci has secured an indefinite taxpayer-funded security detail, The Dossier has confirmed.
Fauci remains on staff at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) so that he maintains eligibility for a taxpayer-funded U.S. Marshals detail, which involves more than half a dozen agents on a full-time detail.
In August of 2022, Fauci wrote that he would be “stepping down” from his position in December in order to “pursue the next chapter of my career.” It remains unclear what Fauci’s new role is at the NIH. All we know is that he no longer leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). That position is now held by Hugh Auchincloss, Fauci’s longtime deputy. Auchincloss is a walking conflict of interest. His daughter is a Big Pharma executive, and his son is a U.S. congressman.
In a recent “exit interview” with the corporate press, Fauci claimed to have received endless “death threats,” thereby justifying his around-the-clock taxpayer-funded security detail. However, this privilege is unique to Fauci, as it is not even afforded to most cabinet secretaries.
Fauci’s newfound status was first reported by Dr Marty Makary at Johns Hopkins University.
Once source close to the matter told me that the White House made the decision to keep Dr. Fauci employed by the government in order to keep his security detail of U.S. Marshals. The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has received death threats, including one that was believed to be an intercepted plot to harm him.
He continues:
Some staff at NIH are simply frustrated by the idea that the 82-year-old former NIAID director is part of an inside network of legacy government players that are ‘taken care of’ by each other. If Dr. Fauci is still “on the books” it would be in line with a pattern of older NIH scientists being shuffled around government at the end of their career.
When reached by The Dossier, both the U.S. Marshals and the NIH refused to confirm or deny the fact that Fauci remains on the government payroll. However, The Dossier has independently confirmed that Fauci receives a security detail at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer, which confirms that he remains on the NIH roster. Though his duties are unclear, Fauci remains classified as an “employee” in the NIH directory.
A full time protective detail is billed at over $1 million per month, according to previous reporting on U.S. Marshals security costs. A large team of U.S. Marshals special agents have been detailed to Fauci for almost three years, meaning that he has incurred tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded security costs.
It’s not as if Dr Fauci can’t afford private security from time to time. He has become a very wealthy man over the course of his time in government.
The government bureaucrat’s net worth soared especially during the Covid hysteria era. Via Open The Books, he disclosed a net worth increase from $7.6 million on January 1, 2019, to over $12.6 million on December 31, 2021.
In his post, Dr Makary explains that Fauci’s situation is not an aberration, but the norm, as the NIH acts as a good ol’ boys network for recently “retired” officials, setting up longtime officials with no-show jobs:
NIAID’s most recent chief of viral diseases, 85-year-old Dr. Bernard Moss, who just stepped down from his leadership role, still works at the agency. And Dr. John E. Bennett, who will turn 90 this year, also still works at NIAID as an infectious disease scientist.
Last year, Dr. Francis Collins (age 72) stepped down from his role as NIH director and soon after was named co-head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Dr. Collins is also still working in a lab at the NIH after serving as director of the agency for 12 years.
Hunter Biden is a lot of things, but it looks like we can add “deadbeat father” to that list.
Not only is the president’s son fighting tooth and nail in the court system to lower the amount of child support he will have to remit to Lunden Roberts, a former Washington D.C.-based exotic dancer with whom Hunter Biden had a child, but he’s also exhausting all possible legal maneuver to prevent the child from bearing the family surname.
According to the New York Post, Hunter Biden told an Arkansas court that his 4-year-old daughter, Navy Joan Roberts, would be robbed of “peaceful existence” if she were to take the Biden family name. That’s an interesting angle. It’s almost as if he’s admitting that the Biden name brings trouble.
He’s never even met his daughter.
But as a December New York Post report noted, Hunter Biden hasn’t even met his young daughter yet, and it was only in 2020 that he was finally forced to admit that he fathered the girl after DNA tests confirmed it. President Joe Biden, the young girl’s grandfather, also remains estranged.
Hunter Biden’s attorneys doubled down, arguing that the girl should have the power to make that decision on her own once “the disparagement of the Biden name is not at its height.”
Roberts, however, had a contrasting view of the Biden surname.
In late December, Roberts argued to Circuit Court Judge Holly Meyer that her daughter should be afforded the right to carry the prestigious last name, saying it would benefit the young girl because the last name is “now synonymous with being well educated, successful, financially acute and politically powerful.”
Why doesn’t Hunter Biden want to let the child have his last name, given that he’s the father? Anyone even remotely familiar with political optics can answer that question quickly. It’s an elitist PR issue, plain and simple.
The Biden family, as corrupt and shady as they come across, presumably can’t fathom the thought of a child born out of wedlock to a former D.C. stripper sharing the same last name.
Hunter Biden’s excuses to the court as to why he doesn’t believe the child deserves to carry the family name are weak, at best, and sound more like a sneaky way of complying with the wishes of others in his family who won’t tolerate young Navy Joan taking the Biden name, as it would ultimately draw negative media attention that the Biden’s can’t afford at the moment.
But the strategy seems to have backfired spectacularly because now the headlines read as though Hunter Biden is a candidate for “worst father of the decade.”
Among many others, Shapiro Chair of Public Interest Law at George Washington University Jonathan Turley tore into Hunter Biden’s attempts to block his daughter from taking his name.
“It is awful to think of this child learning that her father fought recognition of paternity, fought child support, and then fought her using his name. Fortunately, she has the law on her side and, despite her father’s disgraceful efforts, she is a Biden,” Turley tweeted.
It is awful to think of this child learning that her father fought recognition of paternity, fought child support, and then fought her using his name. Fortunately, she has the law on her side and, despite her father’s disgraceful efforts, she is a Biden.https://t.co/wYCVfq30KA
“What a thoroughly rotten thing to do to a child. Just consider that Hunter had all the privileges of life. He wants to deny all of those privileges to his own child and fought to avoid his responsibility every step of the way,” one Twitter user wrote.
What a thoroughly rotten thing to do to a child. Just consider that Hunter had all the privileges of life. He wants to deny all of those privileges to his own child and fought to avoid his responsibility every step of the way.
If Hunter Biden wants to avoid further scandal and negative press, this is one issue he should probably let go of as soon as possible. Not attempting to weasel out of child support payments would also be an excellent first step.
Fidelity - to whom? Bravery - Where? Integrity - Not in years
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If only the Federal Bureau of Instigation could find these MOST WANTED in itself
The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech.
“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement.“As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
Almost all of the FBI communique is untrue, except the phrase about the bureau’s “engagements which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.”
Future disclosures will no doubt reveal similar FBI subcontracting with other social media concerns of Silicon Valley to stifle free expression and news deemed problematic to the FBI’s agenda.
The FBI did not wish to help Twitter “to protect themselves,” given the bureau’s Twitter liaisons were often surprised at the FBI’s bold requests to suppress the expression of those who had not violated Twitter’s own admittedly biased “terms of service” and “community standards.”
The FBI and its helpers on the Left now reboot the same boilerplate about “conspiracy theorists” and “misinformation” smears used against anyone who rejected the FBI-fed Russian collusion hoax and the bureau’s peddling of the “Russian disinformation” lie to suppress accurate pre-election news about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The FBI is now, tragically, in a freefall. The public is at the point, first, of asking what improper or illegal behavior will the bureau not pursue, and what, if anything, must be done to reform or save a once great but now discredited agency.
Consider the last four directors, the public faces of the FBI for the last 22 years. Ex-director Robert Mueller testified before Congress that he simply would not or could not talk about the fraudulent Steele dossier. He claimed that it was not the catalyst for his special counsel investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged ties with the Russians when, of course, it was.
Mueller also testified that he was “not familiar” with Fusion GPS, although Glenn Simpson’s opposition research firm subsidized the dossier through various cutouts that led back to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. And the skullduggery in the FBI-subsidized dossier helped force the appointment of Mueller himself.
While under congressional oath, Mueller’s successor James Comey on some 245 occasions claimed that he “could not remember, could not recall,” or “did not know” when asked simple questions fundamental to his own involvement with the Russian collusion hoax.
Comey, remember, memorialized a confidential conversation with President Trump on an FBI device and then used a third party to leak it to the New York Times. In his own words, the purpose was to force a special counsel appointment. The gambit worked, and his friend and predecessor Robert Mueller got the job. Twenty months and $40 million later, Mueller’s investigation tore the country apart but could find no evidence that Trump, as Steele alleged, colluded with the Russians to throw the 2016 election.
Comey also seems to have reassured the president that he was not the target of an ongoing FBI investigation, when in fact, Trump was.
Comey was never indicted for either misleading or lying to a congressional committee or leaking a document variously considered either confidential or classified.
While under oath, his interim successor, Andrew McCabe, on a number of occasions flat-out lied to federal investigators. Or as the office of the inspector general put it:
As detailed in this report, the OIG found that then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the WSJ, and that this conduct violated FBI Offense Codes 2.5 and 2.6. The OIG also concluded that McCabe’s disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.
McCabe purportedly believed Trump was working with the Russians as a veritable spy—a false accusation based entirely on the FBI’s paid, incoherent prevaricator Christopher Steele. And so, McCabe discussed with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein methods to have the president’s conversations wiretapped via a Rosenstein-worn stealthy recording device, presumably without a warrant.
Note the FBI ruined the lives of General Michael Flynn and Carter Page with false allegations of criminal conduct or untruthful testimonies. Under current director Christopher Wray, the FBI has surveilled parents at school boards meetings—on the prompt of the National School Boards Association, whose president wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland alleging that bothersome parents upset over critical race indoctrination groups were supposedly violence-prone and veritable terrorists.
Under Wray, the FBI staged the psychodramatic Mar-a-Lago raid on an ex-president’s home. The FBI likely leaked the post facto myths that the seized documents contained “nuclear codes” or “nuclear secrets.”
Under Wray, the FBI perfected the performance-art, humiliating public arrests of former White House officials or Biden Administration opponents, whether it was the nocturnal rousting of Project Veritas muckraker James O’Keefe in his underwear or the arrest—with leg restraints=—of former White House advisor Peter Navarro at Reagan National Airport for misdemeanor contempt of Congress charge or the detention of Trump election lawyer John Eastman at a restaurant with his family and the confiscation of his phone. Neither O’Keefe nor Eastman has yet been charged with any serious crimes.
The FBI arguably interfered in two presidential elections, and a presidential transition, and possibly determinatively so. In 2016, James Comey announced that his investigation had found that Hillary Clinton had improperly if not illegally used her private email server to conduct official State Department business, some of it confidential and classified, and likely intercepted by foreign governments. All that was a clear violation of federal statutes. Comey next, quite improperly as a combined FBI investigator and a de facto federal prosecutor, deduced that such violations did not merit prosecution.
Around the same time, the FBI had hired as a source the foreign national and political opposition hitman Christopher Steele. It helped Steele to spread among the media his fraudulent dossier and used its unverified and false contents to win FISA warrants against U.S. citizens on the bogus charges of colluding with the Russians to throw the election to Donald Trump. By the FBI’s own admission, it would not have obtained warrants to surveil Trump campaign associates without the use of Steele’s dossier, which it also admittedly either knew was a fraud or could not corroborate.
Again, such allegations in the dossier were false and, apparently, the FBI soon knew they were bogus since one of its own lawyers—the now-convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith—found it necessary also to alter a court-submitted document to feign incriminatory information.
The FBI, on the prompt of lame-duck members of the Obama Justice Department, during a presidential transition, set up an entrapment ambush of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. It was an effort to lure Flynn into admitting to a violation of the Logan Act, a 223-year-old-law that has led to only two indictments and zero convictions.
During the 2020 election, the FBI suppressed knowledge of its possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Early on, the bureau knew that the computer and its contents were authentic and yet kept its contents suppressed.
Moreover, the FBI sought to contract out Twitter (at roughly $3.5 million) as a veritable subsidiarity to suppress social media traffic about the laptop and speech the bureau deemed improper.
Again, although the FBI knew the laptop in its possession was likely genuine, it still sought to use Twitter employees to suppress pre-election mention of that reality. At the same time, bureau officials remained mum when 51 former “intelligence officials” misled the country by claiming that the laptop had all the hallmarks of “Russian disinformation.” Polls later revealed that had the public known the truth about the laptop, a significant number likely would have voted differently—perhaps enough to change the outcome of the election.
The media, Twitter, Facebook, and former intelligence operatives were all following the FBI’s own preliminary warning bulletin that “Foreign Actors and Cybercriminals Likely to Spread Disinformation Regarding 2020 Election Results”—even as the bureau knew the laptop in its possession was most certainly not Russian disinformation. And, of course, the FBI had helped spread the Russian collusion hoax in 2016.
In addition, the FBI-issued phones of agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page, along with members of Robert Mueller’s special counsel “dream team”—all under subpoena—had their data mysteriously wiped clean, purportedly “by accident.”
Apparently, the paramours Strzok and Page, in particular, had much more to hide, given how earlier they had frequently expressed their venom toward candidate Donald Trump. Strzok boasted to Page that the FBI in general, and Andrew McCabe in particular, had an “insurance policy” means of denying Trump the presidency:
I want to believe the path you threw out in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take the risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.
When some of their embarrassing texts emerged, both were dismissed by the special counsel. But Mueller carefully did so by staggering Strozk and Pages’ departures and not immediately releasing the reasons for their firings or reassignments.
To this day, the public has no idea what the FBI was doing on January 6, how many FBI informants and agents were among the rioters, and to what degree they knew in advance of the protests. The New York Times reporter most acquainted with the January 6 riot, Matthew Rosenberg, dismissed the buffoonish violence as “no big deal” and scoffed, “They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.”
“There were a ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol,” Rosenberg noted. We have never been told anything about that “ton”—a topic of zero interest to the January 6 select committee.
What are the people to do about a federal law enforcement agency whose directors either repeatedly lie under oath, or mislead, or do not cooperate with congressional overseers?
What should we do with a bureau that alters court documents, deceives the court with information the FBI had good reason to know was false and leaks records of confidential presidential conversations to the media to prompt the appointment of a special prosecutor?
What should be done with a government agency that pays social media corporations to warp the dissemination of the news and suppress free expression and communications? Or an agency that hires a foreign national to gather dirt on a presidential candidate and plots to ensure that there is “no way” a presidential candidate “gets elected” and destroys subpoenaed evidence?
What, if anything, should the people do about a once-respected law enforcement agency that repeatedly smears its critics, most recently as “conspiracy theorists?”
The current FBI leadership under Christopher Wray, in the tradition of recent FBI directors, has stonewalled congressional overseers about FBI activity during the Trump and Biden Administrations. In “Après moi, le déluge” fashion, the bureau acts as if it assumes the next Republican administration in office will remove the current hierarchy. And thus, it assumes for now, not cooperating with Republican investigations while Democrats hold control of the Senate and White House for a brief while longer ensures exemption.
Wray, most recently, cut short his Senate testimony on the pretext of an unspecified engagement, which turned out to be flying out on the FBI Gulfstream jet to his vacation home.
Yet the bureau’s lack of candor, contrition, and cooperation has only further alienated the public, especially traditional and conservative America, characteristically the chief source of support for the FBI.
There have been all sorts of remedies proposed for the bureau.
The three reforms most commonly suggested include: 1) simply dissolve the FBI in the belief that its concentration of power in Washington has become uncontrollable and is increasingly put to partisan service, including but not limited to the warping of U.S. presidential elections; 2) move the FBI headquarters out of the Washington D.C. nexus, preferably in the age of Zoom to a more convenient and central location in the United States, perhaps an urban site such as Salt Lake City, Denver, Kansas City, or Oklahoma City; or 3) break-up and decentralize the FBI and redistribute its various divisions to different departments to ensure that the power of its $11 billion budget and 35,000 employees are no longer aggregated and put in service of particular political agendas.
The next two years are dangerous times for the FBI—and the country. The House will soon likely begin investigations of the agency’s improper behavior. Yet, simultaneously, the Biden Justice Department will escalate its use of the bureau as a partisan investigative service for political purposes.
The FBI’s former embattled, high-ranking administrators who have been fired or forced to leave the agency—Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Peter Strzok, James Baker, Lisa Page, and others—will continue to appear on the cable news stations and social media to inveigh against critics of the FBI, despite being all deeply involved in the Russia-collusion hoax.
Merrick Garland will continue to order the FBI to hound perceived enemies through surveillance and performance art arrests. And the people will only grow more convinced the bureau has become Stasi-like and cannot be reformed but must be broken up—even as in extremis a defiant and unapologetic FBI will, as its latest communique shows, attack its critics. ✪
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The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech.
