“Two months before his Florida home was raided by the FBI, former President Donald Trump secretly received a grand jury subpoena for classified documents belonging to the National Archives, and voluntarily cooperated by turning over responsive evidence, surrendering security surveillance footage and allowing federal agents and a senior Justice Department lawyer to tour his private storage locker, according to a half dozen people familiar with the incident.

Assistant Attorney General for DOJ National Security Division Matthew Olsen, seen from a video monitor before a Senate Judiciary Committee virtual hearing on domestic terrorism, Jan. 11, 2022. (Credit: VOA)

While the cooperation was mostly arranged by his lawyers, Trump personally surprised the DOJ National Security Division prosecutor and three FBI agents who came to his Mar-a-Lago compound on June 3, greeting them as they came to pick up a small number of documents compliant with the subpoena, the sources told Just the News, speaking only on condition of anonymity because the visit was covered by grand jury secrecy.

The subpoena requested any remaining documents Trump possessed with any classification markings, even if they involved photos of foreign leaders, correspondence or mementos from his presidency.

Secret Service agents were also present and facilitated the visit, officials said.

Trump signaled his full cooperation, telling the agents and prosecutor, “Look, whatever you need let us know,” according to two eyewitnesses. The federal team was surprised by the president’s invitation and asked for an immediate favor: to see the 6-foot-by-10-foot storage locker where his clothes, shoes, documents and mementos from his presidency were stored at the compound.

Given Trump’s instruction, the president’s lawyers complied and allowed the search by the FBI before the entourage left cordially. Five days later, DOJ officials sent a letter to Trump’s lawyers asking them to secure the storage locker with more than the lock they had seen. The Secret Service installed a more robust security lock to comply.

Around the same time, the Trump Organization, which owns Mar-a-Lago, received a request for surveillance video footage covering the locker and volunteered the footage to federal authorities, sources disclosed.

The disclosure Wednesday to Just the News raised immediate new questions in legal and congressional circles about the necessity for the subsequent raid, including whether the judge who approved the warrant knew of the earlier cooperation.”  (Read more: Just The News, 8/11/2022)  (Archive)

WATCH: (Jordan segment begins at 2:20)

“Multiple former FBI officials are coming forward with information suggesting the bureau is “purging” employees with conservative viewpoints, according to House Judiciary Committee Republicans.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the ranking member of the panel, sent a letter to Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday outlining new allegations that relate to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

“In one such example, the FBI targeted and suspended the security clearance of a retired war servicemember who had disclosed personal views that the FBI was not being entirely forthcoming about the events of January 6. The FBI questioned the whistleblower’s allegiance to the United States despite the fact that the whistleblower honorably served in the United States military for several years — including deployments in Kuwait and Iraq — valiantly earning multiple military commendation medals,” a press release for the letter states.

“In addition, another whistleblower, who has since left the FBI, has informed us that faced retaliation for criticizing the FBI in an anonymous survey circulated by the [REDACTED] to employees following January 6. The FBI allegedly escalated an adverse personnel action against this employee after [REDACTED] commented on the survey, which sought feedback about the [REDACTED] actions ‘during the recent crisis/command post’ event. The employee, too, was never disciplined or reprimanded until after [REDACTED] criticized the FBI,” the letter reads.

The names of the former officials do not appear, as the letter features several redactions, but Jordan stressed multiple “whistleblowers have called it a ‘purge’ of FBI employees holding conservative views.” He reminded Wray that “whistleblower disclosures to Congress are protected by law and that we will not tolerate any effort to retaliate against whistleblowers for their disclosures.”

Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz were sent a copy.

Jordan also said a prior letter, sent May 6, details allegations of the FBI suspending the security clearances of bureau employees for their participation in protected First Amendment activity, and he claimed the FBI failed to respond or provide a requested briefing. (Read more: Washington Examiner, 6/07/2022)  (Archive)

The Department of Justice (DOJ) intervened on behalf of Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss to respond to congressional inquiries related to its probe into the Biden family business, emails unearthed from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit show.

The collaboration raises questions about if Weiss’ responses to congressional investigators were under the direction of the DOJ and if Weiss and the DOJ colluded to mislead Congress.

The Federalist reported:

Did the DOJ’s Office of Legislative Affairs respond to Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson’s May 9, 2022, letter seeking information concerning the Hunter Biden investigation? Weiss posed that question to one of his lead assistant U.S. attorneys, Shannon Hanson.

“Not to my knowledge,” Hanson replied, followed soon after with a second email noting that Joe Gaeta, the then-deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legislative Affairs, was working on a response. And although Grassley and Johnson had addressed their May 9, 2022, inquiry solely to Weiss, DOJ’s Office of Legislative Affairs would intercede on his behalf, responding in a letter dated June 9, 2022, that the DOJ would not respond to the questions posed.

The following month, Grassley and Johnson dispatched another letter requesting information related to the Hunter Biden investigation, addressing this letter to Weiss, as well as Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray. Again, the Office of Legal Counsel intervened, telling Weiss’s office in an email reviewed by The Federalist that it would “take the lead on drafting a response” to Grassley and Johnson’s letter.

WATCH — CNN’s Honig: DOJ Repeatedly Took “Very Lenient” Stance on Hunter, Only Changed After Public Pressure, Whistleblowers:

CNN’s “The Lead” interviews CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig. (Credit: video clipping/Breitbart)

“It is standard procedure for congressional inquiries to be routed through the agency’s legislative affairs shop,” Kash Patel, a former federal public defender and House Intelligence Committee aide, told Breitbart News.

“What is not standard,” Patel continued, is for the DOJ to create “conspiratorial schemes concocted to subvert valid constitutional oversight and stonewall documentation production.”

“It also shows how Republicans allow themselves to be dominated by DOJ’s criminal conduct by flailing about with another strongly worded letter,” Patel added. “Impeach them for breaking the law, or stop complaining when you get punched in the face.”

Weiss told House investigators on June 7 that he had “ultimate authority” in whether to charge Hunter Biden with potential wrongdoing.

However, FOIA emails show that while Attorney General Merrick Garland claimed Weiss was the sole authority to bring charges against Hunter Biden, Garland was also controlling the flow of responses back to House investigators. (Read more: Breitbart, 8/28/2023)  (Archive)

General John Allen commanded forces in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2013. (Credit: Michael Reynolds/EPA)

“General John R. Allen has stepped down as president of the Brookings Institution after he was accused of lying and obstructing an FBI probe connected to an illegal lobbying campaign for Qatar.

The retired four-star Marine, who became Brookings president in 2017, said in his resignation letter that he leaves the research institute with a “heavy heart,” according to Responsible Statecraft.

“I know it is best for all concerned in this moment,” he said in his resignation letter that was obtained and posted by the online magazine of the Quincy Institute, which advocates for diplomacy and military restraint.

The departure comes after he was placed on leave by Brookings Wednesday following explosive allegations that he made false statements and withheld “incriminating” documents from the FBI during its investigation into whether he worked behind the scenes to influence US foreign policy in favor of the small Persian Gulf nation, according to court documents.” (Read more: New York Post, 6/12/2022)  (Archive)

Previously, a Treasury spokesperson said the department provides SARs “in a manner that enables robust oversight.” @CBS_News asked Treasury to respond to republican allegations it is continuing to “thwart congressional oversight.”

— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) July 6, 2022

Clipping from Congressman James Comer’s letter to Janet Yellen.

“Kentucky congressman James Comer (R) joined “Fox & Friends First” Thursday to address his efforts to obtain suspicious foreign business transactions on Hunter Biden and slams the White House and Democrats for refusing to release the information.

JAMES COMER: To put this into perspective, a suspicious activity report was put into place when George Bush was president after September 11th to try to catch money laundering into terrorist cells in the United States. A suspicious activity report is a very serious banking violation. Hunter Biden and Joe Biden’s brother, Jim, have had over 150 suspicious activity reports when Bush was president and through Obama, Clinton, Bush, any member of Congress could request from Treasury a list of suspicious activity reports in their congressional districts and in their states. When Joe Biden became president and this is before it became public knowledge that Hunter had these suspicious activity reports, he, in the dark of night, changed it to where Congress could no longer access that from Treasury. Now, we have formally requested the suspicious activity report on Hunter Biden and the White House will not allow us to have it unless the Democrats sign on to the request.

(Fox News, 7/7/2022) (Archive)

“A top FBI official repeatedly violated bureau policy by hobnobbing with journalists while overseeing the controversial investigation into Donald Trump’s suspected ties to Russia — and then retired before he could be interviewed by ethics probers, a newly released Justice Department report revealed.

Steinbach allegedly oversaw the probe into Hillary Clinton’s email server. (Credit:AFP/Getty Images)

Michael Steinbach “had numerous unauthorized contacts with the media” that began when he was the bureau’s assistant counterterrorism director and continued after he was named executive assistant director of its National Security Bureau in February 2016, according to the heavily redacted DOJ Inspector General report obtained by The Post through a freedom of information act request.

The “hundreds of contacts” included “soliciting” an unidentified reporter for a $300 ticket to the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Association gala after earlier getting invited by a different reporter to the 2015 Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner.

“Lots of [redacted] reporters here. May have to branch out!” Steinbach wrote to the unidentified reporter in a text message on the night of the 2015 dinner.

“Absolutely not!!! But curious to know who you’ve met so far?” the reporter responded, adding: “well they will never be as good as me! and don’t you get the big head! ;)”

“But they are promising the WH Correspondents dinner,” Steinbach responded.

The following year, Steinbach attended the White House Correspondents’ dinner and a reception party as a guest of a reporter — and boasted about it in a text to an unidentified CNN reporter.

“I put you on the map and now you’re cheating on me with [redacted],” the CNN reporter wrote in a text message to Steinbach.

“I kept waiting for my invite from you,” Steinbach responded.

After the $300-a-ticket event, Steinbach sent an email to a reporter with the subject “Great Night” that included a photo of an unidentified person standing with the journalist in front of the White House Correspondents’ Association banner.

“Thanks for hanging out with us last night [redacted] and I had a great time. And also thank you for giving us a lift. That was nice. I know it has been [sic] very busy year but when it slows down and as the weather gets nicer, we would love to grab [sic] or drinks with you and [redacted] either in the city somewhere or at our house,” the email read, in part.

In addition to the dinners, Steinbach had numerous lunches with journalists in Washington from 2014 to 2017, including at restaurants Asia Nine, Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steakhouse, Elephant & Castle and Oyamel Cocina Mexicana.

“The OIG notes that it was unable to determine who paid for the drinks or meals during these social engagements,” the report states.

(…) The report notes the watchdog concluded that Steinbach violated federal regulations and FBI protocol and its findings would be delivered to the FBI.

“Prosecution was declined,” the report adds.” (Read more: New York Post, 6/14/2022)  (Archive) 

“It seems like every few weeks we’re reminded of why Twitter, Facebook, Democrats and the media worked so hard to keep the Hunter Biden laptop out of the news before the 2020 election.

The latest example is an audio file that’s rather revealing.

Andrew Kerr and Jerry Dunleavy report at the Washington Examiner:

Hunter Biden recorded himself boasting that his father will adopt political positions at his command, footage obtained from a copy of his abandoned laptop shows.

“He’ll talk about anything that I want him to, that he believes in,” Biden said in reference to his father, Joe Biden, in the Dec. 3, 2018, recording. “If I say it’s important to me, then he will work a way in which to make it a part of his platform. My dad respects me more than he respects anyone in the world, and I know that to be certain, so it’s not going to be about whether it affects his politics.”

“All those fears you think that I have of people not liking me or that I don’t love myself … I don’t fear that. You know why I don’t fear that? Because the man I most admire in the world, that god to me, thinks I’m a god,” Hunter Biden added in the 77-minute recording, which was taped about five months before Joe Biden launched his successful 2020 presidential campaign in late April 2019. “And my brother did, too. And the three of us, it was literally — I had the support to know I can do anything.”

The president’s son even mused about his cocaine addiction:

The conversation was taped at a house in Plum Island, Massachusetts, amid the throes of Hunter Biden’s addiction to crack cocaine.

“Have you ever thought about this: Maybe this is the greatest thing that f***ing ever happened to me,” Hunter Biden mused to Horan about his addiction to the Schedule II narcotic. “Maybe this is literally the continuation and the continuum of what is going to be the thing that makes me the person that my father believes I am.”

LISTEN: Hunter Biden says his father, Joe, will “talk about anything that I want him to”

“If I say it’s important to me, then he will work a way in which to make it a part of his platform” pic.twitter.com/2ZyKVCnvYq

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 14, 2022

(Read more: Legal Insurrection, 6/15/2022)  (Archive)

Trump: “Hillary has to pay for what’s she’s done.” pic.twitter.com/cb4JqHRbJw

— Real Mac Report (@RealMacReport) June 17, 2022

Source video: President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks in Nashville, Tennessee, on Friday, June 17, 2022. He comments about the ongoing RICO lawsuit filed against Hillary Clinton and others.

“Twice-failed presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton on Friday said Trump supporters are a “clear and present danger to American democracy.” Clinton responded to a judge who lashed out at Trump supporters during Thursday’s January 6 show trial.

“Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy,” former circuit judge (George H. W. Bush appointee) Michael Luttig said to the J-6 panel. WATCH:

Conservative Judge Michael Luttig:

“Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy.” pic.twitter.com/xSs6JMxvIR

— CAP Action (@CAPAction) June 16, 2022

Hillary Clinton agreed with the former federal judge. Hillary Clinton went from calling Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables” to a “clear and present danger” in a matter of just a few years. “Louder, for those in the back: Donald Trump, his allies, and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy.” Hillary Clinton said in a tweet on Friday.

Louder, for those in the back:

Donald Trump, his allies, and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. https://t.co/Q8mmCQM45C

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 17, 2022

(Read more: Conspatriot News, 6/17/2022) (Archive)

(…) Judge Luttig never notes that the president specifically said to the crowd to go and “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

In fact, not only did that part of the president’s speech not make Judge Luttig’s statement, it was, as Ohio’s Republican Congressman Jim Jordan has noted, also edited out of the committee’s video of that event. Imagine that. (The American Spectator, 6/16/2022)

Clipping of a New York Times article published May 29, 2016.

(…) In an interview with the Financial Times (paywall), Clinton was asked if she has considered another possible run for president in 2024, to which she shut down saying, “out of the question,” adding “first of all, I expect Biden to run. He certainly intends to run. It would be very disruptive to challenge that.”

(…) Clinton continued to say she believes President Trump will run again, claiming only if he thought it would benefit him financially.

Describing herself as the “most investigated innocent person in America,” Clinton portrayed herself as a victim, calling out Republicans for painting her as a “murderer or a child trafficker.”

Clinton called the thought of a Republican president “frightening,” adding “we are standing on the precipice of losing our democracy, and everything that everybody else cares about then goes out the window.” (Read more: Town Hall, 6/18/2022)  (Archive)

Trump and Clinton during a 2016 election debate. (Credit: Rick Wilking/Reuters)

(…) On June 21, 2022, Trump filed an amended RICO suit against Clinton and a large number of other DNC-related individuals who were involved in the RussiaGate hoax.

The new suit, at 193 pages in length, was significantly more robust and detailed than Trump’s original March 24 RICO suit and included additional defendants. On the very same day, Kash Patel, a former Trump administration official who’s worked diligently to get Trump’s declassified documents released, announced on a podcast that he was officially a representative for Trump at the National Archives. Patel said it was his intention to “identify every single document that they blocked from being declassified.” Patel stated that he “would start putting that information out next week.”

The following day, June 22, Magistrate Bruce Reinhart suddenly recused himself from Trump’s suit against Clinton & Company. Just 44 days later, after his unexpected recusal from Trump’s RICO case against Clinton, Reinhart personally signed the search warrant to raid Mar-a-Lago. (Read more: The Epoch Times, 8/19/2022)  (Archive)

Twitter has been on a recruitment drive of late, hiring a host of former feds and spies. Studying a number of employment and recruitment websites, MintPress has ascertained that the social media giant has, in recent years, recruited dozens of individuals from the national security state to work in the fields of security, trust, safety, and content.

Chief amongst these is the Federal Bureau of Investigations. The FBI is generally known as a domestic security and intelligence force. However, it has recently expanded its remit into cyberspace. “The FBI’s investigative authority is the broadest of all federal law enforcement agencies,” the “About” section of its website informs readers. “The FBI has divided its investigations into a number of programs, such as domestic and international terrorism, foreign counterintelligence [and] cyber crime,” it adds.

For example, in 2019, Dawn Burton (the former director of Washington operations for Lockheed Martin) was poached from her job as senior innovation advisor to the director at the FBI to become senior director of strategy and operations for legal, public policy, trust and safety at Twitter. The following year, Karen Walsh went straight from 21 years at the bureau to become director of corporate resilience at the silicon valley giant. Twitter’s deputy general counsel and vice president of legal, Jim Baker, also spent four years at the FBI between 2014 and 2018, where his resumé notes he rose to the role of senior strategic advisor.

Mark Jaroszewski (Credit: FBI Event Flyer, May 2018)

Meanwhile, Mark Jaroszewski ended his 21-year posting as a supervisory special agent in the Bay Area to take up a position at Twitter, rising to become director of corporate security and risk. And Douglas Turner spent 14 years as a senior special agent and SWAT Team leader before being recruited to serve in Twitter’s corporate and executive security services. Previously, Turner had also spent seven years as a secret service special agent with the Department of Homeland Security.

When asked to comment by MintPress, former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley said that she was “not surprised at all” to see FBI agents now working for the very tech companies the agency polices, stating that there now exists a “revolving door” between the FBI and the areas they are trying to regulate. This created a serious conflict of interests in her mind, as many agents have one eye on post-retirement jobs. “The truth is that at the FBI 50% of all the normal conversations that people had were about how you were going to make money after retirement,” she said.

Many former FBI officials hold influential roles within Twitter. For instance, in 2020, Matthew W. left a 15-year career as an intelligence program manager at the FBI to take up the post of senior director of product trust at Twitter. Patrick G., a 23-year FBI supervisory special agent, is now head of corporate security. And Twitter’s director of insider risk and security investigations, Bruce A., was headhunted from his role as a supervisory special agent at the bureau. His resumé notes that at the FBI he held “[v]arious intelligence and law enforcement roles in the US, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East” and was a “human intelligence and counterintelligence regional specialist.” (On employment sites such as LinkedIn, many users choose not to reveal their full names.)

Meanwhile, between 2007 and 2021 Jeff Carlton built up a distinguished career in the United States Marine Corps, rising to become a senior intelligence analyst. Between 2014 and 2017, his LinkedIn profile notes, he worked for both the CIA and FBI, authored dozens of official reports, some of which were read by President Barack Obama. Carlton describes his role as a “problem-solver” and claims to have worked in many “dynamic, high-pressure environments” such as Iraq and Korea. In May 2021, he left official service to become a senior program manager at Twitter, responsible for dealing with the company’s “highest-profile trust and safety escalations.”

Head of Twitter’s Strategic Response Team, Jeff Carlton, who worked for CIA & FBI, deleted his LinkedIn quickly in response to #TwitterFiles. Before deleting, he changed his name to an alias to make him harder to find.

But I have an archive: https://t.co/WniUAOd7N0 @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/h1TNkwPwEH

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) December 9, 2022

Other former FBI staff are employed by Twitter, such as Cherrelle Y. as a policy domain specialist and Laura D. as a senior analyst in global risk intelligence.

Many of those listed above were active in the FBI’s public outreach programs, a practice sold as a community trust-building initiative. According to Rowley, however, these also function as “ways for officials to meet the important people that would give them jobs after retirement.” “It basically inserts a huge conflict of interest,” she told MintPress. “It warps and perverts the criminal investigative work that agents do when they are still working as agents because they anticipate getting lucrative jobs after retiring or leaving the FBI.”

Rowley – who in 2002 was named, along with two other whistleblowers, as Time magazine’s Person of the Year – was skeptical that there was anything seriously nefarious about the hiring of so many FBI agents, suggesting that Twitter could be using them as sources of information and intelligence. She stated:

Retired agents often maintained good relationships and networks with current agents. So they can call up their old buddy and find out stuff… There were certainly instances of retired agents for example trying to find out if there was an investigation of so and so. And if you are working for a company, that company is going to like that influence.”

Rowley also suggested that hiring people from various three-letter agencies gave them a credibility boost. “These [tech] companies are using the mythical aura of the FBI. They can point to somebody and say ‘oh, you can trust us; our CEO or CFO is FBI,’” she explained.

Twitter certainly has endorsed the FBI as a credible actor, allowing the organization to play a part in regulating the global dissemination of information on its platform. In September 2020, it put out a statement thanking the federal agency. “We wish to express our gratitude to the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force for their close collaboration and continued support of our work to protect the public conversation at this critical time,” the statement read.

One month later, the company announced that the FBI was feeding it intelligence and that it was complying with their requests for deletion of accounts. “Based on intel provided by the FBI, last night we removed approximately 130 accounts that appeared to originate in Iran. They were attempting to disrupt the public conversation during the first 2020 U.S. Presidential Debate,” Twitter’s safety team wrote.

Yet the evidence they supplied of this supposed threat to American democracy was notably weak. All four of the messages from this Iranian operation that Twitter itself shared showed that none of them garnered any likes or retweets whatsoever, meaning that essentially nobody saw them. This was, in other words, a completely routine cleanup operation of insignificant troll accounts. Yet the announcement allowed Twitter to present the FBI as on the side of democracy and place the idea into the public psyche that the election was under threat from foreign actors.

Iran has been a favorite Twitter target in the past. In 2009, at the behest of the US government, it postponed routine maintenance of the site, which would have required taking it offline. This was because an anti-government protest movement in Tehran was using the app to communicate and the US did not want the demonstrations’ regime-change potential to be stymied.

A CARNIVAL OF SPOOKS

The FBI is far from the only state security agency filling Twitter’s ranks. Shortly after leaving a 10-year career as a CIA analyst, Michael Scott Robinson was hired to become a senior policy manager for site integrity, trust and safety.

The California-based app has also recruited heavily from the Atlantic Council, a NATO cutout organization that serves as the military alliance’s think tank. The council is sponsored by NATO, led by senior NATO generals and regularly plays out regime-change scenarios in enemy states, such as China.

The Atlantic Council has been associated with many of the most egregious fake news plants of the last few years. It published a series of lurid reports alleging that virtually every political group in Europe challenging the status quo – from the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn and UKIP in Great Britain to PODEMOS and Vox in Spain and Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece – were all secretly “the Kremlin’s Trojan Horses.” Atlantic Council employee Michael Weiss was also very likely the creator of the shadowy organization PropOrNot, a group that anonymously published a list of fake-news websites that regularly peddled Kremlin disinformation. Included in this list was virtually every anti-war alternative media outlet one could think of – from MintPress to Truthout, TruthDig and The Black Agenda Report. Also included were pro-Trump websites like The Drudge Report, and liberatarian ventures like Antiwar.com and The Ron Paul Institute.

PropOrNot’s list was immediately heralded in the corporate press, and was the basis for a wholescale algorithm shift at Google and other big tech platforms, a shift that saw traffic to alternative media sites crash overnight, never to recover. Thus, the allegation of a huge (Russian) state-sponsored attempt to influence the media was itself an intelligence op by the U.S. national security state.

In 2020, Kanishk Karan left his job as a research associate at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research (DFR) Lab to join Twitter as information integrity and safety specialist – essentially helping to control what Twitter sees as legitimate information and nefarious disinformation. Another DFR Lab graduate turned Twitter employee is Daniel Weimert, who is now a senior public policy associate for Russia – a key target of the Atlantic Council. Meanwhile, Sarah Oh is simultaneously an Atlantic Council DFR Lab non-resident senior fellow and a Twitter advisor, her social media bio noting she works on “high risk trust and safety issues.”

In 2019, Twitter also hired Greg Andersen straight from NATO to work on cybercrime policy. There is sparse information on what Andersen did at NATO, but, alarmingly, his own LinkedIn profile stated simply that he worked on “psychological operations” for the military alliance. After MintPress highlighted this fact in an article in April, he removed all mention of “psychological operations” from his profile, claiming now to have merely worked as a NATO “researcher.” Andersen left Twitter in the summer of last year to work as a product policy manager for the popular video platform TikTok.

Twitter also directly employs active army officers. In 2019, Gordon Macmillan, the head of editorial for the entire Europe, Middle East and Africa region was revealed to be an officer in the British Army’s notorious 77th Brigade – a unit dedicated to online warfare and psychological operations. This bombshell news was steadfastly ignored across the media.

POSITIONS OF POWER AND CONTROL

With nearly 400 million global users, there is no doubt that Twitter has grown to become a platform large and influential enough to necessitate extensive security measures, as actors of all stripes attempt to use the service to influence public opinion and political actions. There is also no doubt that there is a limited pool of people qualified in these sorts of fields.

But recruiting largely from the US national security state fundamentally undermines claims Twitter makes about its neutrality. The US government is the source of some of the largest and most extensive influence operations in the world. As far back as 2011, The Guardian reported on the existence of a massive, worldwide US military online influence campaign in which it had designed software that allowed its personnel to “secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.” The program boasts that the background of these personas is so convincing that psychological operations soldiers can be sure to work “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.” Yet Twitter appears to be recruiting from the source of the problem.

These former national security state officials are not being employed in politically neutral departments such as sales or customer service, but in security, trust and content, meaning that some hold considerable sway over what messages and information are promoted, and what is suppressed, demoted or deleted.

It could be said that poachers-turned-gamekeepers often play a crucial role in safety and protection, as they know how bad actors think and operate. But there exists little evidence that any of these national security state operatives have changed their stances. Twitter is not hiring whistleblowers or dissidents. It appears, then, that some of these people are essentially doing the same job they were doing before, but now in the private sector. And few are even acknowledging that there is anything wrong with moving from big government to big tech, as if the US national security state and the fourth estate are allies, rather than adversaries.

That Twitter is already working so closely with the FBI and other agencies makes it easy for them to recruit from the federal pool. As Rowley said, “over a period of time these people will be totally in sync with the mindset of Twitter and other social media platforms. So from the company’s standpoint, they are not hiring somebody new. They already know this person. They know where they stand on things.”

IS THERE A PROBLEM?

Some might ask “What is the problem with Twitter actively recruiting from the FBI, CIA and other three-letter agencies?” They, after all, are experts in studying online disinformation and propaganda. One is optical. If a Russian-owned social media app’s trust, security and content moderation was run by former KGB or FSB agents and still insisted it was a politically neutral platform, the entire world would laugh.

But apart from this, the huge influx of security state personnel into Twitter’s decision-making ranks means that the company will start to view every problem in the same manner as the US government does – and act accordingly. “In terms of their outlooks on the world and on the question of misinformation and internet security, you couldn’t get a better field of professionals who are almost inherently going to be more in tune with the government’s perspective,” Rowley said.

Thus, when policing the platform for disinformation and influence campaigns, the former FBI and CIA agents and Atlantic Council fellows only ever seem to find them emanating from enemy states and never from the US government itself. This is because their backgrounds and outlooks condition them to consider Washington to be a unique force for good.

This one-sided view of disinformation can be seen by studying the reports Twitter has published on state-linked information operations. The entire list of countries it has identified as engaging in these campaigns are as follows: Russia (in 7 reports), Iran (in 5 reports), China (4 reports), Saudi Arabia (4 reports), Venezuela (3 reports), Egypt (2 reports), Cuba, Serbia, Bangladesh, the UAE, Ecuador, Ghana, Nigeria, Honduras, Indonesia, Turkey, Thailand, Armenia, Spain, Tanzania, Mexico and Uganda.

One cannot help noticing that this list correlates quite closely to a hit list of US government adversaries. All countries carry out disinfo campaigns to a certain extent. But these “former” spooks and feds are unlikely to point the finger at their former colleagues or sister organizations or investigate their operations.

THE COLD (CYBER)WAR

Twitter has mirrored US hostility towards states like Russia, China, Iran and Cuba, attempting to suppress the reach and influence of their state media by adding warning messages to the tweets of journalists and accounts affiliated with those governments. “State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution,” it noted.

In a rather bizarre addendum, it explained that it would not be doing the same to state-affiliated media or personalities from other countries, least of all the US “State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the U.K. or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy,” it wrote. It did not explain how it decided that Cuban, Russian, Chinese or Iranian journalists did not have editorial independence, but British and American ones did – this was taken for granted. The effect of the action has been a throttling of ideas and narratives from enemy states and an amplification of those coming from Western state media.

As the US ramps up tensions with Beijing, so too has Twitter aggressively shut down pro-China voices on its platform. In 2020, it banned 170,000 accounts it said were “spreading geopolitical narratives favorable to the Communist Party of China,” such as praising its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic or expressing opposition to the Hong Kong protests, both of which are majority views in China. Importantly, the Silicon Valley company did not claim that these accounts were controlled by the government; merely sharing these opinions was grounds enough for deletion.

The group behind Twitter’s decision to ban those Chinese accounts was the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a deeply controversial think tank funded by the Pentagon, the State Department and a host of weapons manufacturers. ASPI has constantly peddled conspiracy theories about China and called for ramping up tensions with the Asian nation.

Perhaps most notable, however, was Twitter’s announcement last year that it was deleting dozens of accounts for the new violation of “undermining faith in the NATO alliance.” The statement was widely ridiculed online by users. But few noted that the decision was based upon a partnership with the  a counter-disinformation think tank filled with former spooks and state officials and headed by an individual who is on the advisory board of NATO’s Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. That Twitter is working so closely with organizations that are clearly intelligence industry catspaws should concern all users.

NOT JUST TWITTER

While some might be alarmed that Twitter is cultivating such an intimate relationship with the FBI and other groups belonging to the secret state, it is perhaps unfair to single it out, as many social media platforms are doing the same. Facebook, for example, has entered into a formal partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, whereby the latter holds significant influence over 2.9 billion users’ news feeds, helping to decide what content to promote and what content to suppress. The NATO cutout organization now serves as Facebook’s “eyes and ears,” according to a Facebook press release. Anti-war and anti-establishment voices across the world have reported massive drops in traffic on the platform.

The social media giant also hired former NATO Press Secretary Ben Nimmo to be its head of intelligence. Nimmo subsequently used his power to attempt to swing the election in Nicaragua away from the leftist Sandinista Party and towards the far-right, pro-US candidate, deleting hundreds of left-wing voices in the week of the election, claiming they were engaging in “inauthentic behavior.” When these individuals (including some well-known personalities) poured onto Twitter, recording video messages proving they were not bots, Twitter deleted those accounts too, in what one commentator called a Silicon Valley “double tap strike.”

An April MintPress study revealed how TikTok, too, has been filling its organization with alumni of the Atlantic Council, NATO, the CIA and the State Department. As with Twitter, these new TikTok employees largely work in highly politically sensitive fields such as trust, safety, security and content moderation, meaning these state operatives hold influence over the direction of the company and what content is promoted and what is demoted.

Likewise, in 2017, content aggregation site Reddit plucked Jessica Ashooh from the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Strategy Task Force to become its new director of policy, despite the fact that she had few relevant qualifications or experience in the field.

In corporate media too, we have seen a widespread infiltration of former security officials into the upper echelons of news organizations. So normalized is the penetration of the national security state into the media that is supposed to be holding it to account, that few reacted in 2015 when Dawn Scalici left her job as national intelligence manager for the Western hemisphere at the Director of National Intelligence to become the global business director of international news conglomerate Thomson Reuters. Scalici, a 33-year CIA veteran who had worked her way up to become a director in the organization, was open about what her role was. In a blog post on the Reuters website, she wrote that she was there to “meet the disparate needs of the US Government” – a statement that is at odds with even the most basic journalistic concepts of impartiality and holding the powerful to account.

Meanwhile, cable news outlets routinely employ a wide range of “former” agents and mandarins as trusted personalities and experts. These include former CIA Directors John Brennan (NBC, MSNBC) and Michael Hayden (CNN), ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (CNN), and former Homeland Security Advisor Frances Townsend (CBS). And news for so many Americans comes delivered through ex-CIA interns like Anderson Cooper (CNN), CIA-applicants like Tucker Carlson (Fox), or by Mika Brzezinski (MSNBC), the daughter of a powerful national security advisor. The FBI has its own former agents on TV as well, with talking heads such as James Gagliano (Fox), Asha Rangappa (CNN) and Frank Figliuzzi (NBC, MSNBC) becoming household names. In short, then, the national security state once used to infiltrate the media. Today, however, the national security state is the media.

Social media holds enormous influence in today’s society. While this article is not alleging that anyone mentioned is a bad actor or does not genuinely care about the spread of disinformation, it is highlighting a glaring conflict of interest. Through its agencies, the US government regularly plants fake news and false information. Therefore, social media hiring individuals straight from the FBI, CIA, NATO and other groups to work on regulating disinformation is a fundamentally flawed practice. One of media’s primary functions is to serve as a fourth estate; a force that works to hold the government and its agencies to account. Yet instead of doing that, increasingly it is collaborating with them. Such are these increasing interlocking connections that it is becoming increasingly difficult to see where big government ends and big media begins.

(MintPress News, 6/21/2022)  (Archive)

(MintPress News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.)

From @Kash: “This means Durham filed a bunch of classified documents, that [are] being declassified, and will unveil at trial. Gangster move, what I used to do to put down terrorists”…

Date: 06/23/22
US v Danchanko
Document 54
Notes: Protective Order Granted in US v Danchenko

US v. Danchenko (Protective… by FightWithKash

(FightWithKash/Durham Watch, 6/22/2022)  (Archive)

(Credit: fightwithkash.com/Kash Patel)

#DurhamWatch

First off, hats off to the legend @UndeadFoia for gaining access to unredacted copies of the invoices paid by Georgia Tech. We hope you move over to Truth Social soon, but thanks for holding down on that other platform. He did some incredible work to obtain this source documentation via a FOIA request.

Second, @ProfMJCleveland had an absolutely hilarious observation and reaction to the newly released documents…

New: I have obtained unreda… by FightWithKash

(Read more: FightWithKash/DurhamWatch, 6/24/2022)  (Archive)

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is demanding answers from Attorney General Merrick Garland on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) repeated failure to prosecute employees after they are caught making materially false statements during internal investigations. In at least a dozen cases, Grassley lays out instances where the DOJ Office of Inspector General (OIG) made criminal referrals against DOJ employees, but DOJ never took legal action – despite the same charges being frequently prosecuted when they are made against the American public.

One of the cases occurred recently when DOJ refused to prosecute two Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) agents in the Larry Nassar case, after it was discovered that these agents made several false statements.

“The supervisory agent was fired by the FBI for ‘violating the FBI’s policies by making false statements and failing to properly document complaints by the accusers.’ Yet, despite a criminal referral from the OIG, the DOJ refused to prosecute the two agents for the same crime that they routinely prosecute hundreds of American people for each year,” Grassley wrote.

Matthew Graves was confirmed by the United States Senate on October 28, 2021, and sworn in on November 5, 2021, as the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. (Credit: public domain)

Grassley then dives into 12 cases where DOJ has not held its own employees to the same standard that they would apply to all other Americans. In one case, the OIG substantiated allegations that an employee received $350,000 in excess worker’s compensation payments because they did not accurately report their outside earnings. In another, the OIG substantiated allegations that the employee made false statements during a mortgage fraud investigation. In all cases, the United States Attorney’s Office (USAO) declined to prosecute.

“Laws are meant to deter criminal activity, but when DOJ does not enforce those laws but rather shields their employees from consequences, it has the opposite effect. It creates a sense of entitlement and signals that DOJ employees are beyond reproach. DOJ employees should be held to a higher standard for making materially false statements to the OIG, not a lower one. DOJ must hold itself to the highest possible standard or else it risks losing the credibility and trust of the American people,” Grassley continued.

Grassley concludes by demanding answers to several questions, including a full list of how many DOJ employees have been prosecuted for making false statements in the last five years and how many criminal referrals have been made by the OIG in that time frame. He also asks DOJ for a more detailed explanation behind their decision not to prosecute the FBI agents involved in the Nassar investigation.

The full letter is available HERE.

(Grassley News release, 6/27/2022)  (Archive)

“Hillary’s attorney Marc Elias was handed another defeat from the Supreme Court. The court agreed with the Congressional district lines drawn by Louisiana Republicans for the upcoming election.

(…) Recently, Elias was reportedly receiving “rebukes from judges, prosecutors, and even fellow Democrats”. Elias’s aggressive stance on elections was praised by Democrats but when he was tied to actions with the Russia collusion scandal he was shunned.

(Credit: Gateway Pundit)

(Credit: Gateway Pundit)

(…) The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday to restore Republican-drawn lines in Louisiana ahead of the midterms as Democrats pushed to create a second black-majority district. The court issued an order that restored a congressional voting map that a federal judge said, disenfranchised black voters. Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan would have denied the application for stay.

The case was brought by Elias who reportedly represented a group of individuals in Louisiana.” (Read more: Gateway Pundit, 6/29/2022)  (Archive)

“Judge Nathan has sentenced Ghislaine Maxwell to 20 years in prison. “A sentence of 240 months is sufficient and no graver than necessary.”

The sentence is less than the 30-50 years prosecutors asked for, but more than the 6 year sentence the defense thought was appropriate.

While preparing to deliver the sentence, Nathan said that “Ms Maxwell directly and repeatedly and over the course of many years participated in a horrific scheme” to traffic and abuse girls, and that “Ms Maxwell worked with Epstein to select young victims who were vulnerable.

As such, a “substantial sentence” is warranted, which – if not released early, means Maxwell will be 80 years old when she gets out.

And somehow not a single Epstein client was named…

Judge Alison J Nathan said on Tuesday that Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal activity was “extensive,” and that she’s enhancing her sentence due to the fact that she was at least 10 years older than her victims, and exercised “undue influence” on them.” (Read more: Zero Hedge, 6/28/2022) (Archive)

(Link)

“Nuland” gets 16 hits. Including this interesting 7/27/16 email from “William Nuland” (who?) about the DNC hack. And another interesting Oct 2016 email exchange with Strobe Talbott. https://t.co/hLy1bFt5L1 pic.twitter.com/kdsFEasoRE

— FoiaFan (@15poundstogo) June 30, 2022

This Strobe Talbott to Toria Nuland email gets at least a silver medal for swampiness. https://t.co/xWm3sVhI8t pic.twitter.com/dF4xjhIFPs

— FoiaFan (@15poundstogo) July 1, 2022

(Note: FoiaFan did searches for several people and linked to results on Twitter. Also, William Nuland is Victoria Nuland’s half-brother. @Larry_Beech comments, “William Peterson Nuland. Victoria’s 20 year younger half brother, who worked for secureworks, prior VeriSign, possibly involved with Facebook too.”)