Tag Archives: FBI

Intelligence Community, law, Surveillance

FBI Conducted Millions of Searches of Americans’ Electronic Data in 2021 without a Warrant

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Cristina Laila
Published April 29, 2022

The FBI conducted millions of searches of Americans’ electronic data in 2021 without a warrant, according to a new report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The FBI claims it conducted the searches as they sought to curb cyberattacks.

“In the first half of the year, there were a number of large batch queries related to attempts to compromise U.S. critical infrastructure by foreign cyber actors,” according to the report, Bloomberg reported. “These queries, which included approximately 1.9 million query terms related to potential victims — including U.S. persons — accounted for the vast majority of the increase in U.S. person queries conducted by FBI over the prior year.”

The ACLU called the FBI’s warrantless spying an invasion of privacy ‘on an enormous scale.’

Bloomberg reported:

The FBI searched emails, texts and other electronic communications of as many as 3.4 million U.S. residents without a warrant over a year, the nation’s top spy chief said in a report.

The “queries” were made between December 2020 and November 2021 by Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel as they looked for signs of threats and terrorists within electronic data legally collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to an annual transparency report issued Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The authority the FBI used in this case was under Section 702 of FISA, which is set to expire at the end of next year unless it’s renewed by Congress.

The report doesn’t say the activity was illegal or even wrong. But the revelation could renew congressional and public debates over the power U.S. agencies have to collect and review intelligence information, especially data concerning individuals. In comparison, fewer than 1.3 million queries involving Americans’ data were conducted between December 2019 and November 2020, according to the 38-page report.

The report sought to provide a justification for the increase in queries during the last year.

Uncategorized

Confirmed: Liz Cheney’s J6 Committee Is Now Holding Onto Evidence that FBI Was Running Operatives During the Jan. 6 Protests — WILL THEY LIE ABOUT THIS TOO?

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Jim Hoft
Published April 29, 2022

On Thursday afternoon, September 30th, at 3:45 PM Eastern the FBI raided Jeremy Brown’s home and arrested Jeremy. The charge is trespassing. The FBI sent 20 vehicles for his arrest. DHS and Pinellas County law enforcement were also present. The FBI was in Jeremy’s home for 5-and-a-half hours looking for evidence.

The FBI searched his house, RV, and trailer. Then they arrested Jeremy and took him away.

Jeremy’s family contacted The Gateway Pundit the next morning.

** You can support Jeremy Brown’s fundraising effort here.  

Jeremy Brown is a Green Beret and former Republican candidate for Congress in Florida’s 14th Congressional District. Brown served in the United States Army from 1992 to 2012 and reached the rank of Special Forces Master Sergeant.

Jeremy Brown NEVER entered the US Capitol on January 6. His actual crime was refusing to be an FBI informant as we describe below.

Not only did Jeremy refuse to work as an FBI informant on January 6th, he went public with photos and audio of the conversations he had with

As we reported months ago, Jeremy Brown refused to be an informant for the dirty FBI — They wanted him to be one of their operatives at the Jan. 6 Trump rallies.

According to an earlier TGP report:

The FBI called Jeremy’s cellphone and asked for a meeting after trying to contact him at his house. Jeremy then met with the FBI agents at a restaurant in Ybor City in December. He told Brandon Gray that 38 seconds into the interview the FBI attempted to recruit him to spy on the Oath Keepers.

Jeremy refused to be an FBI informant so they stormed his home and arrested him on bogus misdemeanor charges months after the Jan. 6 protests.

Jeremy Brown did nothing wrong.

His only “crime” was refusing to work as an informant for the FBI!

* * * * * * * * * *

Jeremy has been confined on a misdemeanor charge for seven months now in a Florida jail.

Recently, Liz Cheney’s January 6 Committee subpoenaed Jeremy Brown’s phone records.

The Gateway Pundit has a copy of the January 6 Committee subpoena to Jeremy Brown.

The subpoena asks for Jeremy’s phone records from November 1, 2020 through January 31, 2021.

According to Brown’s family member, the documents were turned over to the committee by Verizon.

That means Liz Cheney and her January 6 Committee are now holding on to evidence, including call records, of the FBI contacting US veteran Jeremy Brown to work as an operative on January 6 for the deep state.

So will they ever admit they are holding on to proof of the FBI’s role in the January 6 uprising?

Clintons, Durham Investigation, Social-Media

Durham Wants to Use Hillary Clinton’s Tweet Accusing Trump of Having a Secret Line of Communication with Russian Alfa Bank as Evidence in Sussmann Trial

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Cristina Laila
April 19, 2022

Special Prosecutor John Durham wants to use Hillary Clinton’s tweet accusing Trump of having a secret line of communication with Russian Alfa Bank as evidence in Michael Sussmann’s trial next month.

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann’s motion to dismiss Durham’s case was denied by a federal judge last week.

Sussmann was indicted last September for lying to the FBI.

According to the indictment, Sussmann falsely told James Baker he wasn’t doing work “for any client” when he asked for a meeting with the FBI where he presented bogus evidence the Trump Tower was secretly communicating with Kremlin-tied Alfa Bank.

Hillary Clinton fired off a tweet claiming Trump Tower was secretly communicating with Russian Alfa Bank.

The defamatory tweet is still on Twitter.

Sussmann doesn’t want Durham to use Hillary Clinton’s tweet in next month’s trial, however the special prosecutor wants it to be admitted as evidence.

The Washington Examiner reported:

The Democratic cybersecurity lawyer charged with concealing his work for the Clinton campaign from the FBI doesn’t want special counsel John Durham to be able to use Hillary Clinton’s tweet touting the Trump-Russia collusion claims he was pushing as evidence at trial.

Michael Sussmann was indicted in September for allegedly concealing his clients — Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and “Tech Executive-1,” known to be former Neustar executive Rodney Joffe — from FBI general counsel James Baker in September 2016 when he pushed since-debunked claims of a secret backchannel between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa-Bank. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty.

Durham told the federal court last week he wanted an October 2016 tweet from the Clinton campaign promoting the Alfa-Bank claims to be admitted as evidence at the May trial.

The special counsel argued the tweet is not inadmissible hearsay “because it is not being offered for its truth” — emphasizing that the prosecutors actually believe its claims were false. Durham said he instead wanted to present the tweet to “show the existence of the defendant’s attorney-client relationship with the Clinton Campaign, which is directly relevant to the false statement charge.”

corruption, Intelligence Community, spygate

CIA Notes Confirm US Intelligence Officials Targeted Trump After He Was Elected — Ran a Coup on President Trump While in Office

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Jim Hoft
Published April 16, 2022

For years now The Gateway Pundit has reported on the attempted coup against President Trump and his administration. We now know that this coup was real and involved several intelligence officials as well as the Hillary Clinton Campaign, Barack Obama, Joe Biden with the undying support from the fake news mainstream media.

Now they are caught.

Any other human being would have folded under the pressure. Not President Donald Trump. He was harassed, attacked and smeared his entire presidency by thousands of Democrats and the far left media complex. But he never folded. He excelled with record economic numbers, historic peace deals, a secure border, and an America-First foreign policy.

Now there is more evidence that the US intel community and Democrat politicians targeted president Trump after he was elected and while he was in office.

CIA notes of the Sussman meeting confirm that the intel community and Democrats were targeting and spying on President Trump after he was in office.

These people need to be charged and face trial. We either have a country or we don’t.

Via TechnoFog.

Biden Crime Family, DOJ

Former DNI Director Says Hunter Biden Laptop Coverup Had To Be Helped By DOJ, FBI

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Carmine Sabia
April 9, 2022

OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.

Former Director of National Intelligence, Ric Grenell, has laid out a major charge against the nation’s highest intelligence agencies as he said that China is “laughing all the way” over what has happened with the Hunter Biden laptop.

Speaking with the Newsmax show “John Bachman Now,” the former ambassador to Germany said that there was “no possible way” that laptop was covered up sans help from officials in the Department of Justice and FBI, Newsmax reported.

“I don’t say it lightly,” he said. “There’s no possible way that someone at DOJ didn’t see what was happening with that laptop three weeks before the 2020 election.”

“Let me be very clear,” he argued. “That is the Beijing line. That’s what China wants you to do. China does not want you looking at that laptop because of all the details about the Chinese businessmen with the Biden family.”

He also said that there was “no possible way” FBI agents did not notice that the Biden team and Democrats were blaming the laptop on a Russian disinformation campaign.

He said when “the Democrats and the DOJ and the FBI allowed the narrative to shift,” the Chinese “love it.”

He also argued that there was no need for a special counsel to investigate the matter.

“Why do we need an outside special counsel?” the national security analyst said. “The only time you need an outside special counsel is if you come to the table and you assume that DOJ can’t do its job and it’s too biased. I’m not there yet.”

And he argued that there needs to be changes made in the FBI.

“I can tell you from being the acting director of national intelligence when I looked at these FBI agents whose names were on the information that said redacted information, and I would say ‘why did you redact this?’ they would say to me ‘I actually didn’t redact it my boss did,’” he said.

This means there are a lot of hard-working FBI agents who are trying to do the right thing, but there needs to be “prosecutions and a total clean-out” at the top of the federal agencies, he added.

Grenell also discussed reports that four Secret Service members, including a person on first lady Jill Biden’s detail, have been suspended for accepting gifts from men charged with impersonating federal officials.

“The Inspector-General needs to get involved,” he argued. “The DOJ needs to get involved. I don’t want to default to outside organizations. They’ve got to clean up themselves.”

And he said that when agents know that other agents, or bosses, are engaged in chicanery, “you need to start outing them, and there needs to be self-policing.”

It was reported this week that Ron Klain, the Chief of Staff for President Joe Biden, apparently reached out to Hunter Biden in September 2012 to ask for help to raise 20,000 for the Vice President’s Residence Foundation (VPRF) and asked him to “keep this low low key” to prevent “bad PR,” emails reviewed by Fox News Digital showed.

Klain was the head of the foundation, a year after leaving his position as the vice president’s chief of staff, and told Hunter that he needed his help “tackle a piece of unpleasant business,” Fox News reported.

“The tax lawyers for the VP Residence Foundation have concluded that since the Cheney folks last raised money in 2007 and not 2008, we actually have to have some incoming funds before the end of this fiscal year (i.e., before 9/30/12 – next week) to remain eligible to be a ‘public charity,’” he said to Hunter in the email.

“It’s not much – we need to raise a total of $20,000 – so I’m hitting up a few very close friends on a very confidential basis to write checks of $2,000 each,” he said to Hunter.

He added in the email: “We need to keep this low low key because raising money for the Residence now is bad PR – but it has to be done, so I’m trying to just collect the 10 checks of $2,000, get it done in a week, and then, we can do an event for the Residence Foundation after the election.”

Intelligence Community, Surveillance

The FBI Boosts Its Social Media Surveillance Technology

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By Didi Rankovic

Both US law enforcement and Babel Street CEO Jeffrey Chapman seem to like to keep it in the family: Chapman is a former Treasury Department official and a former intelligence officer, whose data mining “AI” company will now furnish the FBI with 5,000 licenses for one of its tools.

The contract is worth up to $27 million.

The licenses, to be provided by Panamerica Computers IT vendor, give the FBI – specifically its Strategic Technology Unit of Directorate of Intelligence – the right to use a data analytics tool called Babel X, which harvests user data, including location, from the internet.

This Directorate is supposed to collect data that’s publicly available online.

When the FBI issued a procurement call for a tool, whose purpose, boiled down, is to track a massive number of social media posts, the agency said that it must provide capability of searching multiple social media sites, in multiple languages.

As per FBI’s procurement documents, the tool had to be able to scrape data from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Deep/Dark Web, VK, and Telegram, while being able to do the same with Snapchat, TikTok. Reddit, 8Kun, Gab, Parler, ask.fm, Weibo, and Discord would be considered a plus, FedScoop said.

In addition, the FBI said it would prefer more “fringe” as well as encrypted messaging platforms to be included in the winning bid. Another requirement was for the tool to carry out surveillance of these sites continuously, while the data collected would be held by the vendor and then pushed to the FBI.

Back in 2020, reports said that Babel X was selling a platform called Locate X to a number of law enforcement agencies: Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the Secret Service, and that the data broker’s tool was capable of collecting real-time location data from a huge number of users.

Locate X was taking location data anonymously from well-known phone apps that incorporate mapping or targeted ads, and is used for dragnet surveillance via the digital fence method.

Sourced from Reclaim the Net via Truth Unmuted

Clintons, Durham Investigation, law

More Damning Evidence Surfaces Against Hillary Clinton in Durham Probe

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Martin Walsh
April 8, 2022

More and more damaging evidence continues to surface against Hillary Clinton in Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation.

During an interview with journalist Sharyl Attkisson, California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa argued that it’s time for Durham to get the ball rolling.

“Justice delayed is justice denied is not some sort of a trite statement. It’s very true,” Issa told Attkisson.

“The fact is, the time has passed. It is pretty irrelevant, except it’s a lesson to Congress that putting real-time limits and putting real meat in activities, including inspector general’s reports and so on, is more important than ever. The time it takes to complete an investigation, or the time it takes for Congress to get to the truth, impacts whether or not you’re going to get the truth and compliance in a timely fashion. If you can hold an administration accountable in real-time, they will cooperate. If they know they can run out the clock, as they often do, they won’t,” Issa said.

Last month, a federal judge rejected a bid by Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann to “strike” a “factual background” section of Special Counsel John Durham’s early February court filing.

Sussmann’s legal team filed a motion demanding that the court remove portions of the Feb. 11 filing that included the “Factual Background” section by claiming that it would “taint” a jury.

“I’m not going to strike anything from the record,” noted U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Christopher Cooper during a status hearing. “Whatever effect the filing has had has already passed.”

“Allowing this case to go forward would risk criminalizing ordinary conduct, raise First Amendment concerns, dissuade honest citizens from coming forward with tips, and chill the advocacy of lawyers who interact with the government,” the filing stated.

Durham’s team responded by calling his claims “absurd” and asked the federal court in the District of Columbia to proceed.

“And far from being immaterial, they went on to say that ‘the defendant’s false statement was capable of influencing both the FBI’s decision to initiate an investigation and its subsequent conduct of that investigation,” the filing continued.

In its response to the Sussmann filing, Durham’s team noted: “The defendant’s false statement to the FBI General Counsel was plainly material because it misled the General Counsel about, among other things, the critical fact that the defendant was disseminating highly explosive allegations about a then-Presidential candidate on behalf of two specific clients, one of which was the opposing Presidential campaign.”

“The defendant’s efforts to mislead the FBI in this manner during the height of a Presidential election season plainly could have influenced the FBI’s decision-making in any number of ways,” Durham’s team continued.

Since then, Durham’s team has uncovered a smoking gun text message to the FBI that indicates there was a “conspiracy” and “joint venture” to create a false narrative to saddle Donald Trump with a phony Russian “collusion” narrative.

Durham also revealed in a recent court filing, “revealed he has unearthed a text message showing Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann falsely told the FBI he was not working on behalf of any client when he delivered anti-Trump research.”

Durham also put “the courts on notice he is prepared to show the effort to smear Donald Trump with now-disproven Russia collusion allegations was a ‘conspiracy.’”

Biden Crime Family, Congress, Law Enforcement

FBI Cyber Chief Says He Doesn’t Know Where Hunter Biden’s Laptop From Hell Is (VIDEO)

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Cristina Laila
March 29, 2022

FBI Assistant Director, cyber division, Bryan Vorndran on Tuesday said he doesn’t know where Hunter Biden’s laptop is because it’s not in his purview.

Hunter Biden’s laptop was previously abandoned at a computer repair shop in Delaware.

The Delaware repair shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, contacted lawmakers about Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and the FBI was in possession of the computer by December 2019.

The FBI withheld the laptop from President Trump’s legal team during the first impeachment.

Emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop revealed he was involved in an international money laundering operation and acted as a bagman for Joe Biden.

Hunter Biden took money from China, Russia, Ukraine and other countries.

GOP Congressman Matt Gaetz on Tuesday asked FBI cyber chief Bryan Vorndran if he knows where Hunter Biden’s laptop is stored.

“Sir, I don’t know that answer,” he said.

corruption, Durham Investigation, law

Sussmann Asks Court to Dismiss Charge of Lying to FBI, Says ‘Extraordinary Prosecutorial Overreach’

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Attorney Michael Sussmann on Thursday asked a federal court to dismiss the federal indictment against him for allegedly making a false statement to the FBI in 2016 about his connection to the Clinton presidential campaign when talking to the agency about possible collusion between those associated with the rival Trump campaign and Russia – suggesting his statement was immaterial and saying the charge is a “case of extraordinary prosecutorial overreach.”

“This is a case of extraordinary prosecutorial overreach. It has long been a crime to make a false statement to the government. But the law criminalizes only false statements that are material – false statements that matter because they can actually affect a specific decision of the government,” Sussmann’s lawyers said in a 33-page filing in a Washington, D.C. federal court.

File:

 SussmannDismissalMotion.pdf

“By contrast, false statements about ancillary matters – false statements about what  Blackstone called “trifling collateral circumstances” –are immaterial and cannot give rise to  criminal liability.”

Durham was appointed by Trump administration Attorney General William Barr in 2020 to investigate false allegations about Russia collusion.

Last week, Durham made a filing that alleges Sussmann and other campaign lawyers paid a technology company to “mine” servers belonging to Trump Tower and the Trump White House to create an “inference” of Russia collusion in 2016-17, hoping to prod federal agencies to investigate.

On Monday, Sussmann and his legal team filed a response claiming the filing includes “false allegations” and tries to “taint the jury pool” for his upcoming trial.

corruption, Independent Media, Investigation

John Solomon Reveals Who He Thinks John Durham Will Go After Next

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Martin Walsh
February 8, 2022

OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.

Just The News founder John Solomon believes that Special Counsel John Durham is preparing to go after the FBI.

During an interview on Fox News, Solomon and host Maria Bartiromo spoke about the special counsel’s investigation into the Trump-Russia witch hunt and what Durham’s next move might be.

Russian-born analyst Igor Danchenko — key source for the unverified Steele dossier that alleged ties between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia — was arrested by federal agents last year as part of the Durham investigation.

Solomon explained that he believes Durham is dealing with “two buckets.”

In one “bucket,” there are the last two indictments against officials who were connected to Hillary Clinton and their plan to feed the FBI false information about Trump-Russia conspiracies.

Solomon said the other “bucket” focuses on the FBI and whether agents knowingly mislead the FISA court to obtain warrants to spy on members of Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Solomon also disputes former FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok’s statement on MSNBC that the FBI never investigated the Trump campaign in 2016, as Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Mueller probe makes another indictment.

STRZOK: Whether intentionally or not, when you look at the balance of those pages, they have subtle dog whistles to these pro-Trump conspiracy theories, statements like the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign relied on certain things. Well, there was never an FBI investigation of the Trump campaign. Unless you listen to some kind of far-extreme-right commentators or of folks in Congress who assert there was, but that’s nonsense.

BARTIROMO: Of course, John, there was no pushback from Rachel Maddow. To say there was no investigation of the Trump campaign. Your reaction? Mind-boggling.

SOLOMON: Listen, Pete Strzok’s opening electronic communication which starts the Crossfire Hurricane investigation states they are looking at whether individuals associated with the Trump campaign were coordinating conspiring with Russia. When they put the first FISA in, in October, the Trump campaign is mentioned a dozen times in the first FISA, and as I mentioned in the last segment, the allegation is a well-developed conspiracy between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and Russia to hijack the election.

Of course, it was about the campaign. Peter Strzok’s own words said it was about the campaign. He was lying the other night. There’s no other way to say it politely.

BARTIROMO: Of course, they continue to renew FISA warrants against the Trump campaign, and they based those warrants to wiretap people like Carter Page, based on that dossier which they knew was false and made up. So I ask you now, what do you think the indictments will look like in the future? Do you think that John Durham is going to indict people at high levels, big fish, within the FBI?

SOLOMON: There’s no doubt there is activity inside the grand jury right now aimed at looking at top-level officials of the FBI, and it’s based on this evidence. We all look at the fact that Denchenko was interviewed by the FBI on January 17, and disowned a lot of the things that were said to him. A lot of people said that should have been the point where the FBI stopped.

But Durham developed really significant evidence that red flags, the stop-now warning signs go all the way back to August when Bruce Orr, in 2016 came to the FBI and said Christopher Steele is dumping a dossier. He hates Trump. He’s hired by Hillary Clinton and most of his information is raw and uncorroborated.

A month after the CIA sends a warning to the FBI, this is something John Ratcliffe declassified, saying Hillary Clinton is trying to play a dirty trick on Donald Trump to tie him to Russia to get out of her e-mail thing. All through the fall, they keep a spreadsheet of what’s right and wrong of the Steele dossier. It’s all wrong. Can’t corroborate, they can’t collaborate the information. The FBI never should have started the investigation and I think that’s where John Durham’s investigation is focused right now.