By Chuck Ros
Jim Jordan Turns Up Heat On Obama Intel Chiefs And FBI Brass Implicated In Bias Complaints
- Director Christopher Wray’s Use Of FBI Jet Amounts To ‘Embezzlement,’ Current, Ex-Agents Allege
- FBI Whistleblower Says Bureau Using Excessive Tactics To Ensure ‘Process Is The Punishment’
Two FBI officials who briefed Facebook ahead of its decision to censor news stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop donated to Democrats in 2020, according to court filings and campaign finance records.
Laura Dehmlow, the unit chief for the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and Elvis Chan, the head of the FBI’s San Francisco cyber division, were “involved” in the communications between the FBI and Facebook that led to the social media giant’s “suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story,” according to a court filing on Thursday. The FBI’s interactions with Facebook have been of interest since Mark Zuckerberg said in August that Facebook blocked access to an October 2020 New York Post article about Biden’s laptop because the FBI had earlier warned the company to be on “high alert” for Russian efforts to release derogatory information about the Bidens before the election.
According to campaign finance records, Dehmlow gave $60 to the Democratic National Committee in 2020. Chan contributed $50 each to Democratic Georgia Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock for their runoff campaigns in November 2020. According to the court filing, Facebook parent company Meta identified Dehmlow and Chan in response to a subpoena for records of interactions with the Biden administration. The filing, released by the Missouri attorney general’s office on Monday, does not detail Dehmlow and Chan’s interactions with Facebook or any other social media companies. The attorney general’s office is suing the Biden administration for allegedly colluding with social media companies to “censor free speech.”
The contributions are likely to revive longstanding concerns about political bias in the FBI’s probe of Hunter Biden, who is under federal investigation over his taxes and foreign business dealings. Republican lawmakers have accused the FBI of shutting down aspects of the investigation into Biden and of inaccurately referring to reports about the Biden family’s business dealings as Russian disinformation.
Sens. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) have for months pressed the FBI for information about who met with social media companies to warn them about the Post’s laptop story, which cited Hunter Biden’s emails with his Ukrainian business partners. After Zuckerberg’s comments, the Republicans asked the FBI and Justice Department to detail interactions with social media companies and accused the agencies of “falsely” portraying negative reports about the Biden family as Russian disinformation.
Twitter joined Facebook in censoring the Post’s story about Hunter Biden based on information from intelligence officials. Yoel Roth, the head of Twitter’s site integrity unit, has said he blocked access to the story because the officials, who have not been identified, said there were “rumors” that Russia would release derogatory material about Hunter Biden.
Facebook and Twitter executives have acknowledged they were wrong to censor the Biden story. There is no evidence that Russia hacked Hunter Biden or released his emails. A computer repair shop owner in Delaware says Biden dropped off his laptop for repairs in April 2019 but never retrieved it. The shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, provided a copy of Biden’s hard drive to the FBI in late 2019, and released another copy to the media in 2020.
According to Grassley and Johnson, FBI whistleblowers claim that an FBI official in the Washington Field Office who oversaw aspects of the Hunter Biden investigation shut down inquiries into derogatory allegations about him in October 2020. The official, Timothy Thibault, criticized Republicans in multiple social media posts.
‘The FBI is broken’: GOP drops 1,000-page report saying Bureau is ‘rotten at its core’, manipulated domestic violent extremism stats for political purposes, and deliberately downplayed ‘serious allegations of wrongdoing’ from Hunter Biden
Republicans on then House Judiciary Committee released a 1,000-page report on the politicization and misconduct in the FBI. The damning file said the bureau is ‘rotted at its core’, manipulated domestic violent extremism statistics for political purposes and downplayed investigations and ‘serious allegations of wrongdoing’ levelled at Hunter Biden. ‘The Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the stewardship of Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, is broken,’ the GOP report states. ‘The problem lies not with the majority of front-line agents who serve our country, but with the FBI’s politicized bureaucracy.’
Big Tech lawsuit has uncovered one of the most disturbing revelations yet about social media companies’ collusion with law enforcement agencies to police speech on the Internet.
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, one of the attorneys general that filed the lawsuit, disclosed an overview of FBI agent Elvis Chan’s testimony on ‘weekly meetings’ about censoring Internet posts ahead of the 2020 election.
“In our deposition of FBI agent Elvis Chan on Tuesday, we found that the FBI plays a big role in working with social media companies to censor speech – from weekly meetings with social media companies ahead of the 2020 election to asks for account takedowns,” Schmitt wrote in a Twitter thread.
“Chan, the FBI’s FITF, and senior CISA officials had meetings with social media companies in the lead-up to the 2020 election, in which Chan personally told the social media companies that there could potentially be a Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation shortly before the election,” he continued. “Those meetings were initially quarterly, then monthly, then weekly heading into the 2020 election.”
“Chan stated that the FBI regularly sent social media companies lists of URLs and social media accounts that should be taken down because they were disinformation from ‘malign foreign influence operations’,” Schmitt went on. “The FBI then inquired whether the platforms have taken down the content. On many occasions, the platforms took down the accounts flagged by the FBI.”
Chan testified because of the agent’s extensive knowledge of the FBI’s interaction with social media companies, the judge in the case stated.
“Chan had authority over cybersecurity issues for the FBI in the San Francisco, California region which includes the headquarters of major social-media platforms and played a critical role for the FBI in coordinating with social-media platforms related to censorship,” Judge Terry A. Doughty wrote in his court order.
“Even if Chan played no role in the Hunter Biden laptop communication issue, he may have knowledge of who did, and his deposition is nonetheless warranted,”
On Friday night, Twitter released a trove of internal documentation about the social media platform’s coordination with Biden campaign staff and DNC officials ahead of the 2020 election. But one thing was missing, as pointed out by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine.“Elon Musk half-delivered on his promise to tell all about Twitter’s censorship of The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election,” Devine said. “What was missing were details of specific warnings we know the FBI made to Twitter about a Russian ‘hack and leak operation’ involving Hunter during their weekly meetings with top executives of the social media giant in the days and weeks before The Post published its exclusive bombshell.”
“We know that FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan testified Tuesday in a lawsuit against the Biden administration brought by Republican attorneys that he organized those weekly meetings with Twitter and Facebook in San Francisco for as many as seven Washington-based FBI agents in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election,” she noted.
“Taibbi said he had been shown no evidence of the collusion between the FBI and Twitter that we know occurred,” she added.
“Although several sources recalled hearing about a ‘general’ warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence — that I’ve seen — of any government involvement in the laptop story,” Taibbi remarked.
But we know from Mark Zuckerberg’s interview with Joe Rogan, and subsequent testimony before Congress, that the FBI was deeply involved in policing information ahead of the 2020 election, especially the Hunter Biden laptop story.
“So, we took a different path than Twitter,” Zuckerberg said. “I mean, basically the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us some, some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey just so you know, like you should be on high alert. There was… we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump of — that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”
“So our protocol is different from Twitter’s,” he went on. “What Twitter did is they said ‘you can’t share this at all.’ We didn’t do that. What we do is we have — if something’s reported to us as potentially misinformation, important misinformation, we also use this third party fact-checking program, ’cause we don’t want to be deciding what’s true and false. And for, I think it was five or seven days when it was basically being being determined, whether it was false, the distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it. So you could still share it. You could still consume it.”
“Can we say the distribution is decreased… how does that work?” Rogan asked.
“It… basically the ranking in newsfeed was a little bit less, so fewer people saw it than would’ve otherwise,” Zuck replied.
“By what percentage?”
“I don’t know off the top of my head,” Zuck answered. “But it’s meaningful. But I mean, basically a lot of people were still able to share it. We got a lot of complaints that was the case. You know, obviously, this is a hyper-political issue. So, depending on what side of the political spectrum, you either think we didn’t censor it enough or censored it way too much. But we weren’t sort of as black and white about it as Twitter, we just kind of thought, ‘Hey look, if the FBI — which I still view as a legitimate institution in this country, it’s like very professional law enforcement — they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something.’ Then I want to take that seriously.”
“Did they specifically say you need to be on guard about that story?” Rogan asked.
“No, I don’t remember if it was that specifically,” Zuckerberg said. “But… it basically fit the pattern.”
But Facebook wasn’t done doing the Democratic Party favors during the 2016 election. Multi-billionaire owner Mark Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions on “Zuckerberg boxes” that disproportionately benefited Democrats, as the Thomas More Society documented in a 2020 report.
Thus, Twitter, Facebook, and Big Tech companies like it, acted like censors for the United States government instead of private, independent companies. The actions raise serious questions about constitutional violations of Americans’ rights, respect for freedom of the press, and 2020 election interference.
Biden’s Family Got ‘Interest-Free,’ ‘Forgivable’ Loan From China
Report: Hunter Biden Secured $40 Million In Deal With Russians
FBI director Christopher Wray established the Foreign Influence Task Force in 2017 “to identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the United States.” According to the FBI, the task force has focused primarily on foreign influence operations in which foreign actors “use false personas and fabricated stories on social media platforms to discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.”
- Tucker Carlson Discusses Leaked Documents Reflecting Direct DHS Portals To Social Media Companies
- Glenn Greenwald: The Consortium Behind Democrats’ Censorship Regime
Chan, who works in the FBI’s San Francisco field office, has spoken publicly about his interactions with social media companies in the run-up to the 2020 election. He said he “was very involved in helping to protect the U.S. elections in 2020” and that the FBI “worked in conjunction with the private sector.” He said he met with technology and social media companies “on a weekly basis” before the election to share intelligence regarding any “unusual” activity on their networks.
“That’s where the FBI and the U.S. government can actually help companies,” he said.
The FBI has been dogged by allegations of political bias since the investigation into former president Donald Trump’s possible ties to Russia. Peter Strzok, who led the investigation, was fired after the discovery of anti-Trump text messages he exchanged with FBI attorney Lisa Page. Another FBI attorney who worked on the investigation, Kevin Clinesmith, sent text messages after the 2016 election urging “Viva le resistance,” a reference to anti-Trump groups that emerged after the election.
The FBI and Facebook did not respond to requests for comment.
2022-07-18 CEG to DOJ FBI (Political Bias) – Senator Chuck Grassley
Jul 18, 2022 … and Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) guidelines by Assistant … I remain very concerned that political bias by a select group.
Grassley Raises Concern about Apparent Political Bias by Senior …
May 31, 2022 … Grassley Raises Concern about Apparent Political Bias by Senior FBI Public Integrity Official. Requests Inspector General Investigation.
FBI Agent Who Pushed To Censor Hunter Biden Story Is Shaping Biden Admin’s Response To ‘Misinformation’
REUTERS/Michael A. McCoy
Laurel Duggan Social Issues and Culture Reporter
An FBI agent who coordinated with Facebook to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story is advising the Biden administration in its push to suppress information on social media, according to leaked documents published by The Intercept.
Laura Dehmlow was involved in conversations between the FBI and Facebook ahead of the social media company’s decision to censor the story surrounding the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election, the Washington Free Beacon reported. She was later involved in the Biden administration’s efforts to suppress and censor content on social media platforms for misinformation-related purposes, according to The Intercept.
“We need a media infrastructure that is held accountable,” she said during a March meeting attended by Twitter executives and executives from JP Morgan Chase, according to documents obtained by The Intercept. She also said subversive content on social media could weaken public support for the U.S. government. (RELATED: Government Officials Have A Special Portal To Flag Facebook Posts For Censorship)
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has made plans to pressure private social media companies to censor information on “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine,” according to leaked documents obtained by The Intercept. Facebook and Instagram also have a formal process for government officials to ask them to suppress certain information.
The DHS was created to combat terrorism, and it justified its involvement in online censorship with the claim that threats can be “exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread online,” according to The Intercept.
Disinformation and misinformation aren’t always precisely defined by the federal government; this creates an opening for the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech and what they can censor.
FBI agent Laura Dehmlow was in communications w Facebook that led to the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 over the false allegation that it was “disinfo.” This year, she met w/ Twitter/DHS to stress “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.” pic.twitter.com/17LqhEyMN0
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) October 31, 2022
The FBI pressured social media platforms to censor reports about the laptop Hunter Biden and called the story “Russian misinformation” prior to the 2020 presidential election.
Twitter locked the New York Post’s account for several days after the outlet broke a story Oct. 15, 2020 about emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop regarding a meeting between then-Vice President Joe Biden and a Ukrainian gas executive; the platform also blocked users from sharing links to the article.
The FBI, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
Scandal-Ridden San Francisco FBI Field Office Involved in Pelosi Investigation
By Julie Kelly
No one should accept at face value the strange account of what happened to Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), at their California home last week.
Plenty of factors—a wholly dishonest news media, unsubstantiated claims the attacker was a foiled assassin who planned to kill the speaker of the House, and Mr. Pelosi’s recent legal troubles, to name a few—feed justified skepticism surrounding the alleged break-in and hammer attack that occurred in the wee hours of October 28. Details continue to change while leading Democrats including Hillary Clinton blame the incident, without evidence, on Republicans and Donald Trump.
This situation is yet another example of how the public’s complete lack of faith in major institutions is fueling doubt and suspicion. Unfortunately, that level of distrust extends to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a once-revered agency that has blown its reputation in service to the Democratic Party. And news that the San Francisco FBI field office is taking a lead role in the Pelosi investigation offers little comfort that the American people will ever find out the truth of the matter.
The San Francisco field office, like the bureau’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and many other offices across the country, is mired in scandal. It’s particularly true as it relates to the FBI’s cozy ties to Big Tech—and the San Francisco FBI office is ground zero for that quid pro quo relationship. Rather than investigate the nearly 300 Big Tech companies within its Silicon Valley jurisdiction for various offenses such as election interference, the San Francisco FBI office appears instead to be in cahoots with these powerful corporate interests to do the Democratic Party’s dirty work.
Few people benefit more than Nancy Pelosi, who of course happens to live in San Francisco. Democratic candidates and lawmakers are flush with campaign donations from Big Tech; in 2020 alone, Facebook and Twitter—the latter located in Pelosi’s congressional district and the former located just outside its boundaries—donated at least $5.5 million to Democrats and only a paltry $435,000 to Republicans, a 12-1 ratio in favor of Pelosi’s party. Conversely, threats made by leading Democrats to break up Big Tech or hold congressional hearings into alleged malfeasance have been slow-walked since Pelosi reclaimed the speaker’s gavel.
Fortunately, a lawsuit recently filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt laid bare how this lucrative back-scratching operation works. Elvis Chan, a top cyber FBI agent working in the San Francisco office, was in routine communication with Big Tech giants prior to the 2020 election to warn companies of “foreign disinformation” spread on their platforms—and the discussions just happened to coincide with the release of explosive materials found on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Chan is named as a co-defendant in Schmitt’s sweeping civil suit seeking to hold accountable government officials working behind-the-scenes with Big Tech to censor information considered hostile to the regime.
“Defendant Elvis M. Chan is Supervisory Special Agent of Squad in the San Francisco Division of the FBI.” Schmitt wrote in a recent filing. “On information and belief, he has authority over cybersecurity issues for FBI in that geographical region, which includes the headquarters of major social-media platforms, and he plays a critical role for FBI—in coordinating with social-media platforms relating to censorship and suppression of speech on their platforms. Meta [Facebook’s parent company] has identified Elvis Chan as involved in the communications between the FBI and Meta that led to Facebook’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
Chan, for his part, publicly brags about his influence in Silicon Valley, boasting how he “was very involved in helping to protect the U.S. elections in 2020” by communicating “on a weekly basis” with Big Tech titans “That’s where the FBI and the U.S. government can actually help companies,” Chan said during a June 2022 podcast interview.
In other words, Chan is the power couple’s hand holder. (The Department of Justice is fighting a court order for Chan’s deposition on the grounds his involvement in the Hunter Biden laptop suppression effort was misrepresented.) And there is no indication the partnership will end anytime soon. Social media platforms continue to collaborate with the FBI to excavate incriminating evidence from the deleted accounts of January 6 defendants; Facebook is collecting private messages between users expressing “anti-government” or “anti-authority” sentiment—read: conservatives—and turning over those texts to the FBI without a subpoena.
The Intercept reported Monday that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security plan to accelerate its joint effort to censor “misinformation” spread online. Targeted topics include posts critical of COVID vaccines, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, and support for Ukraine. FBI counterrorism agents are being “reassigned” from critical surveillance of potential threats overseas to spy on American citizens.
“They work on an undercover basis online to penetrate social networking chat rooms, online forums, and blogs to detect, enter, dismantle, and disrupt existing and emerging terrorist organizations via online forums, chat rooms, bulletin boards, blogs, websites, and social networking,” one anonymous FBI agents told The Intercept.
There are other problems at the San Francisco FBI office. In early October, a California jury convicted a former FBI special agent for accepting at least $150,000 in cash and gifts on behalf of a corrupt Armenian businessman with ties to organized crime. Babak Broumand was the head of national security investigations at the San Francisco FBI field office at the time of his arrest in 2018. According to the indictment, “Broumand accepted cash, checks, private jet flights, a Ducati motorcycle, hotel stays, escorts, meals, and other items of value from an organized crime-linked lawyer.”
He was found guilty of four counts including bribery of a public official; Broumand will be sentenced in January and faces up to 45 years in prison.
Which could explain why FBI Director Christopher Wray quietly replaced the head of the San Francisco field office in September. Robert Tripp was just moved from the bureau’s inspection division (the FBI’s version of internal affairs) in Washington to take over the San Francisco operation.
Late Monday afternoon, Tripp and Justice Department officials announced federal charges against the alleged attacker, David DePape, including the attempted kidnapping of Speaker Pelosi—a confusing charge, considering Pelosi wasn’t home and DePape clearly had no physical or mental capacity to do so. It appears more than anything to be political narrative-building by Biden’s Justice Department to bolster the idea that Trump and Republicans inspired another “kidnapping” attempt. The complaint, signed by a special agent assigned to domestic terror investigations in the San Francisco FBI office, also offers a conflicting account as to what happened when officers arrived and an incomplete timeline of events.
Given the highly partisan nature of the FBI, and the San Francisco field office in particular, there is no reason to believe FBI brass will do anything more than run cover for the Pelosis and conceal any damaging or contradictory facts about the confrontation. Prayers for Paul Pelosi are in order as he remains hospitalized for his injuries—a full investigation free from political interference also is in order. It’s unlikely, however, the FBI will proceed accordingly.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/incidents-and-offenses
The FBI’s Million-Dollar Men
By Julie Kelly
Proceedings underway in three U.S. courtrooms are providing a coordinated view into the abuse of the FBI’s confidential human source (CHS) program, a cash-flush operation now primarily used to bolster Democratic Party narratives instead of detecting and preventing crime.
As I’ve reported, the FBI spends an average of $42 million per year to pay informants and does so with absolutely no financial or legal accountability. Confidential human sources are paid in cash; they can offer their services for a variety of reasons including financial need or to obtain a change in immigration status. FBI agents are required to keep at least one informant on the books, an FBI whistleblower told me; successfully using a CHS to bust up a crime is one way to get promoted.
But ongoing trials related to the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, January 6, and the Whitmer fednapping case are once again shining a light on the way the bureau hires snitches to advance political goals.
After numerous investigations over the course of more than six years—not to mention an obsessive fixation by the national media—the scandal known as Russiagate produced another bombshell revelation during the perjury trial of Igor Danchenko, the key source for the Steele dossier. The FBI offered to pay Christopher Steele, its author, up to $1 million in cash if he could verify the dossier’s declarations about Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. He could not.
Described for years as a “former British intelligence officer,” Steele, in fact, was a private consultant with several paymasters in 2016. Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee retained Steele to write his dossier that alleged shadowy connections between the Kremlin and Trump associates. At the same time, Steele was lobbying the U.S. government on behalf of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who ran afoul of the Obama Administration.
When the cash offer was made in October 2016, Steele also was working as an informant for the FBI. (It’s unknown how much he was paid.) He moved seamlessly between the bureau, other government agencies including the State Department, and the national news media almost until Election Day. Steele met with journalists and editors in the fall of 2016 to spin the dossier’s content as legitimate—and some outlets took the bait.
The bureau severed the arrangement in late October 2016 after learning Steele had met with reporters, but the damage was done. Steele’s fabricated dirt seeded the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax.
Turns out, Steele wasn’t the only paid FBI informant tied to the dossier. Testimony revealed the FBI hired Danchenko as an informant in March 2017 and paid him at least $200,000 until the FBI cut him loose in October 2020—the same month Attorney General William Barr named U.S. Attorney John Durham as special counsel. (Stefan Halper, another FBI informant, also aided the FBI’s effort to smear Trump via Russiagate.)
It’s unclear exactly what Danchenko did as an informant. Was he used as a behind-the-scenes leaker to give oxygen to the Russiagate hoax in the media? Did the bureau hire him as an informant to protect him, and the FBI, from the prying eyes of investigators?
Either way, it’s clear the FBI didn’t hire these informants because the government had cause to suspect Trump was in cahoots with Russia to rig the 2016 election. To the contrary, the informants manufactured the falsehood, giving FBI partisans and the news media fabricated evidence to sabotage Trump with the FBI’s imprimatur.
Seditious Conspiracy—Or Entrapment?
The bureau’s crusade against Trump continued, climaxing with the events of January 6, 2021. Down the interstate from Dancheko’s trial in Virginia is the seditious conspiracy trial of five members of the Oath Keepers. Prosecutors working under U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves, a Biden campaign advisor, are trying to convince a D.C. jury that the Oath Keepers tried to overthrow the government that day.
The case rests largely on inflammatory posts in group chats and social media; none is accused of committing violence that day, in fact, those who legally brought firearms from various states kept their weapons behind in a Virginia hotel on January 6. Evidence suggests they tried to help police calm the crowd inside—two never even entered the building.
That isn’t stopping Graves’ office from insisting the Oath Keepers, a group of former military and law enforcement officers, plotted a traitorous coup. But at the last minute, the government admitted five informants had been embedded in the group, likely before the Capitol protest.
Prosecutors, however, do not want jurors to hear much about those informants, particularly their work in past “investigations”—code for past “entrapment schemes.” (The New York Times reported last year that FBI informants had infiltrated the Proud Boys, another alleged “militia” charged in the Capitol breach, months before January 6. The group’s leader himself is a former confidential human source for the FBI.)
Other unknowns in the Oath Keepers’ case raise serious questions about the FBI’s deeper involvement. A man who created an encrypted group chat and can be heard urging at least one Oath Keeper to commit violence remains unidentified and uncharged—following a pattern of other unindicted instigators such as Ray Epps. Dozens of alleged Oath Keepers who participated in similar conduct also are not charged. And defense counsel discovered that at least 20 FBI and ATF agents were near the group on January 6.
Doing what, exactly? If federal agents were in the city that day, why didn’t they protect the Capitol and lawmakers inside?
None of it adds up.
A History of Entrapment
About 800 miles away, three Michigan men are on trial for a very similar conspiracy case. In 2020, state prosecutors charged Joe Morrison, Pete Musico, and Paul Bellar for “providing material support for a terrorist act” related to the plot to kidnap and kill Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. But two separate federal trials exposed how the scheme was engineered by multiple FBI agents and informants. (Two men were acquitted by a federal jury in April amid an FBI entrapment defense. That jury hung on two other defendants but they were convicted at a second trial in August.)
At least a dozen informants worked the fednapping hoax; the total cost to taxpayers has not yet been disclosed. The lead FBI informant, Dan Chappel, took the stand last week in the state trial to explain his role. As I’ve reported, the FBI compensated Chappel at least $60,000 in cash and personal items to stitch the random targets together. An FBI agent handed Chappel an envelope with $23,500 in cash in December 2020, two months after the arrests were made in the case.
But Chappel’s testimony—and defense filings—show how he lured the men into the FBI’s trap. Chappel created encrypted chat groups to foster talk of violence while giving the FBI direct access to the secret communications. He organized meetings where he recorded every word, even when the targets were drunk or stoned. On two occasions, Chappel drove his main target to Whitmer’s vacation cottage, the scene of the potential crime, on a “surveillance” trip that in reality was a stunt to produce photographs later used as evidence against the man.
Chappel, however, broke FBI protocol in several instances including suggesting criminal acts and becoming a commander in the fake militia the FBI invented exclusively for the fednapping caper. Defense attorneys grilled Chappel last week about the veracity of the government’s explanation as to how Chappel became an informant; turns out, his previous claim that he went to the FBI after being alarmed at seeing violent, anti-law enforcement chatter on a website wasn’t true.
Chappel also couldn’t explain why he didn’t receive a Purple Heart if he indeed suffered injuries during the Iraq War, a representation made by both Chappel and the government. “This witness can’t get away with misrepresenting his conduct, his service, his valor—which I would argue is stolen valor in this matter—to these 15 people,” one defense attorney said in court.
The nexus of all three trials is, of course, Donald Trump. In Russiagate, the goal was to portray Trump as a tool of the Kremlin, a president illegitimately elected with the help of Russia. In the other two cases, innocent men entrapped then prosecuted by the government are pawns to prove that “domestic violent extremists” loyal to Donald Trump are prone to violence on his behalf.
Over the weekend, Representative James Comer (R-Ky.) said if Republicans take control of the House, he would support establishing a committee to investigate the FBI. “We have a huge problem with the FBI and the fact is, the American people have lost faith in the FBI,” Comer told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo. “It’s going in the wrong direction.”
It sure is. Republican voters want a full-scale investigation into the investigators; House GOP leaders would be wise to include the investigators’ long list of highly-paid political hit men known as FBI informants.
Welcome to the Worst FBI Field Offices
– Millions of Dollars Wasted as Agents Get tailed By Other FBI Agents & ‘Trouble Makers’ Get Labeled Terrorists, but San Francisco field office may be more corrupt
– San Francisco FBI office protects Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Elon Musk, Jerry Brown, John Doerr, Kamala Harris, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt and Larry Page. They have received over 300 crime reports on them but have not written a single felony-recommending “302 Form” on them to the DC office. Compromised Much?
FBI Agents awaiting promotions in the New Haven, Connecticut field office realized they might have to wait for a long time.
Especially after Special Agent in Charge Patricia Ferrick passed over decorated agents and instead promoted her husband who worked in the same office, a fact that agents say has helped the office earn its reputed reputation in FBI lore.
A reputation as the worst FBI field office in America.
Welcome to New Haven, a quaint town that boasts Yale University and its tony suburbs along with an FBI office ruled by “fear and intimidation,” as one internal FBI report deemed it. A place where agents tail other agents and where FBI brass designate outliers as potential terrorists so they can win employment grievances.
The chronic shenanigans at the FBI’s New Haven field office are literally costing taxpayers millions of dollars.
“I had a buddy who was assigned to New Haven when we were working in New York City and I said ‘No, don’t go. Don’t do it. It’s a career disaster,’ ” said one veteran FBI agent.
Turns out, for many FBI agents, he was right. And it is even worse. Current and former agents told True Pundit working in New Haven caused severe depression and even thoughts of suicide.
Yes, suicide. The FBI’s little known and ugly secret, often referred to as “eating my gun” when FBI agents describe their thoughts of escaping bad working conditions gone haywire. Even when many FBI agents end their own lives, it is seldom reported as a suicide.
The stress of taking on the FBI’s culture can attribute to such severe depression. When agents buck the system and press for their rights in employment disputes they are met with a fierce backlash that many say is not waged to dispute the agent’s grievance but instead ruin that agent’s life. Ruin their career, sink them in legal bills, debt, foreclosure, break up a marriage, depression, even suicide.
You want to take on the Bureau even if you’ve been treated capriciously, prepare for the fight of your life. It’s the same techniques the FBI and Justice Department employ against criminal defendants who won’t work a plea deal or seek a jury trial.
If things are that bad, why doesn’t someone in the Justice Department or Washington, D.C. do something about it. Ferrick who runs the office is a close associate of recently defrocked and fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Under McCabe’s supervision, agents seldom filed complaints because they feared they would be ignored. Often, they were. Others who did file complaints were put through a vicious gauntlet designed by FBI brass.
SAC Patricia Ferrick
McCabe’s influence and management philosophy still has tentacles throughout numerous key FBI field offices, sources said. That includes New Haven, although it is on a much smaller scale compared to Las Vegas, Los Angeles or even Little Rock where McCabe’s influence is still seen in the Bureau’s leadership of each office.
Ferrick and her inner circle are accused of, among other infractions, running an office plagued with pay-for-play, favoritism, hundreds of thousands spent in legal fees to fight lawsuits and internal complaints, alleged illegal surveillance on their own agents.
And retaliation. Lots of retaliation.
Even nepotism.
“New Haven has been a real shit show for a long time,” one DEA agent said. “Everyone in the northeast knows it, not just FBI. The U.S. Attorney’s office up here is no better because they cover for them.”
Two agents in New Haven have uncovered just how rife the office is with corruption and downright pettiness that is costing taxpayers untold millions of dollars.
Special Agent Kurt Siuzdak filed a federal lawsuit against the Justice Department and then-Attorney General Eric Holder in 2014 for serious workplace problems in New Haven. Now, four years later, that case is still active but a federal judge has directed the FBI and Justice Department to settle the case, sources said.
“The judge said if this gets in front of a jury and goes public, it will become a major black eye for the FBI,” one FBI insider said. “The judge has coaxed the Justice Department to pull the plug and save itself the embarrassment. Settle it. Pay the agent and walk away.”
It turns out the New Haven FBI might have messed with the wrong agent. Siuzdak is a 21-year FBI veteran and also a trial lawyer who worked in New York as a legal attache to Iraq for the Bureau before joining New Haven in 2009.
That’s when the trouble began for the former Army veteran who was also one of the FBI agents who responded to and worked the World Trade Center bombings on September 11, 2001.
Siuzdak maintains he was passed over for promotions because New Haven’s FBI leadership awarded promotions based on social affiliations: popularity, not achievement. Just like a high school prom committee. When Siuzdak complained that New Haven’s leadership was feckless, dysfunctional and arbitrary, he was professionally minimized, harassed, retaliated against and even subjected to a baseless internal investigation.
That included being followed by colleagues like a common criminal, sources said.
It is hard to understand why Siuzdak was targeted so viciously. It was not a surprise — even after the agent blew the whistle — that New Haven wasn’t the FBI’s shining field office on a hill.
According to internal FBI employment surveys in 2012 and 2013, agents hammered the office with brutally-low ratings for leadership, employee treatment and overall office morale. A January 2013 an inspection by FBI headquarters of New Haven’s violent crime task forces found that “senior management was described as leading by fear and intimidation, negatively impacting both internal personnel and the liaison relationships with the FBI’s external partners.”
As FBI Director, James Comey visited the New Haven office in 2014 and vowed to clean it up. He also apologized to agents in a speech for the Bureau’s past transgressions of workplace slights in New Haven. Four years later, agents said the office is worse than ever.
Just ask New Haven FBI Special Agent Omar Montoya.
He sued the FBI, Justice Department, Jeff Sessions and Christopher Wray in September.
Montoya’s case is entwined with Special Agent Kurt Siuzdak’s case in a somewhat strange way. Before any FBI agent can file a case in federal court, they are required to file the grievances within the FBI’s office of Equal Employment Opportunity Affairs (“EEO”). Montoya, who worked as a GS-11 electronics technician for the FBI, was also the internal FBI EEO counselor who was assigned to another agent’s case in 2015.
Sources said Montoya recognized the unnamed agent’s case was so well documented that he told supervisors and FBI brass in New Haven that they should settle the case, it was doubtful the FBI would win the case, specially if it reached federal court, sources said.
Outraged that Montoya would not string out a decision for a referral on the case — delay the case to frustrate the agent — FBI brass harassed and retaliated against Montoya.
From Montoya’s federal lawsuit:
On or about April 24, 2015, plaintiff assisted an FBI Special Agent (“SA1”)
initiate an EEO complaint against his FBI supervisors, including SAC Ferrick and ASAC Kline.
SA1’s EEO complaint alleged, inter alia, claims of discrimination and retaliation against his FBI
supervisors, including but not necessarily limited to SAC Ferrick and ASAC Kline.
On or about April 24, 2015, as part of his duties as an EEO counselor, plaintiff
interviewed both SAC Ferrick and ASAC Kline in connection with SA1’s EEO complaint and in
an effort to mediate a resolution to the EEO complaint. When he interviewed SAC Ferrick and
ASAC Kline, however, both FBI supervisors resisted plaintiff’s efforts to explore a mediated
solution and demonstrated contempt for the EEO process. In fact, when plaintiff met with
ASAC Kline to discuss SA1’s EEO complaint, he became angry with plaintiff and attempted to
intimidate him.
Soon after plaintiff interviewed SAC Ferrick and ASAC Kline in his capacity as
an EEO counselor in connection with SA1’s EEO complaint and provided SA1 with his Notice
of Right to File an EEO complaint, his FBI supervisors began to harass him and treat him
differently and less favorably than other FBI employees.
On or about July 1, 2015 – and shortly after he had interviewed SAC Ferrick and
ASAC Kline in connection with SA1’s EEO complaint – plaintiff sent an e-mail to the FBI
executive management at the FBI’s NHD, including SAC Ferrick and ASAC Kline, reporting
what he believed to have been an abuse of authority by an FBI supervisor.
Montoya maintains New Haven FBI brass canceled a promotion by “falsely mischaracterized and misrepresented plaintiff’s work performance as deficient in an effort to ensure that he would be denied a promotion to the GS-12 level.”
No such promotion was given. Montoya began to suffer medical problems from the stress at the New Haven FBI.
So far, FBI agents in New Haven have sued Eric Holder, the FBI, Jeff Sessions, Christopher Wray and that list could grow larger. Other cases working their way through the FBI’s internal complaint process could blossom into federal civil cases, sources said.
Each case — whether it reaches federal court or not — requires lawyers from the Justice Department. And that gets expensive. If the FBI loses a case, the Justice Department has to not only underwrite its legal fees to fight the case, but also pay the plaintiff’s legal fees. Then, taxpayers are on the hook for cash settlements which normally top out at $300,000 though many can exceed that amount based on back pay and lost promotions and benefits, sources said.
Then there are the man hours when supervisors assigned FBI agents to surveillance of other FBI agents who make formal complaints.
“Cars sat parked outside our house for weeks at a time, following us, keeping tabs on everywhere we went,” one FBI source said. “These agents weren’t working cases, they were intimidating their colleagues and getting paid handsomely to do it.
“These are mutts. Who would listen to a supervisor and sit on an agent’s house? The lowest of the low. It hurts morale. Kills it.”
And it is expensive. Very expensive.
That said, the shenanigans at the FBI’s New Haven field office are literally costing taxpayers millions of dollars.
And while Montoya’s lawsuit fails to detail another toll unseen on a balance sheet, FBI sources said FBI brass in New Haven targeted Montoya with a dirty trick that likely contributed to his stress-induced medical woes and health decline.
Montoya emigrated to the United States from Ecuador in 1993 and became a legal resident of the United States. By 1994, he was a legal citizen as was enrolled in the Army from 1994 through 2002, deployed to Saudi Arabia and South Korea. From 2003 to 2006 he was employed as a civilian contractor the U.S. Armed Forces, deployed to Iraq and central America as an aircraft mechanic. Then he enrolled in college and got his bachelor’s degree.
The American dream, really.
At the time, FBI sources said Peter Strzok was running a program in Washington D.C. called the Post-Adjudication Risk Management plan, or PARM, an FBI program initiated to catch problematic and criminal associations of FBI agents with foreign contacts. FBI insiders said Strzok used PARM to label Montonya an “insider threat” because of his international travel and service for the U.S. military and being that he was born in Ecuador.
“It’s the equivalent of being linked to terrorism inside the FBI,” one insider said. “Your career is frozen when you are designated an insider threat. McCabe and Stzok used this to silence many agents and Kerrick was behind this in New Haven. She dialed up McCabe to try and ruin Montoya, there is not doubt.”
Just to win a grievance over a promotion.
Sources said Montoya suffered multiple health issues after this and missed time at work, including a stint where he had to file for disability pay in order to keep up with his family’s bills and obligations because FBI brass didn’t want to pay him any more.
This is what the FBI does with agents who take on the system. They break good people. Some never come back. They “eat” their guns.
An no one in D.C. headquarters even blinks.
If the FBI does this to its own, just imagine what they are capable of doing to you.
Lawyers Cite Race In Defense Of Black FBI Agent Who Leaked Classified Info (dailycaller.com)
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