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GOP Rep Threatens to Cut FBI Funding

Posted By: ConSigCor

GOP Rep Threatens to Cut FBI Funding - 05/17/2023 02:05 AM

Oversight GOP Rep Threatens to Cut FBI Funding Over Bureau’s Refusal to Cooperate With Biden Family Probe

Original article here.

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), a member of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, said Monday that House Republicans might have to “use the power of the purse” to compel the FBI to cooperate with their investigations.

“The Congress is this country’s checkbook and we can start cutting funds to the FBI,” Burchett told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business’ “Mornings With Maria.”

The FBI has refused to release a document that allegedly describes “very serious and detailed allegations” involving Joe Biden.

On May 3, Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) issued a Congressional subpoena demanding that the FBI produce an unclassified record detailing an alleged criminal bribery scheme involving the then-Vice President and a foreign national.

Comer issued the subpoena after a whistleblower made legally protected disclosures to Senator Chuck Grassley’s (R-Iowa) office. According to the whistleblower, the document is an FBI-generated FD-1023 form and it details an arrangement involving an exchange of money for policy decisions.

Burchett said he was in favor of cutting the FBI’s funding as a way to force the Bureau to comply with their subpoena.

“We’ll have to start cutting their checkbook a little bit just to get them to the table if that’s what it takes,” he said.

The congressman also confirmed what Comer told Bartiromo the day before regarding a missing whistleblower.

The Oversight Chairman said on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures that at least one informant/whistleblower with information regarding the Biden family’s crime schemes had gone missing.

“Nine of ten people that we’ve identified, that have very good knowledge with respect to the Bidens, they’re one of three things,” Comer said. “They’re either currently in court, they’re currently in jail, or they’re currently missing, They fear for their lives. Not only are the Biden lawyers and the Biden White House intimidating them, the media is trying to intimidate or discredit them.”

As American Greatness reported earlier this month, an Israeli whistleblower went missing in Cyprus after claiming in a tweet that the Biden administration was out to “bury” him. The Biden Department of Justice had Dr. Gal Luft, the founder and executive director of the Washington-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS), arrested on weapon trafficking charges last February as he was preparing to reveal damning information about the Biden family’s international business exploits to Congress.

“I’ve been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated extradition request by the U.S.,” Luft tweeted on February 18. “The US, claiming I’m an arms dealer. It would be funny if it weren’t tragic. I’ve never been an arms dealer,” Luft continued. “DOJ is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim & Hunter Biden,” the 56-year-old added, threatening to “name names.”

The whistleblower posted bail in March and hasn’t been seen since.

Earlier this month, Comer accused Hunter Biden’s lawyers of “testing the limits” of witness intimidation by contacting witnesses cooperating with their probe and reminding them of their “potential liability in some of these business schemes.”

“We feel that this is close to crossing the line,” he told Fox News’ Sandra Smith on May 1. “Obviously their objective, in my opinion, is witness intimidation.”

“The FBI doesn’t give a rip,” Burchett told Bartiromo. “They just basically sent a flippant response to our inquiries into this whole mess.”

Burchett also noted that the FBI has been sitting on evidence of colossal criminality regarding the Biden family, but has focused instead on “small potatoes” like Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.)

“There are ten million reasons to look at this White House,” Burchett said, in reference to the $10 million the Biden family and their business associates have received via wire transfers from foreign companies.

Bartiromo marveled that these have been the most serious allegations ever leveled against a sitting president and the media refuses to cover it.

“The whole thing is ridiculous and for the Democrats and the national media and the FBI to apparently be in collusion together on this thing is even more telling,” Burchett agreed.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is scheduled to have a one-on-one meeting with FBI Director Christopher Wray to discuss these issues on Thursday.

Posted By: airforce

Re: GOP Rep Threatens to Cut FBI Funding - 05/17/2023 05:03 AM

They should cut the FBI's funding to zero. The Founding Fathers had the chance to create a national police force, and wisely decided not to. If there ever as a good reason to have an FBI, that reason no longer exists.

Onward and upward,
airforce
Posted By: airforce

Re: GOP Rep Threatens to Cut FBI Funding - 05/20/2023 05:47 PM

How should we fix the FBI? Burn it down.

Quote
This has not been a banner week for the FBI.

The Durham Report was, well, not great for the bureau. Yes, I still want heads.

It was, of course, just the latest in a long stream of events that should rattle any faith anyone has in our institutions.

It isn’t getting any better, either.

You see, it seems that the FBI wasn’t content to just screw over the American people. They also wanted to screw over their own who dared step out of line to do what they thought was right.

From TheBlaze:

Quote
An interim staff report released Thursday morning by the House Judiciary Committee and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government accused the Federal Bureau of Investigation of "retaliatory conduct" against whistleblowers who exposed the bureau's "politicized rot."

The committee's report, obtained by Fox News Digital, revealed that the FBI suspended and revoked the security clearances of employees who spoke out about the agency's "abuse and misconduct."

Several current and former FBI employees provided testimony to the committee.

"Some of these employees—Special Agents Garret O'Boyle and Stephen Friend, Supervisory Intelligence Analyst George Hill, and Staff Operations Specialist Marcus Allen—have chosen to speak on the record about their experiences," the report stated. "The disclosures from these FBI employees highlight egregious abuse, misallocation of law-enforcement resources, and misconduct with the leadership ranks of the FBI."


In other words, they spoke up and were punished for their efforts.

It would be one thing if they were accused of releasing classified information or something. That would make perfect sense. The fact that they weren’t arrested, though, suggests it was nothing like that.

What it looks like happened is that these people stepped up and said what was going on was wrong and the FBI decided to slap them back in line.

That tells us that they knew they were in the wrong and decided to continue anyway.

At this point, it’s obvious that the FBI needs to be burned to the ground with the earth salted afterward.

I’m sure there are good people in the bureau. I know there are. I’ve met more than a few through the years.

Yet the leadership is thoroughly disgraced and they’ve been in a position where it’s impossible to know who has been suborned and who hasn’t. As such, about the only people you can trust to remain are the janitors.


Maybe.

I am well and truly disgusted with what has happened. I’m angry like I’ve never been angry before about something ostensibly political.

While I never fully trusted my government, I tended to believe that, in the long run, what was right would win out.

It would, too, were the playing field remotely even. It’s not, and when these folks raised concerns, rather than back off, the FBI sought to punish them.

There can be no amnesty for this. There can be no redemption. These…individuals have gone beyond anything approaching reasonable and, what’s more, they knew it.

Burn. It. Down.


Onward and upward,
airforce
Posted By: ConSigCor

Re: GOP Rep Threatens to Cut FBI Funding - 05/20/2023 06:27 PM

FBI misused surveillance tool on Jan. 6 suspects, BLM arrestees and others

The FBI has misused a powerful digital surveillance tool more than 278,000 times, including against crime victims, Jan. 6 riot suspects, people arrested at protests after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 and — in one case — 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate, according to a newly unsealed court document.

FBI officials say they have already fixed the problems, which the agency blamed on a misunderstanding between its employees and Justice Department lawyers about how to properly use a vast database named for the legal statute that created it, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

But the failures to use the database correctly when collecting information about U.S. citizens and others may make it harder for the agency to marshal support in Congress to renew the law, which is due to expire at the end of this year. It may also create additional head winds for the FBI, which has been under attack for years by former president Donald Trump and his political supporters. House lawmakers aligned with Trump held a hearing this week trying to show that the nation’s premier law enforcement agency is biased against conservatives.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees Section 702, has pressured the FBI to address the problems, writing in the April 2022 opinion that was unsealed Friday that if the agency doesn’t perform better, the court will crack down and order its own changes to FBI practices.

The Section 702 database is a vast trove of electronic communications and other information that can be searched by the National Security Agency and the FBI. The FBI is authorized to search the database only when agents have reason to believe that such a search will produce information relevant to foreign intelligence purposes, or evidence of crimes.

Built in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the database is seen by U.S. officials as one of the prize jewels of the national security apparatus. Its primary purpose is targeting foreign intelligence or terrorism information. But the sweeping nature of the information in the database has long worried civil rights advocates, who argue that the government has proved it cannot be trusted to use the system carefully.

The court “is encouraged by the amendments to the FBI’s querying procedures,” Judge Rudolph Contreras of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court wrote in the opinion, which detailed the nearly 300,000 abuses logged between 2020 and early 2021. “Nonetheless, compliance problems with the querying of Section 702 information have proven to be persistent and widespread. If they are not substantially mitigated by these recent measures, it may become necessary to consider other responses, such as substantially limiting the number of FBI personnel with access to unminimized Section 702 information.

While House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has argued that the FBI has mistreated conservatives and applied a liberal bent to its investigations, the examples cited in Contreras’s opinion suggest that the bureau was multifaceted in its failure to live up to the legal standards of the courts and the Justice Department. In a written statement, Jordan said that FBI Director Christopher A. Wray “told us we can sleep well at night because of the FBI’s so-called FISA reforms. But it just keeps getting worse.”

In June 2020, the FBI searched for digital data and communications of 133 people arrested “in connection with civil unrest and protests between approximately May 30, and June 18, 2020,” a time when demonstrations erupted across the country over Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.



FISA Court Report: FBI Continued to Abuse Surveillance Tool After Trump-Era Abuses

By Debra Heine
May 19, 2023

The FBI continued to abuse a powerful digital surveillance tool even after the Bureau promised reforms following its Trump-era abuses, according to a newly-unsealed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court document.

The FBI misused Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) more than 278,000 times, the Washington Post reported, “including against crime victims, January 6 riot suspects, and people arrested at protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.” In one particularly egregious case, they reportedly relied on Section 702 to spy on 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate.

Section 702 is a provision of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 that “permits the government to conduct targeted surveillance of foreign persons located outside the United States, with the compelled assistance of electronic communication service providers, to acquire foreign intelligence information.”

The law, created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, allows National Security Agency and FBI employees a to search a vast database of electronic communications and other information.

The FBI is authorized to search the Section 702 database “only when agents have reason to believe such a search will produce information relevant to foreign intelligence purposes, or evidence of crimes,” according to the Post.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees Section 702, stated in the memorandum opinion that the FBI has shown “a pattern of conducting broad, suspicionless queries that violate the requirement that its queries of unminimized Section 702 information be reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime.”

In the April 2022 opinion, unsealed Friday, the FISA Court’s Judge Rudolph Contreras warned that if the FBI didn’t do better, the FISA court would crack down and order its own changes to the Bureau’s surveillance practices.

The FBI says it has already fixed the problems, which it blamed on a misunderstanding between its employees and Justice Department lawyers about how to properly use a vast database named for the legal statute that created it, Section 702.

But the failures to use the 702 database correctly when collecting information about U.S. citizens and others may make it harder for the agency to marshal support in Congress to renew the law, which is due to expire at the end of this year.

Before the 2022 midterm elections, Rep Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, promised “major changes” to the Justice Department and FBI if Republicans won control of Congress, and said FISA should be allowed to expire.

“I think we should not even reauthorize FISA which is going to come in the next Congress,” Rep. Jordan said in a Fox News Channel interview on October 9, 2022. “At the very least, Congress needs to change the FISA process, Jordan added.

More recently, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) noted in an interview with Newsmax that “we are going to have to take a vote in the Congress to reauthorize the very authorities we saw weaponized in [the John Durham report] and I cannot imagine any Republican voting to reauthorize those authorities.”

In the opinion, Judge Contreras said the court “is encouraged by the amendments to the FBI’s querying procedures,” but noted that “compliance problems with the querying of Section 702 information have proven to be persistent and widespread.”

The judge added: “If they are not substantially mitigated by these recent measures, it may become necessary to consider other responses, such as substantially limiting the number of FBI personnel with access to unminimized Section 702 information.”

The FISA Court’s report detailed the nearly 300,000 abuses logged between 2020 and early 2021.

For instance: After the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, an FBI employee ran a whopping 23,132 separate queries of Americans “to find evidence of possible foreign influence, although the analyst conducting the queries had no indications of foreign influence related to the query term used,” Contreras found. Justice Department officials “concluded there was no specific factual basis to think the searches would turn up foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime” and the court opinion found that “no raw Section 702 information was accessed as a result of these queries.”

In June 2020, the FBI searched for digital data and communications of 133 people arrested “in connection with civil unrests and protests between approximately May 30, and June 18, 2020,” when protests and riots erupted across the country over George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.

That search was done, officials said, to see if there was counter-terrorism information about those individuals. When questioned about the searches later, FBI officials said it was reasonable for agents to think the searches would return foreign intelligence. The court opinion describing that effort has significant redactions, making it unclear why the FBI developed its theory.

Incredibly, the Court also found a long pattern between 2016 and 2020 in which the FBI conducted FISA searches targeting “individuals listed in police homicide reports, including victims, next-of-kin, witnesses, and suspects,” according to the court opinion. The Justice Department found these searches violated the rules “because there was no reasonable basis to expect they would return foreign intelligence or evidence of crime.”

In its defense, the FBI argued “that querying FISA information using identifiers of the victims — simply because they were homicide victims — was reasonably likely to retrieve evidence of crime.”

Even more egregiously, an FBI analyst “conducted a batch query for over 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign” because the campaign was supposedly “a target of foreign influence,” the opinion said.

Justice Department officials found that “only eight identifiers used in the query”—such as a name, phone number or an email address—”had sufficient ties to foreign influence activities” that complied with the FISA standards.

Officials said lawmakers who were briefed months ago about the problems have been pushing authorities to make them public. The delay in doing so was due to discussions of redactions of a separate part of the opinion, which described a novel application of surveillance techniques, who like others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national security matters.

Senior law enforcement officials said Friday that the problems in the report do not represent FBI’s current practices. The problems were discovered largely due to Justice Department audits, they said, and have been remedied.

“We’re not trying to hide from this stuff, but this type of non-compliance is unacceptable,” a senior FBI official said. “There was confusion historically about what the query standard was,” said another senior law enforcement official.

The FBI has rolled out a host of changes to how agents and analysts use the Section 702 database. While a previous version of the system automatically included it in a list of areas that agents could search for information, agents and analysts must now specifically seek and choose to search 702 information. FBI users of the database are also required to write, in their own words, why they think their search will return foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime, and an attorney must approve any “batch” searches involving large numbers of people.

In recent months, authorities have touted that the number of 702 searches conducted that involve U.S. residents or companies has dropped dramatically — more than 90 percent last year. Officials said Friday that the dropoff was largely the result of the Justice Department audit having found significant compliance failures by the FBI.

The problems identified by the court and the Justice Department are separate from criticism lodged against the FBI in 2019 by the Justice Department’s inspector general, and again this week by special counsel John Durham, over the FBI’s use of a different kind of foreign intelligence surveillance court order, which specifically targeted a former Trump adviser in 2016 and 2017 based on faulty and incomplete FBI applications.

In 2021, a follow-up report by Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz found “widespread” failures by the FBI to follow one of the key rules of FISA surveillance, indicating that the problems went far beyond the FBI’s investigation of former Trump adviser Carter Page.

Additionally, the court opinion included information regarding what officials called a “highly sensitive” surveillance technique, and a court debate about the novel use of that technique. Details about the technique are redacted, making it difficult to determine the purpose and scope of the controversial surveillance.

In a statement to American Greatness, Jordan said: “Chris Wray told us we can sleep well at night because of the FBI’s so-called Fisa reforms. But it just keeps getting worse.”
Posted By: ConSigCor

Re: GOP Rep Threatens to Cut FBI Funding - 05/20/2023 06:29 PM

‘Bad Guys Have Begun Running Parts of the Government’: FBI Whistleblowers Testify Before House Weaponization Committee
By Debra Heine
May 18, 2023

Three FBI whistleblowers and a former Biden official testified before the House Weaponization Committee Thursday morning to discuss multiple abuses of power by Bureau leadership, including whistleblower retaliation, the purging of conservatives, security clearance suspensions, and the inflation of domestic terrorism statistics.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and head of the select committee, scheduled the hearing “to examine abuses seen at the Bureau and how the FBI has retaliated against whistleblowers.”

Tristan Leavitt, who served in the Biden administration as a member of the United States Merit Systems Protection Board from March 4, 2022 to February 28, 2023, blasted Democrats on the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government over their “shameful” attempts to smear the FBI whistleblowers.

“Instead of welcoming or at least protecting such disclosures, FBI employees who have come forward to Congress have been shamefully treated by the Ranking Members and Minority staff of this Committee,” said Tristan Leavitt, President of Empower Empower Oversight, in his opening statement. Leavitt served in the Biden administration as a member of the United States Merit Systems Protection Board from March 4, 2022 to February 28, 2023.

Leavitt testified that Democrat lawmakers on the committee have made inaccurate assertions in their attempts to smear and discredit the whistleblowers.

“It’s one thing to hear allegations and not find them particularly persuasive or relevant to a particular inquiry. If an office even wants to ignore allegations, as the Minority staff appeared to have done for several months up until transcribed interviews with these witnesses were scheduled with the Committee, that’s their prerogative,” Leavitt said.

But it’s another thing altogether to actively go out and smear the individuals disclosing those allegations. That’s exactly what the Ranking Members and Minority staff of this Committee did when they released a March 2 report entitled “GOP Witnesses: What Their Disclosures Indicate About the State of the Republican Investigations.

In the foreword of the report, Ranking Member Nadler and Ranking Member Plaskett wrote: ‘[T]he three individuals we have met are not, in fact, whistleblowers. These individuals . . . did not present actual evidence of any wrongdoing at the Department of Justice or the [FBI].’

Similarly, in the body of the report, they alleged: ‘[N]one of the witnesses have provided evidence related to a violation of law, policy, or abuse of authority. None are ‘whistleblowers’ in any sense recognized by federal law or any federal agency.’

“These assertions were conceptually inaccurate, both on the law and on the facts,” Leavitt declared. “The law doesn’t define the term whistleblower.”

Tristan Leavitt nails it on the definition of a whistleblower. pic.twitter.com/KVPO4Z5LPR

— SweetPeaBelle (@SweetPeaBell326) May 18, 2023

Two suspended FBI special agents, Garret O’Boyle, Steve Friend, and suspended FBI State Operations Specialist Marcus Allen also testified before the committee, Thursday.

In his opening statement, Friend testified that in August of 22, he made protected whistleblower disclosures to his Assistant Special Agents in Charge, and Special Agent in Charge regarding his concerns about the January 6th investigations assigned to his office.

Friend served in the FBI as a special agent for eight and a half years, and five more years on an FBI SWAT Team. As a special agent, Friend said he investigated approximately 200 violent crimes, such as aggravated assaults, murder, child abuse, rape, robbery, child molestation, child pornography, and human trafficking. He also spent five years as a local law enforcement officer in Georgia.

“I believed our departures from case management rules established in the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide could have undermined potentially righteous prosecutions and may have been part of an effort to inflate the FBI’s statistics on domestic extremism,” said Friend. “I also voiced concerns that the FBI’s use of SWAT and large-scale arrest operations to apprehend suspects who were accused of nonviolent crimes and misdemeanors, represented by counsel, and who pledged to cooperate with the federal authorities in the event of criminal charges created an unnecessary risk to FBI personnel and public safety.”

The former G-man testified that at each level of his chain of command, “leadership cautioned that despite my exemplary work performance, whistleblowing placed my otherwise bright future with the FBI at risk.”

The whistleblower pointed out that he had to take an oath to protect the US Constitution and was required to attend trainings at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and MLK Memorial learn about the dangers of federal law enforcement overreach.

“Nevertheless, the FBI weaponized the security clearance processes to facilitate my removal from active duty within one month of my disclosures,” he testified, noting that his suspension was indefinite and unpaid.

The FBI then “initiated a campaign of humiliation and intimidation to punish and pressure me to resign,” Friend said.

In violation of HIPPA, individuals at the FBI leaked my private medical information to a reporter at the New York Times. In violation of the Privacy Act, the FBI refused to furnish my training records for several months. To date, they only provided a portion of the records, which are essential to obtaining private investigator and firearms licenses in the state of Florida. Even after releasing some of the records, the FBI refuses to confirm their legitimacy to the Florida Department of Agriculture, rendering the few documents they have provided practically useless. The FBI denied my request to seek outside employment, in an obvious attempt to deprive me of the ability to support my family. Finally, the FBI Inspection Division imposed an illegal gag order in an attempt to prevent me from communicating with my family and attorneys.

Steve Friend was a distinguished FBI agent. The FBI retaliated against him after he exposed how the Bureau was cooking the books on domestic violent extremism cases. pic.twitter.com/X1JpMYDkBq

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) May 18, 2023

O’Boyle, a former police officer and decorated Army veteran who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, also described how the FBI retaliated against him and his family after he made protected disclosures about the FBI “snitch line” targeting parents who protested at school board meetings.

“In weaponized fashion, the FBI allowed me to accept orders to a new position halfway across the country. They allowed us to sell my family’s home. They ordered me to report to the new unit when our youngest daughter was only two weeks old. Then, on my first day on the new assignment, they suspended me; rendering my family homeless and refused to release our household goods, including our clothes, for weeks,” O’Boyle testified in his opening statement.

The former agent added: “All I wanted to do was serve my country by stopping bad guys and protecting the innocent. To my chagrin, bad guys have begun running parts of the government making it difficult to continue to serve this Nation and protect the innocent.”

FBI Special Agent Garret O'Boyle was transferred across the country only to be suspended on his first day.

The FBI’s actions forced his family to beg and borrow warm coats for their children because the family’s belongings were locked in an FBI-controlled storage facility. pic.twitter.com/T7BseKr0cf

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) May 18, 2023

Marcus Allen, a decorated Marine Corps veteran who served two tours in Iraq, told the committee that he has been suspended without pay for more than a year, after he forwarded information to his superiors and others that “questioned the official narrative of the events of January 6.”

“During my deployments, I was exposed to live enemy fire on numerous occasions, even though I served primarily in analytical and intelligence roles,” Allen testified in his opening statement.

I was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal and the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal. I eventually joined the FBI and was employee of the year in 2019 in the Charlotte Field office. As the holder of a Top Secret security clearance since 2001, I have been trusted with the nation’s greatest secrets. So why am I here today? Despite my history of unblemished service to the United States, the FBI suspended my security clearance, accusing me of actually being DISLOYAL to my country!

This outrageous and insulting accusation is based on unsubstantiated accusations that I hold “conspiratorial views” regarding the events of January 6, 2021 and that I allegedly sympathize with criminal conduct. I do not. I was not in Washington DC on January 6, played no part in the events of January 6, and I condemn all criminal activity that occurred.

Allen testified that because he questioned the official January 6 narrative, he was accused of promoting “conspiratorial views” and “unreliable information.” Since his suspension in January of 2022, Allen said “there has been a dearth of communication from the FBI, with interactions seemingly only being forced by actions from my counsel or members of congress.”

Allen said he has filed a federal a civil rights lawsuit, which is pending, “to recover my livelihood and restore my good name.” After filing the complaint, Allen said the FBI informed him that his clearance had been formally revoked.

Marcus Allen bravely served our country overseas in the armed services and has been suspended without pay for OVER a year by the FBI for "disloyalty."

Listen to his powerful testimony ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/5fR0VTk5zb

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) May 18, 2023

According to Leavitt, a “troubling pattern” has emerged of the FBI suspending security clearances as a means of whistleblower retaliation.

The Bureau, he explained, gets around government directives prohibiting this type of retaliation “by leaving the whistleblower in the limbo of suspension without ever getting around
to adjudicating and revoking the clearance.”

Title 50 is interpreted to apply to clearance suspensions, but only after a year without an adjudication. Meanwhile, when the FBI suspends a clearance it also immediately suspends the employee indefinitely without pay. To make matters worse, even though the FBI is not paying the employee, it requires them to obtain permission from the FBI to take another job—permission the FBI routinely denies. Congress should closely examine this issue to stop this sort of abuse.

You can watch the ongoing hearing in the live streaming video below:

Posted By: airforce

Re: GOP Rep Threatens to Cut FBI Funding - 05/20/2023 09:00 PM

Someone told me there was no reason to "throw out the baby with the bath water."

Well, when it's Rosemary's baby...

Onward and upward,
airforce
Posted By: ConSigCor

Re: GOP Rep Threatens to Cut FBI Funding - 05/26/2023 12:07 PM

Rein In The FBI: Put An End To Their Gestapo Tactics

Authored by John and Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“One of the creeping hands of totalitarianism running through the democracy is the Federal Bureau of Investigation… Because why does the FBI do all this? To scare the hell out of people… They work for the establishment and the corporations and the politicos to keep things as they are. And they want to frighten and chill the people who are trying to change things.”

– Howard Zinn, historian

Power corrupts. We know this.

In fact, we know this from experience learned the hard way at the hands of our own government.

So why is anyone surprised to learn that the FBI, one of the most power-hungry and corrupt agencies within the police state’s vast complex of power-hungry and corrupt agencies, misused a massive government surveillance database more than 300,000 times in order to target American citizens?

This is how the government operates, after all.

First, they seek out extraordinary powers acquired in the wake of some national crisis—in this case, warrantless surveillance powers intended to help the government spy on foreign targets suspected of engaging in terrorism—and then they use those powers against the American people.

According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FBI repeatedly misused Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in order to spy on the communications of two vastly disparate groups of Americans: those involved in the George Floyd protests and those who may have taken part in the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol.

This is par for the course for the FBI, whose modus operandi has historically been to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived threats to the government’s power.

Indeed, the FBI has a long history of persecuting, prosecuting and generally harassing activists, politicians, and cultural figures.

Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, the FBI’s targets were civil rights activists, those suspected of having Communist ties, and anti-war activists. In more recent decades, the FBI has expanded its reach to target so-called domestic extremists, environmental activists, and those who oppose the police state.

In 2019, President Trump promised to give the FBI “whatever they need” to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism, without any apparent thought for the Constitution’s prohibitions on such overreach.

That misguided pledge sheds a curious light on the FBI’s ongoing spree of SWAT team raids, surveillance, disinformation campaigns, fear-mongering, paranoia, and strong-arm tactics meted out to dissidents on both the right and the left.

Yet while these overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear, none of this is new.

Indeed, the FBI’s love affair with totalitarianism can be traced back to the Nazi police state.

As historian Robert Gellately recounts, the Nazi police state was so admired for its efficiency and order by the world powers of the day that in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen.

Since then, U.S. government agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—have fully embraced many of the Nazi’s well-honed policing tactics, and used them repeatedly against American citizens.

With every passing day, the United States government borrows yet another leaf from Nazi Germany’s playbook: Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Censorship. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. Indefinite detention.

These are not tactics used by constitutional republics, where the rule of law and the rights of the citizenry reign supreme. Rather, they are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes, where secret police control the populace through intimidation, fear and official lawlessness on the part of government agents.

Consider the extent to which the FBI’s far-reaching powers to surveil, detain, interrogate, investigate, prosecute, punish, police and generally act as a law unto themselves resemble those of their Nazi cousins, the Gestapo.

Just like the Gestapo, the FBI has vast resources, vast investigatory powers, and vast discretion to determine who is an enemy of the state.

Much like the Gestapo spied on mail and phone calls, FBI agents have carte blanche access to the citizenry’s most personal information.

Much like the Gestapo’s sophisticated surveillance programs, the FBI’s spying capabilities can delve into Americans’ most intimate details (and allow local police to do so, as well).

Much like the Gestapo’s ability to profile based on race and religion, and its assumption of guilt by association, the FBI’s approach to pre-crime allows it to profile Americans based on a broad range of characteristics including race and religion.

Much like the Gestapo’s power to render anyone an enemy of the state, the FBI has the power to label anyone a domestic terrorist.

Much like the Gestapo infiltrated communities in order to spy on the German citizenry, the FBI routinely infiltrates political and religious groups, as well as businesses.

Just as the Gestapo united and militarized Germany’s police forces into a national police force, America’s police forces have largely been federalized and turned into a national police force.

Just as the Gestapo carried out entrapment operations, the FBI has become a master in the art of entrapment.

Just as the Gestapo’s secret files on political leaders were used to intimidate and coerce, the FBI’s attempts to target and spy on anyone suspected of “anti-government” sentiment have been similarly abused.

The Gestapo became the terror of the Third Reich by creating a sophisticated surveillance and law enforcement system that relied for its success on the cooperation of the military, the police, the intelligence community, neighborhood watchdogs, government workers for the post office and railroads, ordinary civil servants, and a nation of snitches inclined to report “rumors, deviant behavior, or even just loose talk.”

Likewise, as countless documents make clear, the FBI has had no qualms about using its extensive powers in order to blackmail politicians, spy on celebrities and high-ranking government officials, and intimidate and attempt to discredit dissidents of all stripes.

In fact, borrowing heavily from the Gestapo, between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted an intensive domestic intelligence program, termed COINTELPRO, intended to neutralize domestic political dissidents. As Congressman Steve Cohen explains, “COINTELPRO was set up to surveil and disrupt groups and movements that the FBI found threatening… many groups, including anti-war, student, and environmental activists, and the New Left were harassed, infiltrated, falsely accused of criminal activity .”

Sound familiar? The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, John Lennon, and hundreds more.

The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, denounced the government’s abuses:

“Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.”

The report continued:

“Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.”

Whether 50 years ago or in the present day, the treatment being doled out by the government’s lethal enforcers has remained consistent, no matter the threat.

The FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, and that’s just based on what we know.

Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government; recruiting high school students to spy on and report fellow students who show signs of being future terrorists; or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work of ensuring compliance, keeping tabs on potential dissidents, and punishing those who dare to challenge the status quo.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to rein in the Federal Bureau of Intimidation’s war on political freedom.
Posted By: airforce

Re: GOP Rep Threatens to Cut FBI Funding - 05/26/2023 06:22 PM

59% want FBI officials pushing Russiagate prosecuted. Do I think it will ever actually happen? No.

Quote
In a potential boon for former Presidential Donald Trump’s presidential bid, a majority of Americans not only believe he was the target of the so-called “Russiagate” affair but want FBI officials involved prosecuted.

The latest Rasmussen Reports survey shared with Secrets said that 63% believe that Trump was the target of a Hillary Clinton campaign orchestrated “hit” during the 2016 campaign. Just 30% disagreed.


The results came after a report by special investigator John Durham revealed details about the scheme to undermine Trump’s 2016 campaign and presidency by claiming the Republican colluded with Russians in his 2016 campaign.

Trump has long said that his presidency would have been better had he not been dogged by the charges, fueled by an anti-Trump media.

In the report, Durham raised serious questions about FBI operations and coordination with the Clinton team to hurt Trump.

The survey suggested that Americans want revenge on those involved.

Rasmussen said that 59% of likely voters want those inside the FBI who promoted the false Trump claims in the scandal “criminally prosecuted.”

Durham found the FBI was aware Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the source for claims about Trump and Russian collusion, which had no basis in evidence.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley called the Russian collusion charge against Trump “a well-orchestrated hit job by the Clinton campaign and government officials.” The survey used that language to ask Americans what they thought.


Onward and upward,
airforce
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